I've often heard and observed that Malaysians are generally kind and charitable people, quick to forgive and forget slights, insults and offences. As forgiveness is a considerable virtue, I find this entirely admirable. But forgetfulness, I feel, can go only so far before it becomes a fault, or at least a failing. Because we can never hope to learn from unpleasant experience if we allow ourselves to fall or worse, be lulled and lied into a state of amnesia.

Some forms of amnesia, I grant you, are milder and less dangerous than others. Cramnesia, for example, which you may recall suffering back in your student days: frantically stuffing your mind full of a few facts at the last minute in the hope of scraping through an exam, then immediately afterwards forgetting every single scrap of whatever subject it was that you swotted-up on. Then there's jamnesia, the epidemic that afflicts millions of motorists after they endure endless hours of bumper-to-bumper festive-season traffic, then allow the ordeal to so completely slip their minds that they blithely set off on the torture trail all over again at the same time in the following year.