I refer to Ajmel Hafiz's comments on MRSM. I can fully appreciate that what he perceives to be the cream of Malay intelligentsia were raised from these lofty institutions and many have joined the opposition against Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad's administration.

I do however take exception to some of the denigrating remarks that he makes about non-Malay students and the schools that we attended.

If MRSM can provide the quality of education to Malay students as touted by Ajmel, why is there then such resistance to making these institutions fully world-class by making it merit-based and opened to all who qualify?

If the cream of Malay scholarship can perform well regardless of their surroundings, ascending to Ivy League colleges in the US as stated by Ajmel, I am sure that the presence of non-Malay students will not in the least detract from their performance.

Why maintain MRSM as bastions of narrow mono-culture with little or no interaction between the future leaders of the Malay (and by extension Malaysia) community and other races who share this country?

I hate to burst this bubble, but among many non-Malays in Malaysia, rumours persist of preferential grading by exam boards for MRSM schools and the 100 percent passing grades are often viewed with little more than scepticism.

This is very unfortunate because I believe that all communities in Malaysia irrespective of race have their bright sparks and intelligent people. One way of eventually removing this negative perception is to integrate MRSM.

Conversely, the schools that you so derided like Chung Ling or Victoria Institute are not exclusionist colleges. They are part of the "outer rim" system that many generations of regular Malaysian kids attended, taking in students from all levels of academic performance based on Ministry of Education population numbers for districts surrounding these localities.

In the integrated national education policies since the early 1970s, the formerly missionary schools and even some of the Chinese secondary schools do not get to screen students and as a result do not get "cream material". To thus attack them as not producing "100 percent passing rates" is really uncalled for.

In fact my Malay friends from my class in SPM (then called MCE) benefitted from regular interaction with non-Malays and prepared them to function well in themulti-racial reality that is Malaysia.

It is funny that Ajmel could quote anecdotes like "you will find more Malay Malaysians than Chinese or Indian Malaysians in universities like Harvard or Massachusetts Institute of Technology." How and where did he get his statistics from because US colleges do not keep track of Malaysian ethnicity, and we are all classified as "Asian Pacific Islanders"!

It is sad that even in a foreign land, fellow Malaysians are more keen on discriminating between bumiputra and non-bumiputra rather than putting our best Malaysian feet forward.