The Malaysian Insider

NOV 1 — MCA’s larger crisis, no small thing considering the ongoing hydra-headed leadership wrangle, is that the Chinese community no longer cares who wins and, ultimately, what happens to the party as a whole.

It’s a fair assumption to make, given how far removed politicians can be from their communities. Once every four or five years, they reappear pretending to be your best friend and neighbour, as though a handshake and photo-op makes up for years of absence. They don’t seem to care about us, so why should we care about them?

OCT 18 — I always get nervous when people start spouting terms like “dreams”. “Vision”. “Golden opportunity”.

But for Lotus F1 technical director Mike Gascoyne, they seem to be so much stock in trade. It’s strange to hear them coming from Gascoyne.

From a public relations representative, sure. But from a technical director? Curious, to say the least.

OCT 11 — Some of you wanted to be firefighters. Others wanted to be policemen. The more starry-eyed dreamt of being astronauts while the truly depraved already knew they would be lawyers. Not me. When I was a kid, all I wanted to be was the prime minister of Malaysia.

You can hardly blame a young ’un, can you? In-between watching bouts of Ultraman vanquishing whatever scaly, slimy lizard that crawled out of the gutter, the shuttered television set flashed scenes of a flash-looking Mahathir stepping out of planes, waving all regal-like to a huge welcoming party that even included a brass band. And it happened no matter where he went.

That, I told myself, was the life.

OCT 4 — The Hari Raya festivities are generally over. All the hometowns have been visited, all the lemang eaten, cakes consumed. So all that’s left for us to do now is sort through the mess of dead bodies that have accumulated on our roads over that short period.

At 261 deaths, this year’s Ops Sikap recorded the second highest number of road fatalities since the annual enforcement campaign was started in 2001. Over a two-week period, an average of 18 people lost their lives on roads every day.

Almost nine years in, road fatalities have not gone down by anything further than statistical anomaly. It’s come to the point where you wonder if the whole exercise really is about reducing accidents and fatalities or just an easy way to rack up the a large portion of the year’s summonses quota in a short span of time.

Sept 27 — Motorsports costs money. All sports, to some degree, cost money but more to the point, motorsports costs a lot of money. So much money that only the rich or very talented ever get to participate here in Malaysia.

First there’s the vehicle itself, but rather than being the bulk of your investment, it is merely the gaping hole into which you would proceed to pour all your money into. Modifications can and often do cost more than the car itself. Or even several times the cost of the car.