A Malaysian twitter user caught the attention of netizens after he shared an interesting story about his interaction with the Sultan of Brunei, Hassanal Bolkiah. In his post, he revealed that he used to send Hari Raya greeting cards to the royal family member. Interestingly, he even received a reply from the Sultan himself!
The man, named Amir Oman Hafiz, tweeted, “Back then, I used to send greeting cards to the Sultan of Brunei every year. And the palace would reply. Nowadays I’m lazy. My sibling and I used to post them. We will add the cards in our collection. The most shocking part is seeing the salutation ‘Yang Mulia’ written in front of our names on the card.”
Oman’s tweet has since gone viral, garnering over 3k retweets on Twitter. He appeared in an interview with mStar to share more details about his childhood memory. According to him, he and his younger sibling have always enjoyed sending greeting cards to other people. “We’ve been exposed to this culture since we were little kids,” the Twitter user said.
“The year was 2003 when my younger sibling came up with this idea after watching a news about the Sultan of Brunei. So, we decided to post the greeting card to the palace. My mom helped us to search for the address, because there was no access to the internet at that time,” Oman told the portal.
He added, “We bought the Raya greeting cards which has the ‘Usop Santorian’ and ‘Ujang’ characters printed on them for 50 cents each at a bookstore. We were so young back then, so we learned the specific terms for royalties by watching the classic P. Ramlee movies. All of the cards were handwritten by us. We even asked for some ‘duit raya’ from the Sultan, but we have yet to receive it ’til this day.”
Oman also recalled how excited he and his brother were when they received a reply from the Brunei palace. “We were jumping for joy. We felt extremely proud. We were already informed that the Raya card was not personally from the Sultan, but it’s from a representative of the palace. The envelope was also pasted with a special stamp from the Brunei Sultan,” he shared.
“We flaunted the card to our family members. Since then, it has become a routine for me to send the Hari Raya greeting card to the Sultan of Brunei every year, and the palace representative would always respond to the letter. I made a collection of all the greeting cards from the palace,” Oman was quoted as saying.
At the end of the chat, Oman also hoped that the culture of sending Hari Raya cards will be revived in the modern era. “Now that we have WhatsApp as well as other medium of communications, I feel like the practice of exchanging Hari Raya greeting cards is dying. I hope we can bring back this culture to relive the nostalgia of Hari Raya celebration,” he said.
Source: mStar.
