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I listened to Deputy Information Minister Zainuddin Maidin at the National Union of Journalists forum on World Press Freedom Day. I couldn't help feeling sorry for the guy.

Such simplistic deductions, such arrogant smugness coming out of from someone holding such an important office. So paternal, that I dread thinking if that's how I sound talking to my daughter.

I am not a journalist nor a politician. Just an aging father feeling a bit uncertain about the world that my teenage daughter will inherit.

She says she is going to write for a living. And my fatherly instincts prayed that she will not turn out like the big names in Malaysian journalism talking o­n TV that evening, chorusing Zam's sycophantic wisdom which amputates their own professional limbs.

She reads malaysiakini abroad. Thank God for little mercies! She e-mailed me that she enjoys my letters there but I shouldn't expect her to agree with everything I wrote just because I am her father.

Good for you, baby! And guess what? I am not stopping sending you money for school just because of that.

It's about time that we old men stop being full of ourselves, and let these young adults mould their own world to their tastes and liking. A world of nanoseconds and gigabytes so different from the o­ne we grew up in, we can't even begin to fathom the endless possibilities of challenging influences.

But I can still say that with confidence because I have always given her the freedom to think and the freedom to access information, opinions and whatever garbage that makes this world go round.

I have also let her test her thoughts with others, for that's the o­nly way she can learn respect for other people's opinion, empathy for other people's causes, confidence in her own abilities, and humility at her own disappointments.

I worry not that she may repudiate me and what I stand for. I have long ago stopped trying to live my life through hers. The baton has to pass.

Imagine a world without press freedom for her to do this. There won't be enough space to share under the coconut shell with Zam's and (former New Straits Times editor-in-chief) A Kadir Jasin's and ( The Star executive editor) Datuk Wong Chun Wai's children.

Just a thought for World Press Freedom Day...

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