Have you paid back your scholarship/loan?

I wonder how much Petronas spent to get that half-page notice published on today's NST...

... but I know surely it must have been a mere figure compared to the total scholarship/loan payment that they are expecting from the 22 people, whose names ungracefully graced that particular half-page notice.

Yup, Petronas had learnt it from MARA - if you want those graduates to pay you back, their names has got to be published in the newspaper, that'll get their attention. Hence that half-page Notis Tuntutan Biasiswa/Pinjaman Pelajaran Petronas on page 7 of Wednesday, 31 March 2004's edition of New Straits Times.

By default I don't have any reason to be interested in this, but I could not help but scanned through the list anyway. I bet quite a number of NST readers succumbed to this activity as well.

Not that we're nosy, not that we're interested, we could not be bothered by it anyway... but hey, our eyes can see and that's what things in print do to you - they make your eyes sweep through it whether you like it or not cause it's there and it's legible.

Because it was legible and the font was big enough to capture my attention and bring comprehension, I noticed several anak Dato's and anak Doktors also made the list.

Since I was going through the copy of NST with several of my colleagues, discussion was inevitable. "It's usually the anak Dato's and anak orang kayas that tend to abscond," says one of them.

"Well they should have expected the strings they pulled earlier to get the scholarship to tug back!" joked another.

"Ooh... isn't this so ala kerajaan baru, since Petronas is doing a high-profile debt-clearing measure.." said another colleague, referring to another article - featured in NST not too long after the Kasitah Gaddam case - on a bunch of Datuks clearing up their taxes which amounted to millions of RM.

Me, I was thinking more along the lines of, did the Petronas department which handled the students loan had problems only with these 22 individuals?

And were these 22 people liat sangat in settling their debts that the local oil giant had to resort to publishing their names in bold 12 Arial font, along with their guarantors, in order to get payment out of them?

Or was it that these 22 dudes and dudettes never actually received a letter from Petronas saying that they were required to settle their debts already?