poor sleepy hollow

i promised myself sometime late last year that i'd refrain from commenting on local politics for health reasons - namely, my own! But events of the past week have proved too mind-bogglingly crazy to remain silent. And hence, it is with deep regret that i, dukuhead, blog as thus:

Rahim Tamby Chik, ex-chief minister of Malacca, was credited (still is credited) by most people as a chief minister of true ability who brought substantive progress and development to malacca state. Yes, he was a bright and able administrator, not without the usual flaws in malaysian politicians that we have grown so accustomed to now (especially so in recent years). His fall from grace and the subsequent events that followed need no repeating here. He was quoted to have said that after he was no longer chief minister, the traffic of people coming to see him dwindled, nay the flow disappeared even and he knew then who were his true friends and who were mere fair-weathered friends. It is remarkable and sad that in local culture and politics, a disgraced former VVIP becomes less than a commoner - he becomes invisible. You heard rare utterances from Rahim Tamby Chik in the occasional comments he makes during UMNO general assemblies and such but they were reported more as a matter of old curiosity than that any prominence is given to him. So it is rather sad that Rahim now has apparently been reduced yet even further from a political has-been to a messenger boy and the bearer of dirty laundry. This has nothing whatsoever to bear on the truth or the consequences of the sex video case. I am merely commenting on how terrible the descent has been on a man of talent who is still remembered by many Malaccans as the developer of the state during the 80s, on whom in his hey-day, lavish praises were heaped and the local press fawned upon appropriately. And now that his name is going to be dragged through the mud, along with the stereotypes people often associate Malaccans with (it's going to get even worse for us now I expect), we can but sit and weep silently.