There are not many controversial issues that are being discussed by the media and bloggers these days. A new one would be interesting, if it is found.

And an unlikely one was found in the latest column by Zaini Hassan in Utusan Malaysia which appears every week without fail.

The last time I saw his article, which was on his experience visiting Hyderabad in India, I realised he had been to other cities I had also visited, with his description of the scenes there.

Zaini might not have been to other major cities in India such as Madras, now Chennai; Bombay, now Mumbai, New Delhi and Old Delhi as well as to Agra where the Taj Mahal is, and Ajanta and Ellora which I have visited the few times I was in India, to know what he has written to be so true.

But the many photos and slides I had taken of all my trips to India, and from what I had seen there, is no different than what he had written.

His reference to the Indian characters in many Indian films, be it Tamil or Hindi, are not really a new revelation; they are there for everybody to see.

And for someone with a film background, I can write a lot more on this aspect of Indian cinema, then and now, which has not changed, except for the locations and the actors who now play the lead parts.

In the past they had MGR and Sivaji; they had Kamal Hassan and Rajnikanth in the Tamil cinema, as opposed to Shahrukh Khan and others in the Khan clan who dominate the Hindi cinema scene.

But what is still so striking is how those old Tamil and Hindi films are when compared to the new ones.

I had the fortune to sit with some of my Indian friends - meaning, those from India, as opposed to some Indian ones from Malaysia - at a food stall and they were watching a not-so-new Tamil film starring Rajnikanth.

And what I and everybody else in the stall could notice was how loud and noisy this film is. Worse, how confusing the whole film is.

So what else is new with regard to what Zaini had written about the Indians, regardless of whether they are in India or Malaysia? Nothing.

His description of India and the Indians there could have been written by anyone who has a keen eye for psychology and anthropology as well as history of the country, and of its links with ours, especially with regard to the immigration of the Indian community to British Malaya then.

Any scholar of the history of immigration to British Malaya would write what is obvious and too general.

Find a documentary on India produced by the National Geographic Channel or other stations and one can see how boisterous the Indians there are.

Ah, 'boisterous'. This is how documentaries describe India and the Indians there, so no one would dare misreport on the documentaries and the stations.

If it is written by one Zaini Hassan who writes for Utusan Malaysia, there will be some people in Malaysia who will want to draw blood from them.