PEOPLE sometimes do strange things. They marry to divorce. And if that is not enough, they marry the same person again.
Peculiar people. And for every peculiar man, there is a peculiar woman. After all, we are made in pairs.
Does distance lend enchantment to the view? The heart may have a rearview mirror. Who knows?
There is so little we know of the world around us, let alone the heart.
So, I did the peculiar thing, too. I left the New Straits Times only to return. And in between I grew old, only to wear, T.S. Eliot's Prufrock-like, the bottom of my trousers rolled.
In the meantime, people have come and gone, talking of the NST for 175 years. They still do now.
It wasn't easy to get in. You must have a way with words. So, I had, the NST found out. Not until after they threw me in a dingy place with a wealth of noises of every description.
One must have a ton of audacity to call it a room. There were boxes of this and that, leaving just enough space for a table.
I bet there were old wives' tales in those boxes, too. Apparently, they wanted to see if I could handle the confined conundrum the world of a journalist is supposed to be.
I was there, all of three hours. No, it didn't seem like an eternity.
I was engrossed. Man, I should have been a journalist the moment I learned how to hold the pen. Incidentally, the nib and the NST are never parted.
The NST did some great asking. My memory fails me as to the exact words but it went something like this: "How would you describe the world today?"
It was a geopolitical question, only that it wasn't so described then.
Words and concepts take time to travel from the First World to the Second World and Third World.
Remember, back then An apple was just a fruit to us. And Steve Jobs was just a twenty-something with an idea whose time hadn't come. There was no computer on the desk, let alone one on the lap, so to speak.
Ours was a world of Remington and other machines. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack.
Truth be told, many at the news desk didn't know how to type. Typing was something they taught in stenography schools. We were mostly search-and-attack guys. QWERTY was just a Morse code.
Judging from the space devoted in the broadsheet NST — yes, tabloid was what naughty sisters like The Malay Mail did — the world was just Indochina and the Middle East.
Well, almost.
Heng Samrin was in any space the NST could spare, with his People's Republic of Kampuchea. China, like now, was there too, with its military operations against Vietnam.
As for the Middle East, the muddle left behind by the West began showing up.
The United States embassy was under siege and journalists were learning how to say Khomeini in English. Get it wrong, and it will be the current supreme leader of Iran.
Many did get it wrong, only to give the appearance that they were predicting the coming of the current Khamenei.
The Iranian Revolution will soon make crude the black gold it had come to be. The Iranians may or may not know this.
Black gold is of American coinage. To Iranians, the only thing black is Satan and the White House.
Not much has changed between the two arch enemies. Just flip through the pages of the NST in the 1970s and this year; there is enough animus to melt Antarctica's Lambert-Fischer Glacier.
So, to answer the question of the NST, you had to know your Deng Xioping from a Deng Hsio Peng. No two Dengs are the same in China. If the Great Wall of China is there for anything, it is there as a metaphor to signal this complexity.
That is not all you had to know. You must know Khameini, Brezhnev, Jimmy Carter and Margaret Thatcher.
Thatcher, what a prime minister she was. If any British leader can be said to have destroyed socialism in Britain, she had to be the one. If ever an English sentence got a prime minister elected, Thatcher's "Labour isn't working" must be it.
Never had a prime minister owed so much to copywriters as Thatcher had to ad brothers Maurice and Baron Saatchi.
And Thatcher had a classic original, too. When Francis Fukuyama published his book, The End of History and the Last Man, Thatcher had this very quotable response: "The end of history? The beginning of nonsense."
With so much of geopolitics in the journalist's head, it is little wonder that old journalists don't just die.
They become writers of geopolitical books. And then they die.