Why Kudaguru?
Why Kuda Guru?
It’s funny how it always goes in spates – people asking me, so what does Kuda Guru mean, then? And, generally its which area in the world I am currently sitting in. Here in Asia, people rarely ask.Kuda, means horse in Bahasa Malay and Bahasa Indonesia, so, it begins to make a little bit of sense now, yes? Guru, obviously means teacher, guide, expert or master.About 8 years ago, I was working full time in Malaysia, in an area called Johor Bahru, which is the border town between Malaysia and Singapore. It’s quite industrial and tends to be filled with a lot of Singapore commuters too. Malaysian’s working in Singapore get the best of both worlds – the cheaper Malaysian rents and being able to stay with their families, as well as earning the much higher Singapore wages (and, sadly also enjoy the many hours of sitting on their motorbikes at the border, in very long queues). There is a big riding school / livery yard / hotel just outside JB (as Johor Bahru is more commonly known), where I was working.
I’m hopeless at languages, really, honestly, cannot learn them, no matter how hard I try. So, living in the hotel, I enlisted a couple of the front of house staff to teach me Bahasa Malay. It took me about a month to get Selamat Pagi (Good morning) and Apa kabar (How are you?). Really. A whole month. I did also learn quite quickly about Apa ini? (What is this?) when the grooms would bring me the wrong horse, or the right horse with the wrong saddle etc… But the phrase that seemed clearest, fastest, was Kuda belak (the horses are back) which would be shouted from one end of the yard to the other, to tell the grooms that the trail riding horses were seen coming back out of the jungle. Every groom who had a horse in the ride that we had shipped out a couple of hours before, would come out and stand and wait for his horse to get close enough, so he could help the guest down and take his charge off for their welcome cold shower. My first introduction to Kuda.Now, since we were out in the jungle, there wasn’t an awful lot to do – um, nothing really. We had a swimming pool at the neighbouring hotel, and another restaurant there, but one of our big highlights was going into the nearest kampong (village) to the very big Tesco supermarket. *sigh* such was our hectic social life… One of the other instructors and I would hitch a lift in with the car owning chef, or phone for a cab, and a real taxi would pick us up. And then, on coming out of our exciting trip, there would generally be 3 or 4 “taxi” cars sitting outside. These would have been the Grab / Uber cars, except in those days, Grab / Uber didn’t exist. So, these random young Malay men would be sitting on the off chance that someone would need a ride, haggle over the price, load their unsuspecting passengers into the back of the (usually slightly dodgy) car and take them wherever they needed to go. In that time, we were proudly shown bright green zebra print fake fur seats… A first aid kit… A fire extinguisher.… and more bling CD’s hung on grubby ribbon over the rear-view mirror than you would imagine possible… There were several times, whipping up and down the narrow, steep and winding hill roads where we did consider the possibility of our imminent death…So anyway, on one particular exciting Tesco evening, I came breezing out and a young man was waiting beside his car. Taxi taxi, miss, taxi, he was calling. I said yes, please, I need to go to… And he said yes, yes, I know Kuda Guru. And so, my introduction, that all the grooms and pretty much all the kampong unofficial taxi drivers knew the Kuda Guru. Slightly dodgy again?!
Now, if you take this literally, horse teacher. I, however take it slightly differently - horse teacher, as in, the master happens to be an equine. Who knows best what a horse feels like? Um, a horse. Who knows when a horse becomes unbalanced? A horse? Who knows what this particular rider feels like? Maybe a horse? And how many secrets does a horse keep? About his rider? None. You watch a horse, you can see where his attention is… How rhythmic his rider is…. If he is comfortable or in pain… If he understands an instruction… If he is happy or battling to cope. All of these things, he wears as plain as his heart on his sleeve. So, by thinking Kuda Guru – my thinking then becomes, your horse is your teacher – why am I here in the arena with you? Purely as the translator. After all these years, about the only language that I appear to understand beyond hello and how are you, is horse. So, when you go out to greet your horse tomorrow morning, please, please say, Selamat Pagi Kuda Guru, Apa Kabar?! Have fun!Follow