Gripevine

I'm a TEETOTALER, those who know me from way back in the mid 90s to the earlier years of the 00s will know that this was not always the case. Way back then, especially as a young reporter whose office was conveniently located in Bangsar (everybody's favourite watering hole), I spent many 'happy hours' trawling the many interesting joints located along Telawi1 and Telawi2. My students days in Australia were also quite a delight, alcohol was so......cheap! We Malaysian students were constantly gushing about this. So as you can see, the 'culture of drinking' is not one that is foreign to me. Being the proverbial observer that I am, and also because I was always "never that high", there were many things that I observed about human nature in those dimly-lit smoked filled joints where glasses were raised literally every second of an hour. I'm not gonna start by saying that intoxication does strange things to people, because that's something

This post was supposed to be written and published by August 31, but work dictated otherwise, while most of you were probably enjoying the start of the long weekend yesterday, yours truly was slogging it out at the office, furiously uploading photo after photo of Merdeka Day celebrations, and scrolling the newswires for stories on how the nation celebrated our 55th Independence Day - That in short is the stuff we newspaper people get up to on all the siesta/public holidays. Being exhausted as I was, I did entertain the thought of saving this post for next year, but then the thought occurred to me, that things might be a lil' different then. The last elections brought a lot of changes, and I think many of us are expecting more changes to follow, once our esteemed Prime Minister decides to dissolve Parliament and call for elections. So......the best time to write this post would be now I dare say. The contents of this posting is a result of years and years of observing the &qu