ANTIDOTE The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to be nothing, have no place in it.

The opening line of VS Naipaul's novel ‘A Bend in the River' might well be the motto inscribed on the family crest of Sarawak's Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud, who has been our own homegrown ‘Big Man' for the past 32 years.