JANUARY 28 — Victim blaming should really be a national sport. I mean, what child growing up here hasn't heard the following admonishment: "Siapa suruh?" or literally "Who asked you?"

Fall and hurt your head? Who asked you to run in the first place, say your carers. Wake up late for school? Who asked you to sleep through your alarm, and so on.

It is, thinking about it, a really problematic question. It implies that whatever bad stuff that happens to someone has to somehow be caused by the person's own slip-up.

A friend got into a fight with someone who said (probably in a poncy tone) that it is the fault of cabbies for being cabbies because obviously they didn't apply themselves enough at school.

Another friend also argued with a successful and rather privileged woman who said that any woman could achieve what she did with enough hard work. We all have the same hands, after all.

People like them need to be taken to visit those born without arms. Or sight.

On another note, I can't even indulge in that favoured national pastime of griping about the government without some tool going "Who asked the East Malaysians to keep voting BN?"

Who asked me whether you deserved oxygen, nobody that's who. Snark aside, I wish people would understand that sometimes things are not as simple as you would like them to be.

If hard work and perseverance was all you needed to be rich, shouldn't the foreigners working (and dying) at our construction sites be filthy rich by now?

"How did you get rich, Azeem?"

"Oh I just did a few construction jobs in Malaysia. 20-hour work days, had to share a room with 15 other fellas but fortunately i managed to amass a fortune before my back gave out."

"Ah. I wish I was capable of back-breaking labour like you. Sadly I am four feet tall and have a wooden leg."

In a perfect world, the playing field would be so level you could use it to do your trigonometry calculations. But it isn't.

So before you act as though people deserve to be poor or disenfranchised, ask yourself this: did anyone ask them if they wanted to suffer?

To a certain extent we can change our circumstances. But how much change we can effect is often times up to factors we often have little control over.

So please. Check your privilege at the door and perhaps, just perhaps try a little empathy on for size. At the very least when the revolution comes, perhaps you'll escape the guillotine if you can learn not be an insufferable, compassion-lacking piece of excrement.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.