Malaysians are living in the dark.

On a recent trip to Malaysia I tried to gauge Malaysian people's awareness of their own politics and was surprised to find how ignorant they were of what was happening around them. To take an example -- the on-going trial of Anwar Ibrahim for sexual misdeeds. There was not one amongst them who thought the man had been falsely charged and I was talking not to uneducated people but to a lawyer, an accountant, an estate agent, a couple of university students and others like them. If you, like me, had followed the man's first trial and are following the present one you would be inclined to dismiss the trials as a farce and pronounce Anwar Ibrahim innocent.