So Malaysiakini.com is finally celebrating its five years of existence.

Five years is a long time in a person's life. It is even longer for any attempt to do something really meaningful for Malaysia, especially when the project is shunned by the people with political power and organised money. The online news portal, malaysiakini , falls snugly into this unenviable category.

Of course, any meaningful project that springs from the flickering half-light of civil society in Malaysia has to be very difficult and daunting. That is why there are so few of them around, and that is why the civil society is forever germinating, and never finding fruition.

We know the main reason why this is the case. Ours is a strange brand of democracy. We have all the trappings of a first-world political system, but the essence of a feudalistic primitive third-world political culture.

In this anachronistic rojak concoction, the ancient impulse to centralise power in the hands of a patriarchal oligarchy or a wise old tribal chieftain gets the upper hand over modernist instinct for individual fulfilment of life through the agency of the civil society.

Something like malaysiakini that seeks to express the aspiration for this modernist idea of an independent media goes against the grain of our traditional values. It dares to challenge conventional wisdom, stake a claim in creating values, and pronounce truths contrary to tribal traditions. In the eyes of those sitting at the apex of our political food-chain, malaysiakini must appear alien, subversive, and heretical.

Given the web of invisible shackles around the body and soul of our citizens, from the cradle to the grave, in all nooks and corners of their public and private life, the existence of malaysiakini can at best be tolerated by those guardians of public order and national security.