I just thought about my relationships with my bumiputera friends whom I grew up with and am convinced that the current government policy of preferential treatment is doing more harm than good for the Malaysian race.

As a child and later teenager growing up in KL in a multicultural society, I had friends of all races whom I laughed, cried, played and studied with for the first 17 to 18 years of my life. We truly loved one another as individuals with no regard whatsoever to our different backgrounds - it was wonderful to have experienced that feeling now that I think about it. We didn't know the meaning of prejudice at all and treated everyone like brothers and sisters.

Somehow all this changed when we turned 17 and the bumiputera students left school to take up matriculation in different states. I have to stress that distance played a miniscule role in this change. It was the fact that the non-bumi students were left to battle it out in the much dreaded STPM for limited places in the various local universities.

I remember visiting a Malay friend I've known for more than 12 years then in her village and there was this strange ackwardness in the air. Now that I look back to that day, there was this terrible thing that both of us could not bring ourselves to talk about. For her, probably the feeling that she's going to get a place in university whether she truly deserved it or not (which I think she did but that's besides the point).

And for me, the feeling that here I am, stuck in the nightmare of Form 6 with a pretty uncertain future ahead of me. I wanted to hug my friend and tell her it's okay but that didn't happen. She probably wanted to do the same. Instead we parted with this ackwardness unresolved and unspoken as we couldn't bring ourselves to talk about these sensitive issues.

Even though I saw her again a few times after that, things were somehow never the same again. I think we're both to blame really. I still think about her and wonder what she's up to these days. It was somehow easier to make new bumiputera friends after that even in university, probably due to the absence of that shared feeling of unfairness felt at that same moment in time.

How I long for those halcyon days of my childhood where friendships were untainted by government policies and we lived each day believing things are going to be fine. But it isn't is it? With each new generation of fifth formers leaving school perhaps like me old friendships will be similarly lost. I only wish we were both big enough to overcome these feelings at the time but we were only children after all, were we not?