The New Straits Times, in a column last Saturday called on the people to ‘Sing the national anthem and renew your vows’. My retort to the writer and the NST is, who will sing for the nation and spill blood for her? Allow me to explain my question and then offer a reflection.

The stepping down of an education activist due to a scandal is linked to the teaching of Science and Maths in English.

There was much enthusiasm over the establishment of the Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines - East Asean Growth Area (Bimp-Eaga) - back in the early 1990s, which was touted as the most promising growth triangle in Southeast Asia. However, it has since come to nothing.

It is disheartening to note that while world leaders from Gordon Brown to Barack Obama are consumed with the evolving global economic crisis - the worse since the Great Depression - Malaysian leaders are obsessed with such trivialities as whether yoga would undermine our faith in Islam, and on such silly issues as Malay special privileges.

Since the so-called ‘tsumami’ swept away its two-thirds parliamentary majority and control of five states in the March general election, Barisan Nasional has clearly been faced with the imperative to reform itself or die.

So I’ve been increasingly puzzled to see no sign of improvement. Even Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi’s single token progressive move, the inclusion of law-reform zealot Zaid Ibrahim in his cabinet, has come to nothing. And populist posturings by minority coalition parties like Gerakan and the PPP have been routinely spurned.