Ahhhhh, what a liberating feeling. My first column for malaysiakini . A merciful release, for a few hours, at least, from writing for and about advertising.

A field of literature, or perhaps more accurately illiterature, to which I've devoted most of my time for so long I feel I've been doing it ad nauseam . Which happens to be the title of my forthcoming book-length collection of 80 or so of the columns I've written over the years for the Malaysia-based marketing and ad mag, ADOI .

You should ignore the foregoing sentence, of course. It's a deliberate if relatively venial example of venal journalism. A small specimen of the cancer of commercialisation that's metastasizing everywhere in most of the world's media.