A video of a Malaysian man berating a Singaporean couple for parking their car in an OKU (disabled) lot has set Facebook abuzz.
44-year-old Naren Narasiah posted 3 videos of the incident on Facebook group Champion4disability on Monday (11th April). In the videos, which were filmed at the Machap rest stop along the North-South Highway in Johor about a year ago, Naren is seen going “gangster” on the Singaporean couple who parked in an OKU lot and “tried to worm their way out with dumb excuses”.
Throughout the recordings, Naren can be heard loudly confronting the couple while they apologised to Naren repeatedly. The woman said that they did not see the OKU lot signboard, to which Naren exclaimed, “Rubbish! So big there you cannot see the signboard ah?!” before going on to say that he was “sick and tired” of “irresponsible” like them.
When contacted by The Straits Times, Naren, an energy consultant for the manufacturing industry and also the admin for the “Champion4disability” Facebook group, said that he regularly confronts people who park in handicap lots. In referring to the Machap rest stop incident, Naren said he “deliberately blocked” the couple’s car, then waited for them for 45 minutes. When they returned, there were 2 vehicles blocking its exit – Naren’s truck and a motorcycle.
The couple asked Naren for help to remove the motorcycle but Naren refused. Then, the couple attempted to reverse it out of the lot anyway, knocking into Naren’s truck in the process. “That kind of added fuel to my fire,” he said, adding that he had finished a long day of work, was tired, and feeling extremely irritable.
To be fair, the couple offered to help Naren repair his truck. After some discussion, Naren told them to donate the RM1,000 which they offered as a compensation to a charitable organisation for the handicapped. The Singaporean man promised that he would and that he would send the receipt for the donation to Naren.
The donation didn’t happen. Hence, Naren decided to post up the videos. The caption for the original video post reads:
“I was not going to publish this but it is time I did. This was an incident where I went gangster on a Singaporean couple who parked on a handicapped parking lot and tried to worm their way out with dumb excuses. The drama unfolded when I deliberately blocked their car in disabling them from reversing. I waited for these people to come back to their cars for 45 minutes!!!The driver ended up reversing and knocking into my truck and that kind of added fuel to my fire. It was 6.30pm and I had just completed a long day of energy auditing in Western Digital plant with my 3 other very big and intimidating looking auditors so that is why i look n sound like a thug. Very tired and extremely irritable I wanted them to feel what it was like having to wait just like how a disabled person would have felt. This is part 1 of 3 videos. If some of you feel I was mean in this video, I frankly don’t care! If you are doing something to fight this plague then you are fit to critisize but if you want to be an arm chair critic, keep your comments to yourselfI fight for the disabled who don’t have a voice and in this instance I think I got the message across to them and hopefully they will think twice about doing this again in Malaysia.”
Naren’s actions have received a mixed response from netizens. While a majority of Facebook users supported his actions, some came forward to say that Naren was outrightly being a bully. Even Singapore’s Stomp headline reads, “Model citizen or big bully?”
Watch the video, which has since been heavily circulated on Facebook as well as WhatsApp messages below:
What do you guys think? Was it absolutely necessary for Naren to berate them the way he did? Is it okay to name and shame the Singaporean couple in this manner? Would you have played moral police in a similar situation? How would you have handled it better?
Sources: The Straits Times, Stomp.
