I refer to the Malaysiakini report 'Allah' and PPSMI - two separate issues.

As critical and still energetic Malaysians continue to dissect the reason behind the series of vandalism of places of worship resulting from the ‘Allah’ controversy, one explanation stood out and it was certainly the 'ugly duckling', an explanation that does not fit in today’s global reality.

That ugly duckling was none other than the direct accusation against some who hypocritically advocate the use of English for the teaching of Maths and Science while advocating the use of Bahasa Malaysia for their Bibles among indigenous peoples.

Many who left comments certainly caught the anomaly of relating PPSMI to religious/spiritual development. I, personally, believe that Maths and Science in Malaysia must be taught in English in order to produce Malaysians who are fit for global competence in an increasingly globalising world.

Our world is becoming smaller and smaller as information continues to seamlessly communicated from one end of the world to another and failing to translate information into knowledge (through the help of language competency) and subsequently from knowledge into wisdom, would render Malaysia extinct.

Information is useful to the extent that the receiver converts it to knowledge. For example, if I were to tell you that, 'the E2 glycoprotein of the Chikungunya virus is responsible for cellular receptor recognition.', it remains as just information because your paradigm is that which is shaped by the limited language capacity of Bahasa Malaysia to comprehend science in today’s context.

Information is flowing faster than you think – the first lecture I attended on 'Introduction to Bioinformatics' was more overwhelming than I could ever imagine. Having considered myself a member of Gen-Y and tech-smart, I could hardly imagine that information is increasing exponentially.

Professors in my university who struggled to sequence a small genome in the past year, could now sequence a whole human genome in less than half a year and could find whole genomes on databases like Pubmed.

My point is, human capital competency will determine a country’s growth. Would this be affected if indigenous peoples worshiped God in BM or English? Obviously not. But the language medium used for Maths and Science would affect human capital.

But why should we insist that indigenous peoples worship God in BM? This is because spiritual growth and worldviews are important and it is also best achieved through their preferred language since the resources to provide this are there.

After all, applications of faith in the real world are by our actions which are decision-making and imprinting impressions on others. On the other hand, communicating globally skills must be nurtured in schools and universities and we know for a fact that English is the 'lingua franca' of the day, for now.

So, both the PPSMI and ‘Allah’ issues are separate under one caveat – a country’s growth is determined by education and not by personal spiritual growth. However, if the inverse alone is true, then it is a whole different story altogether.