march 8 – 1 year after

last year, on this date – march 8 – malaysia had its 12th general election. the result – an unexpected shocking (but welcoming) result – the ruling coaltion, barisan nasional (BN) not only lost it’s 2/3 majority but lost 4 states too, i.e. kedah. penang, perak, selangor.  it had been then termed as a ‘political tsunami’.

the winning parties that rule these 4 states, including kelantan, teamed up to form ‘pakatan rakyat’ (PR).

today – march 8, 2009 – is exactly one year of PR’s rule.

so how did PR fare for one year? i’m sure you’ll get to read a lot of views here and there in blogs like anil netto and susan loone and news portal like malaysiakini and the malaysian insider .(anniversary banner you see here is taken from MI). so i’m not going to give my view but what i’ll do is to write about last night’s 1 year anniversary rally in penang.

last night the penang govt. organised a ‘ceramah perdana’ known as  ”malam penerangan setahun pemerintahan pakatan rakyat’ at the esplanade.

i was there with 3 of my citizen journalism classmates. remember i mentioned about the citizen journalism workshop organised by malaysiakini? it also taught us about video journalism and we are encouraged to be citizen journalist with video! well we were there to made a video of the rally and to interview people on what they think of PR’s one year rule. actually the other 3 did most of the work. i just tagged along. we hope to get the video edited and sent to malaysiakini as our contribution.

the crowd was not as expected… maybe 3000 or so only. it was because before 8.00pm, it rains but the rain stop 15 mins or so before 8.00pm. later i also found out that other places, even after 8.00pm there were heavy rain. then there was this news of the rally being ‘sabotage’ when there were rumours going on that it had been canceled. so i guess based on these 2 reasons, the crowd was not big.

lilian chan, the blogger, was one my citizen journalism classmate who were there with me and she did most of the interview. you can hop over to her blog to read her report of the rally here and here.

i did jot down some notes on what the speaker said on my PDA but not being able to concentrate fully, i only have some brief points. ok let’s see… what i have… and what i can remember.

ok i will continue this post in half an hour’s time – tomorrow! now gotta publish it first for the date of march 8 to appear.