One woman. One Malay woman made a difference. Madam Sahorah Ahmat. I was drawing comparisons between this lady and Rosa Parks, commonly deemed the initiator of Negro civil rights movement when she refused to sit in the ‘coloureds’ section of the public bus ….. interestingly she made her mark in history by sitting on the heiny ( is this how you spell posterior?) and Sahorah did it by chilling in a stretcher ..Just like Cedric the Enterntainer said in Barbershop .. “ All that woman had to do was sit on her ass”…but still the picture and accompanying text set me thinking

1) Why have we not heard about this lady before?
2) Should we deem this remarkable effort to vote, an ingenious power play of the PAP or an Olympicesque effort of one woman to make a difference
3) In an alternate dimension, Malay parents bring their kids for weekly visits to a park in Geylang that was built to celebrate Sahorah Ahmat’s galiant efforts
4) In this park is a 12 foot statue of Sahorah , still in her stretcher holding a PAP flag
5) Sahorah should be credited for initiating the whole ‘lepak’ culture
6) She is a constant reminder of the ability to practice affirmative social/political action even when stricken in the lepak state

For those curious , this was 1961 and the PAP and Communist Party were fighting for majority votes in the Government Assembly