Almost three years into the Asian financial crisis, we now know the meaning of "I did it my way".

Multibillion bailouts after bailouts of heavily-indebted corporations (which, in any other country, would have been highly profitable monopolistic concerns) seems to be the solution to a situation that is seemingly of no one's fault.

But to what end? Just to maintain the status and living standards of a minority? Is this what national resilience has become? Didn't we learn that to walk we would first have to crawl and fall a few times?

It is rather disturbing to know that the later generations of Malaysians are going to pay a very high price for all these loans in the form of bonds when this present government is gone. Are we becoming a Latin American economy?

Surely we must lay the foundations of building a proper nation of substance with quality education, developing skilled human resources, developing common communication skills between Malaysians, creating a broad-based economy, technology-end industrialisation and high tech agriculture and so on... and parallel to that, creating a free and entrepreneurial society based on information, knowledge and ideas?

There are no shortcuts to nation building.

Our politicians view everything in Malaysia with race-tinted eyes. They seldom realise that Malaysians just want to get on with life.

They shouldn't make it more difficult for us. They should see us as a nation of 22 million people and realise our collective potential, not as three separate races and one balancing pole.