The Malay Male finds his calling at a halal pub

Amir's Half-Easy

Followers of local blogs earlier this century may remember The Malay Male (not to be confused with The Malay Mail), a blog about the dark side of a young journalist from Pahang blinded by the city lights. Well, the journalist and author of that blog, Amir Hafizi, is now 41 and has just joined us at Bru Publication, the publisher of mole.my, as head of its newest division - BOOKS! There's only one reason why Amir is there: to help fellow journalists get published. Yes, believe it or not, very few of us journos can claim to be authors of books even though we may have written thousands of articles in newspapers and magazines. The late Ahmad A. Talib, for example, had written columns for the New Straits Times for decades before he passed last year. But not a hard cover or a paperback in his name and that's our loss. 

Amir has lined up at least three big titles for 2021 and while Malaysia waits he has decided to start a column in The Mole called Amir's Half-Easy. Missing is the trademark colorful language of The Malay Male but nearly two decades on, it's still the same, old Amir.

Excerpts from Amir's Half-Easy - What's in a name 

Half-Easy is a play on how my name – Hafizi – is pronounced. That fulfils the ‘writer obsessed with himself’ trope. It also sounds like how one wants his or her eggs, but that would be half-boiled or overeasy.

Talking about eggs, I like the fact that it sounds like the opposite to ‘hardboiled’ as in ‘hardboiled crime thriller’ because I discovered that I’m not noir and more grey or beige in my views of the world.

Also, it is quite sexy, suggesting that I’m only half-easy. A fully easy person is of course a slut and I am no slut, not for a lack of trying. The long list of women I was interested in but who later married better men is a testament to my failures as a slut.

Half-easy also means that some parts of me are hard – which is what is required for certain… tasks.

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