It is the night before I meet Dr. Mahathir. For those of you who didn’t know about this, welcome to yet another strange and interesting episode of my life: Tomorrow, I will be interviewing Tun Dr. Mahathir, the 4th and 7th Prime Minister of Malaysia, for my podcast, Pathways To Excellence. I sit here with two books in front of me, the first, The Malay Dilemma, and the next, A Doctor in the House, and I contemplate both and the way they have unquestionably shaped my life. Dr. Mahathir was my Prime Minister when I was just born. From young, I always thought that every country had a Prime Minister; indeed, it is from him that I learned the very concept of Prime Minister itself. For years and years, this had gone on, and I went from thinking that he was the only one who would ever occupy that position, to learning that other countries had ‘presidents’ and ‘kings’, later downgrading the man’s significance as I thought of the ‘world’ and how wide it was, moving first from thinking that Malaysia was everything to thinking that it was tiny, insignificant, hating it, coming back, making it home, and then realising that it was what we made of it. It is fascinating how small the mind of a child is – yet, as I would later realize, how small the mind of an adult is when they fail to contemplate the significance of things that are nearby. I never really thought too extensively what it would mean to actually encounter this person one day. Then one day, many years after my father had died and was buried in the Sungai Petani Christian Cemetery, I found a book. My mum said that she wanted to throw it away, but somehow she didn’t, and there I saw it in its ancient form, yellowed pages […]