A Black and White World

Like all other Malaysian kids, rice and P Ramlee movies were among the staples of growing up. Rice was taken twice a day then.. P Ramlee movies?! Once a week and even that wasn't enough. You could recite all dialogues from any random P Ramlee movie but you still wanted more.

I guess me and my siblings love for P Ramlee movies were inherited from Abah. We had videos of almost all P Ramlee movies where Abah would always have extra empty video tapes for recording the movies. We grew adept at the recording (while filtering all commercials, of course) of these movies so anyone could do it.. just in case Abah was outstation at that time.

Just now was a screening of Sarjan Hassan. A Japanese invasion based movie. In this movie, P Ramlee enlisted in the army to help with the war. I always cringe whenever I realize its Sarjan Hassan on screen because of an incident when I was around 8 or 9 years old (I previously thought it was when I was in standard one, until I remembered, we still hadn't moved to our present house then haha..)

There was once scene (the one that makes me cringe whenever I remember it) where P Ramlee wanted to buy a long scarf (selendang) for his sweetheart back in the village. He told the shopkeeper, he wanted 'the blue one'.

I was always amazed at this scene as it was a black and white movie. It lead to another question so I 'innocently' turned to my father and asked him..

""Abah, tahun bile dunia ni start ade kaler? Dulu² still bleh tau ke cemmane rupa kaler biru wpun dunia masih itam putih ?"

The look on his face (and this was even before he burst out laughing) made me realize I had just asked a silly question.

On my defense, I actually DID think that once upon a time ago, the world was in black and white. I always wondered how it must've felt like to be one of the adults who one day woke up to a colourful world and to tell you the truth, I envied them because they managed to witness a miracle... lah sangaaaaaattttt~~

And yeah.. I had to endure being the butt of the jokes for weeks after (and especially during the weekly P Ramlee movie time haha..)

*Updated*

P/S Turned out I wasn't the only one who thought this. A few friends (and a cousin hehe..) have just admitted to having the exact same thought as me..