aliran dinner

the aliran dinner was held last night at the chee hon moral uplifing society in macalister road. i went with christina and we were one of the early birds. reached there 10 to 7., and the door was still closed! why? the aliran singers were still practising last minute. anyway at 7.00, the door opened for us to go in. i thought the dinner started at 7.30pm as told by christina to me but it started at 8.00pm. met so many of our catholic members at the dinner (even the bishop was there). guess we catholics support aliran very much.

the food was catered by fisherman’s wharf. good food. our table had only 6 people… which means more share for us. haha. the special guest that day was pete teo, a multiple award singer, songwirter, actor and film producer.  some of you are familiar with the 15malaysia films. well, he was involved in it as a producer. he entertained us with a few songs.

the best entertainment, however, came from the aliran singers!  (you can see them in action at the 2nd picture, and 2 other pictures). comprising of, of course, the aliran members themselves.  the ones that i know – anil netto, dr prema, andrew and dr francis loh and 5 others whom i’m not familar with. they used songs by one of my favourite group, abba, to sing… of course changing the lyrics to fit the current political situation.

the songs they used are ‘waterloo’ which they change to ‘march 8’ at the part of ‘waterloo…’ (chorus).

‘i do, i do’ they change to ‘bubar, bubar’ talking about to ‘bubar’ (dissolve) the perak state assembly.

‘mama mia’ was change to ‘mama BN’. just remember the last line ‘why can’t you live without BN!’

‘dancing queen’ was change to calling people to vote for change something like ‘you can dance, you can sing, you can make this space grow, vote for democracy’.

the other songs used are ‘fernando’, ‘super trouper’, ‘i don’t wanna talk about it’.

there was one song where they sang about sg siput and dr jeyakumar (dr jeyakumar was present at the dinner!).

the best of all the songs was ‘honey honey’ – a mixture of english and bahasa. for bahasa in place of ‘money money money’, they used ‘manis manis manis’.

this one line stuck in my mind: “manis manis, jangan takut OSA, ataupun ISA, rakyat mest berani”.

the aliran singers received an encore and some

people gave them standing oviation too! so much so they had to be brought back and they gave a rendition of ‘money money money’ again. yep they were great indeed and how i wish they would have sing more songs.

one of the picture shows the aliran singers with the popular song ‘honey honey’ lyrics are shown on the screen.

ahh… last picture shows my table. the sixth person, richard loh, a blogger too, was the photographer, thus missing. i’m in the picture of course. 🙂