Going with Graduan

Elia Talib is a woman to be admired. In 1995, she launched an annual publication called Aspirasi Graduan, now known as Graduan, aimed at helping fresh graduates prepare for the job market. She has remained focused on her target audience but has extended her product and brand into other related publications, a job website, web TV, as well as career fairs in Malaysia, Australia, England and the US. She has succeeded in doing this almost single-handed, with the help of a small staff and now her two recently-graduated children.

I was introduced to Elia by Ann Lee, whom I've written about in an earlier post. Ann was Graduan's consultant editor and she and Elia wanted to bring more writers on board. So it was that I became a regular contributor, and at times editor, of the publication. I also edited Xtracurriculah!, an activity resource guide for school-children, for two years and a recent Graduan offshoot, Careers in the Capital Market.

Over the past few years, due to my other writing commitments, my involvement with Graduan has lessened, limited to one or two Special Feature articles per issue of leaders in the corporate or political world as well as academia. Elia needs a senior writer for these articles because it's not easy sometimes to get such such people to talk freely; my corporate experience has helped me in this respect. 

Perhaps the most daunting person I've had to interview for Graduan was Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad. Although I was accompanied by Elia and Ann to his imposing office at the Perdana Leadership Foundation building in Putrajaya, it didn't help to settle the butterflies in my tummy. I had heard that he doesn't suffer fools gladly and could send you out of the door before you could start. His personal assistant told us that we had 15 minutes to do the interview but I must have been asking him the right questions and making the appropriate remarks in return to his answers, because we stayed for more than an hour. He even agreed to be photographed with us and signed my copy of The Malay Dilemma that I had brought with me (Elia and Ann felt like kicking themselves for not bringing theirs).

There's a trick to meeting and interviewing personalities like Tun Mahathir. Of course, in the first place, you need to be well prepared - long pauses and 'aahs' won't impress such people. You need to be on your toes and respond appropriately, because they might not give the answers you expected. The main thing, however, is to remember that we are all creations of Allah and that we'll all stand equally before Him on the Day of Judgement.