THEY are not allowed in my home. I am talking about local television newscasters or presenters reading the news of the day using language that I am not familiar with.

When they speak in Bahasa Melayu, their diction, intonations and inflections are totally off.

MY favourite British television series is MI-5, or Spooks as it is titled here in Malaysia.

I don’t watch the series on TV because of too many commercials and instead, get a whole season's episodes on DVD to see how MI-5 chief Sir Harry Pearce makes good decisions, controls his operatives with precision and professionalism, and keeps the nation safe from threats, both internal and external.

MANY years ago, during my days wandering around the world, I ended up in Munich, Germany, working at the US McGraw Army Base.

It was a good life and I could travel on weekends.

One such trip took me to a former Nazi concentration camp in Dachau, about 16km from Munich.

ONCE upon a time, almost in the age of enlightenment in this country in the early 90s, I wrote in a newspaper column about roasting turkey for Christmas for friends.

The following week, I received a letter from a Pas Youth leader asking me to repent for I had deviated from the true path of Islam or so he had surmised just from what appeared to be my derring-do attitude for making a roast turkey dinner!

IT was one humid summer evening in Greece, between Thessalonika and Athens, many, many moons ago that I took a wrong turn into a deserted side road without realising that the time was about 6.30pm.

Even though it was summer and the sun shone till about nine at night, it was still late in the evening.

Imagine this if you can. In the early 60s and 70s, Kuala Lumpur was much a town like what Phnom Penh in Cambodia or Vientiane in Laos are today. KL was filled with bicycles, dusty roads, smelly open drains and rubbish strewn all over the place.

Let us make another thing very clear here: The system of rulers in this country reaffirms the fact that Malaysia has a long history of Malay sultanate governance, even after the peninsula was colonised by European powers.