Looking at photos of the candle-lit peace march in Kuala Lumpur on Sept 27 with a restrained police force on the side, and reported in bits by the mainstream media, I am optimistic that the ISA, Printing Presses and Publications Act and sedition laws that stifle our journalistic work may be amended or at best repealed in good time. But to achieve what now seem like impossibilities, we need a robustly critical and transparent media to sustain the reformasi spirit.

I first read and wrote an article about ‘paradigm shifts’ in the NST in 1992 premised on such thinking propagated by a paper originally written by the late Tan Sri Noordin Sopiee of the Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ISIS).

I had then also documented my reaction to a book launched by the then chief secretary to the government (KSN) called The Malaysian Civil Service: A Paradim Shift. My article was entitled, "What Paradigm Shift?"

The incorrect problem definition often leads to the wrong solution. Therefore, in the course I teach at Universiti Malaya, we spend an inordinate amount of time talking about "problem definitions" for this very reason.

The ISA was a solution to a real problem: in the 1960s Malaya was faced with the genuine threat of an armed struggle to get rid of a newly formed and independent government.