Follow The Clues

In entry this time, the author will be following the clues that can be learned from various award winning film directed and/or played by P.Ramlee. These clues will then be articulated to workplace adaptation. Let play follow the clue and see what we can get from this article. Enjoy the reading...


Starting with a list of award winning film directed/contributed by him.  I'll be selecting a few below (not in particular order):

• Hang Tuah
• Madu Tiga

Film # 1 : Hang Tuah

Source : AsianTorrentZ

It was a story of Malay Legendary Warrior back somewhere between 1400 through 1500.  The story re-lived and directed by Phani Majumdar and placed it to the silver screen. P. Ramlee was the main cast in this film and been doing the musical score. The uniqueness of this film was it the only film made in color among films he produced or worked in his career.  The film was released in Jan 1956 and in May 1956 it got the "Best Music Score" in the 3rd Asian Film Festival in Hong Kong. In 1957, the film was shown in the Berlin International Film Festival. It was the first Malayan entry at that time.

Collaborations with international director was already a trend adapted by P.Ramlee.  This collaboration produced a very positive result even though the film did not win anything in Berlin International Film Festival.

Film # 2 : Madu Tiga

Source : Wikipedia

This was a comedy film directed by him. A story of how a husband managed his three wives.  This film won the "Best Comedy Award" in the 11th Asian Film Festival in Taipei.  It was recorded that this film was an adaptation of a Chinese Film.  Which Chinese Film is unknown at the point this article was written.  The "Madu Tiga" song written in this film became an evergreen song among the mens in Malaysia :) even now and the last re-production of this song was made by Ahmad Dhani, a singer and composer from Indonesia.

Even though the film was an adaptation of some other movie, the re-presentation of this movie was unique that I did not realize at the first place that this film was an adaptation movie. One unique feature of this film of how he blended the music into the film where just by listening to the song, people (in Malaysia especially) will remember the film by heart.  

The keyword that I can capture from this movie were:

• Adaptation and re-creation of idea.
• Anchor element, which I define it as what are the things that would make people remember.

Learning points

From this write up, I manage to extract some key point which we can apply it in our workplace, and I'll place it below in point form.

• Collaboration with people outside of your domain or culture.  There are lots of learning and experience that you can get when you work with people especially those from outside of your country.  They bring in different ideas which was nurtured through their culture.  When you collaborate ... some simple idea that you have can be enhance to something amazing even radical.  Some management likes radical ideas but make sure that the radical idea are inline with the organizational objective.
• Solving problem using ideas based from your territorial knowledge sometimes make workplace life very mundane.  Try to adapt some idea outside the box, get out to the wild for some ideas and adapt the idea to our domain, and re-engineer it to make it yours.
• And finally in what ever you do, keep searching for the masterpiece, something people could remember over and over again.  It may take some time but when the masterpiece come, I'm sure you'll never regret doing it.