Politics complicates his plans. The Mahathir-baiter in UMNO and its supreme council and the Johore Bahru UMNO division chief, Dato' Shahrir Samad, much to everyone's surprise, supports the costly and irrelevant RM2 billion Southern Gateway. This would replace the 80-year causeway with a new 900 metre bridge, deepen the Tebrau Strait, build a new customs, immigration and quarantine complex, and a new railway station on a 38.6 hectare plot along the Tanjong Puteri coastline. This could not be done if Singapore would not demolish its half of the causeway. So far it has refused. When the Southern Gateway was first mooted, Malaysia said it would go its own way even if Singapore disagreed. But it was a mega project with no thought to economic realities or if it could pay its way.

The biggest disaster, and one that would redound on Malaysia years after it is resolved, is this fiasco of the railway double-tracking and electrification contract, part of a multi-nation project with the aim of a Trans Euro-Asia railway which would run from Singapore to Europe via Kunming in China and Siberia in Russia. Malaysia signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with India and China in 2001 for the electrified double-tracking of railway lines in return for payment in the purchase of an equivalent value in palm oil. The Indian MoU was witnessed by the two prime ministers, that with China by the then deputy prime minister and now prime minister. In mid-2002, the Malaysian government gave letters of intent to the Indian Railway Construction Company (IRCON) and the China Railway Engineering Corporation (CREC), both government agencies. IRCON had the northern section - from Ipoh to Padang Besar - and CREC the southern - from Seremban  to Johore Bahru. They submitted a total bid for RM42 billion for 636 kms of double-tracking and electrification after a detailed study.

This is an idisosyncratic view of Malaysia's four prime minister from one who had known and observed them at close quarters. The Tengku, for instance, had known me since I was 12 and he and my parents were living in the same Wadi Hana area of Johore Bahru in the 1950s. Tun Razak I knew as a journalist and indeed met him more often than I perhaps should have as a journalist in the late 1960s and 1970s. Tun Hussein was more distant, but since my late father was an enthusiastic member of Dato' Onn's Independence of Malaya Party or IMP, he acknowledged that and I got on better with him than many others did. But it was only after he left office that I knew him better. He had one remarkable trait in that he would not discuss his past in government, and it was rare for him to open up.

I mentioned this in the answer above. What about Batu Putih/Pedro Branca; the Singapore request for overflights; the Singaporeans raising the cost of living in Johore Bahru and other peripheral issues. The water talks cannot be taken in isolation. The LKY-DZ points of agreement is just one more impediment the Malaysians put into the pot for Singapore to stir. Singapore fell for it. And now tries to wriggle out. I have always suggested to every Singapore high commissioner and many an ambassador from elsewhere that if they want to understand Malaysia and its government, you have to read the Sejarah Melayu. For that provides the cultural roots of how Malaysia is governed. Few as far as I know have. But the suggestion that well-educated presidential scholars must read some fable to understand Malaysia is too much for many of them. You cannot get to understand how Indonesia works if you ignore the predictions of Joyoboyo. I have yet to get one books which lists them but it as important to Indonesian polity as Nostradamus is to the modern European. So the Sejarah Melayu to understand the Malay psyche. Singapore wants its views accepted by the Malay on her terms. That cannot succeed unless its request put in the Malay way to accept it. The bull in a china shop approach would not work. Indeed cannot.

Reading would not catch on unless it is taught early. And once learnt, it is rarely lost. My father was not a reader, but my mother was. She inculcated that in me, though, curiously, none of my brothers and sisters got into that habit. But I also had a wonderful teacher, in Form Two at the English College, Johore Bahru, Mr Lim Teck Siang, who died a few years ago in his late 80s, who insisted we read voraciously, giving us first copies of magazines like 'Tit Bits' and slowly graduating to more literary magazines and books. And write a half-page summary of what one read every week. By the year-end, at 13, I was reading the plays of Shakespeare. It set me up for life. Many of course fell by the wayside. One who did in my class, but who went on to great heights and greater irrelevance, is the National Front (BN) secretary-general, Tan Sri Mohamed Rahmat. I suppose by the standards by which Bolehland judges its people, he made a success of his life and I did not.

In another footnote to history, my old friend from Johore Bahru, the opposition politician, Mr Abdul Razak Ahmad, has decided to call it a day. A recurring back problem and the ravages of old age - the last time we met at a function at the Selangor Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Kuala Lumpur, we talked more of our infirmities as once we would of politics and the world; he is 60, and I four years older - forced him to take the course he did. His importance in Johore politics is that he was there when the poor and the unconnected confronted the government, usually when it wanted to take their land, which happened to be in area where tens of millions of ringgit could be made. He was banished from Singapore for his activist role, as he was about to sit for his LL.B. final examination. That was never lifted. But it burnished his image more than Singapore would ever realise.

My memory is hazy on this but I suspect this was the residence of the UMNO president, and that Tengku Abdul Rahman later occupied it. But I could be wrong. We lived in Jalan Mohamed Taib, in the Wadi Hana area to the back of his house. For at this time, the Tengku lived in the vicinity, and he would often visit the neighbours and made friends with all. UMNO's headquarters was in Johore Bahru, in a gracious building along Jalan Ibrahim, not demolished to make way for a road. History is not a strong point of a community whose history is deliberately erased.

But not reflected when projects and policies costing billions of ringgit are announced with abandon. When it comes to spending money, to mollify the public from teaching the government a lesson, promises, though not funds, come fast and furious. The second causeway linking with Singapore cost billions, is hardly used, but the raison d'etre was the huge land parcels the promoters got and who laughed all the way to the bank, leaving the government and the people to pick up the tab. The Langkawi cable car project, no doubt to benefit the tourists from all over the world who would not come, cost hundreds of millions of ringgit. Now more than a billion ringgit is earmarked for an ecologically friendly bridge to replace the causeway between Johore Bahru and Singapore, built not for convenience or need but greed.

THE MALAYSIAN CHINESE ASSOCIATION (MCA) PRESIDENT, Dato' Seri Ling Liong Sik, is shocked and horrified at the millions of ringgit "some" MCA politicians spend to be where they are in the party. Money politics now creeps into thd party. It is worrisome, he told an MCA gathering in Johore Bahru on Sunday, 03 March 2003. But since it is only millions of ringgit, it is 'not serious'. MCA would no doubt act only when billions of ringgit are involved. He does not explain his role in MCA to encourage money politics. He used it to the hilt to throw his opponents out. Like President George W. Bush and the Prime Minister, Dato' Seri Mahathir Mohamed, he believes in only one prevailing view. His. But it is challenged.

William Kuok, the brother of Tan Sri Philip and the billionaire Mr Robert Kuok, was active in the Malayan Democratic Union, and edited its organ, The Democrat, from its offices in Klyne Street (now Jalan Hang Lekiu) in Kuala Lumpur. He joined the Malayan Communist Party after the Emergency was declared. And rose high in the party until five years later he was shot dead. His father was a prominent business man in Johore Bahru. A family friend, Dato' Onn Jaffar, the founder of UMNO and father of Tun Hussein Onn, Malaysia's third prime minister, and grandson of the UMNO youth leader, Dato' Hishamuddun Hussein, tried unsuccessfully to wean him from his involvement with the MCP, even at one stage offering to get him a job with an international organisation, but he turned it down.

At one time, all races and tribes in the country allowed polygamy. Over the years leading to independence, especially during British rule, monogamy was the norm, the polygamous man, with his multiple wives, a rare exception. It was considered right and proper for Chinese men to have multiple wives, but not for the Malay and Indian, although they was no religious or other inhibitions against it. But it was not accepted socially. In Johore Bahru, where I grew up, I knew of prominent Malays, Indians and Chinese who had multiple wives. They were all socially prominent. In a sense this cushioned them. But the secondary wives were kept hidden. So strict it was that cabinet ministers who took a second wife would rather resign than continue in office. But as Islam came to be more than the state religion, and intruded in all sectors of society, with an active official pressure to convert as many heathens to Islam, polygamy was often used as a bait. If a non-Malay converted, he is, in the eyes of the law, automatically divorced from his wife, if she does not convert with him. He is free to marry again, often does.

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