More than a decade ago, when I was in Malaysia on assignment, I interviewed a senior official of the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC). He was a policy wonk, who had been sent to Oxford University on a Mara scholarship.

My first question to him was whether the whole MSC, the brainchild of Mahathir Mohamad, was just another one of the then premier’s hair-brained schemes at shoring up Malaysian ‘coming-of-age’ grandiosity.

He hung up. Guess he didn’t like the tone of my questions.