After much dithering, I picked up the courage 10 years ago this month to return to Malaysia. Prior to that, I had spent a good 11 years in London, where the ‘miserable comfort' was both real and surreal to me.

I knew I had to put up with some serious miseries in Kuala Lumpur: horrible traffic congestion, notoriously disorganised public transport, and an economic ‘miracle' that had been brought to its knees by the financial crisis in the late 1990s.