Much Ado Over Masala Chai

When I think of tea, specifically the chai kind of tea, I'm reminded of the opening scene in Hindi film Dil Se, and vice versa.

In it, Shah Rukh Khan plays a journalist who ends up at at train station as a storm whips up. The wind tears away the shawl of another waiting passenger sleeping on a bench, who turns out to be Manisha Koirala.

Enraptured, Khan's character tries to flirt with her. When she asks for a cup of tea, he runs off and wakes up a sleeping chaiwalla nearby, entreating him to make two cups of the best, sweetest tea he can muster because "my future depends on it."

...Have your eyes stopped rolling? Good.

Of course, the train pulls away with Manisha inside while Khan stands in the rain like an idiot as fat drops of roof dribble splash into the cups of tea he's holding and as he stares wistfully at the long-gone train, he drinks one of them. Cue the first song, Chaiyya Chaiyya - which I'm not making puns on.

That scene stayed with me like a persistent suitor in a Bollywood film. Can you think of a better advertisement for whatever tea he was drinking? I believe the brand wasn't shown. Major missed opportunity.

One day, someone on Twitter made this claim: "...every 'chai blend' in American supermarkets is inferior to Wagh Bakri tea + milk + anything you have on your spice rack". Those who know this person would know she would know.

I've seen some of these Western-manufactured chai blends. Mine might be similarly outrageous.

A cursory search online revealed that this brand has some history, a part of which veers towards myth. The founder, Narandas Desai, started a tea estate in South Africa but then:

...racial discrimination forced him to return to India with nothing but a few valuables and a certificate from Mahatma Gandhi for being the most honest and experienced tea estate owner in South Africa.

Back in India, Desai established the Gujarat Tea Depot Company in 1919, and in 1925 he launched the Wagh Bakri brand, whose logo has a tiger and a goat flanking a cup of tea. Incidentally, wagh and bakri is Gujarati for "tiger" and "goat" respectively. Tea so good even mortal foes would set aside their differences over it, in line with the founder's aim to foster harmony, like Gandhi would.

And just how huge is Wagh Bakri in India? This huge:

No one can touch it in Gujarat, where over 50 per cent of the tea consumed is Wagh Bakri. And it sells enough in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Mahrashtra, Goa, Delhi, Hyderabad, Chhattisgarh and Karnataka to be the largest brand in the country outside of the HUL and Tata fold.

To reiterate, the biggest tea brand in India is literally called Tiger/Goat and its ethos is apparently Gandhi-inspired. Of such stuff are legends made.

As luck would have it, a mini mart nearby is a one-stop shop for many things from the Indian subcontinent such as Bru Coffee, dried round chillies, and even asafoetida. But the only tea leaves from that brand were in teabags, so I settled for a box of tea dust. As it's imported, it seems expensive compared to local brands of the same weight.

I was warned that Wagh Bakri tea was strong and hoo boy, the aroma that boiled out when I opened the foil package. Just the kind of product that's said to be tailored to "blend with the milk's richness and make its presence, and flavour, felt." I might need to store it in a proper airtight container soon or risk losing the oomph.

I only used one teaspoon of tea dust for the masala chai I made one evening. I roasted and coarsely ground some whole spices: black peppercorns, several "petals" of star anise, two cloves, one cardamom pod, and a pinch of fennel seeds. All these went in before the tea, followed by a pinch of Ceylon cinnamon and about a quarter teaspoon of ginger powder.

If you're grinding the whole spices down to a powder, you won't need much. An acquaintance now residing in India says this is excessive for masala chai and I didn't even throw in a pinch of nutmeg. One of these days, perhaps.

One sip, then two, and I swear, from far away, a familiar voice crooned:

♪ Jinke sar ho~ ishq ki chaa~on
Paa~on ke neeche~ jaanat ho~gi
Jinke sar ho~ ishq ki chaa~on ♫

Oh my.

The box is expensive, about RM11, but it'll last me awhile. And as my sieve couldn't catch the finest bits of dust, there was no bottoms up for me. But I managed to find a little-used coffee sock for the next cup.

Pity the packets of local tea in the cabinet, which I'm now using in experiments with cold-brewed teh-C kosong. Steeping it in milk makes for a bodier brew, but I'd have to use more tea than usual, which I'm reluctant to do with the costlier Indian import. Though the colour is lighter than hot-brewed chai but requires less sweetening, I still find cold-brewing tea with milk wasteful, even with cheaper stuff.

But on some days, getting heat involved is tedious, not to mention having to roast, pound and grind the spices, wait for the beverage to cool down, and properly dispose of the strained-out bits instead of flushing them all down the sink.

I suppose if you need to enjoy a cup of spicy, warming and soothingly Zen-inducing masala chai, the brewing process should be meditative rather than a chore.

Hence, you need chill to chai.

Though I'd broken a half-year coffee fast, I've stopped my regular coffee intake, limiting it to the odd cup or two a week with only one shot of espresso, and switched to chocolate, tea, and the occasional haldi ka doodh (turmeric milk) to cope with life.

I wouldn't mind another six months without coffee if I had tea like this.

Over the years I must have chugged down litres of good and bad coffee under stress, which I guess borked my body clock and forced me to give up on caffeinated beverages - proof that you can't take things for granted, like your health and tolerance for certain foods.

Speaking of which, I might need to find another supplier of Wagh Bakri tea, just in case.

Traffic Laws Are For Everybody

Lax enforcement and perceived vulnerability have allowed motorcyclists to run red lights and ride between lanes, etc., with impunity sebab miskin, kasi chan-lah, and so on. But when they screw up they affect more than themselves.

Arguably, many motorcyclists are B40 or thereabouts. So in a city ruled by cars (read: rich people), riding a bike through red lights, traffic jams and road dividers is a way to beat the system.

So it's no surprise some of them are upset when people suggest they obey traffic laws to the letter.

While the risk of being a motorcyclist on Malaysian roads is much higher, assuming that all motorists deliberately make life hell for bikers is almost as gross as the liberties bikers take because of protections afforded to them.

When their asshole behaviours - like kicking cars that don't give way to them - are called out, they challenge you to throw down at the nearest police station, or make it about race or class. How is this anything but ketuanan rempit?

Traffic laws tend to side with motorcyclists because chances of them dying or being disabled are high. And so many riders rack up so, so many citations on the road, they're likely to be let off - not worth the paperwork, perhaps?

But such laissez-faire enforcement and an environment where motorists end up paying for the mistakes of a gung-ho rider would seed a sense of entitlement and untouchability, which there is already too much of elsewhere.

No doubt Malaysians are awful road users. While I've seen some good sorts who give way to other motorists and allow bikes, ambulances and police cars a wide berth, it still fells like they're the exception, not the rule.

Not all car drivers are rich. Nor can they deal with the distress caused by a reckless biker. Scratched or dented side doors? "Kasi chan-lah!" Or "Mai settle kat balai!" Hit a bike that ran a red light? Dead or alive, your fault. That's fair?

Who has time for an earful about road safety and etiquette, the good fortune of the haves and the struggles of the have-nots, and the dangers of the ego from a motorcyclist who ran a red light and nearly collided into your car?

Traffic laws are for everybody. You can't pick and choose which to obey or break at your convenience, especially in situations where lives are at risk. You might be inconvenienced on occasion for toeing the line, but you'll live.

I'm still a fan of equal penalties for everybody, which I think is an effective short-term solution while we get our act together. Malaysians, among many other things, become more careful when money's involved.

True,the roads here are dangerous for motorcyclists. But motorcyclists can be awful too. However, we can all agree that nobody wants accidents. So can drivers and riders meet halfway on this to make our roads safer?

Bane Of The Broken Ballot

Parts of Twitterjaya erupted when the nascent #UndiRosak movement emerged to crow about the failures of the new government, calling it a vindication of their stand that neither BN nor PH can form a viable government and when forced to choose between two evils, pick neither.

They also seem to be anticipating a surge in spoilt votes now that the voting age has been lowered to 18, perhaps to allow more angry youths to partake in this sort of thing.

But how many voters take this crew seriously? And if this movement gains momentum, can we expect at least half the votes in the next general election to be spoilt? What if all the votes are?

For much of modern Malaysia's history, it's been ruled by one party for so long the rot has seeped in, in the form of corruption, lack of transparency in key decisions and spending, and flagrant abuse of power.

An election has become a game of numbers. Any political party, however altruistic, has to contest in this field according to the rules. Those who don't, lose out. And when an increasingly corrupt, paranoid and power-hungry incumbent is willing to use state machinery to hold on to power, what chance does an opposition have to change things?

A six-decade incumbency also means you have groups that have been disenfranchised from their country's development. Some are kept there with occasional crumbs or populist propaganda about how this is all they have and if they vote for anyone else "others" will take even that away. Others are told to "know your place" and "don't ask too much", or "go back to where you came from".

Bent and broken, these groups keep returning the same people to power, convinced that this will be their lot forever, and that any change will only be for the worse. And it'll be business as usual for the long-ruling incumbents.

Such is the democratic arena in Malaysia, where parties play for points and the downtrodden resignedly sigh "Change is for the rich" when told they can change their lives for the better through the ballot.

This is what #UndiRosak ends up perpetuating while waiting for the arrival of the right party to throw their weight behind, in the hope of changing the country for the better. Their idea of "better", that is.

Many have called them dangerously naive, not without reason. They seem to behave as if all Malaysian politicians care about their constituents and that spoilt votes will terrify them into contrition and make them do better. And if nothing changes, perhaps Malaysia should weather a few more election cycles with the old guard until "better" comes along.

Ha ha ha, nope. And nope.

Do they not sound like someone who will only wait for the right gym and right personal trainer to come along before starting a fitness regime?

Like a long-time couch potato, this country isn't as nimble or hale and hearty enough to adapt to global changes. We've left much of the heavy lifting to the elites, who by now is clear that they don't necessarily have its interests at heart.

A rotting structure is already weak and will degenerate faster, despite being under the same degree of stress. And when there are two evils, not voting for the lesser one will hasten the inevitable.

Fixing such a structure is taxing. Some things will have to be replaced. The transition will be long and painful. Yet we have quitters whining about how terrible the new government is and pledging to switch sides on the next general elections.

You mean, putting the old guard back in, warts and all? When they have demonstrated little to no worth as an opposition and are willing to stoop even lower to regain power, stifle dissent and cover up their tracks? You can hear their desperation screaming from recent headlines, like a banshee's portent of doom.

This country cannot afford to wait for "better". Undoing nearly six decades of damage might take twice as long. Many of my generation will probably be dead before the shift engendered on May 9 starts bearing fruit, but this country will still be around to reap the consequences of our choices now.

#UndiRosak ultimately encourages disillusionment and despair, especially among the "change is for the rich" crowd. People are trying to get them to make themselves heard in a meaningful way, so telling them to spoil their votes is like telling them to scream "We're not voting for anybody because they all suck!" into the void.

It accomplishes nothing, and their grievances are neither conveyed nor addressed. Contesting parties in general elections don't care because their die-hard supporters will vote regardless. In that sense, even voters with a destructive ethnoreligious bent understand the significance of their ballots and respect the election process.

If #UndiRosak wants to damage something, they could start - if they haven't already - by campaigning for local elections. Pockets of the disenfranchised throughout the country can be an intimidating force when empowered and gathered, which is probably why some people want them kept apart and under heel. People, to whom these groups are nothing but vote banks.

If they're sincere about fighting tyranny, they should begin by helping these groups gain some degree of autonomy. As long as they're dependent on federal or state authorities for essentials, these minorities will have no choice but to pick the side that lets them live.

What it would be like if the tables are turned isn't hard to imagine. Seeing the decisions made by some politicians of late, it doesn't look like they're in charge. The right thing is easy to do, so why isn't it being done in many cases?

Because much of the power is still in the wrong hands, and efforts to return that power to the right people will be resisted by those #UndiRosak might relish tripping up.

We've only begun to awaken to the potential of change and some have started grumbling about "the good old days". If the undecided and those who still hope to vote for change are persuaded to spoil their votes for the next elections, I can see only one outcome, and that scares all of those who rejoiced at the results of GE14.

Drug Abuse: Time For Another Approach

Critics are railing against the government's plan to decriminalise drug use. Predictably, the loudest and staunchest critics of the move are the more conservative ones. Of course they would. What else to expect from those who want to amputate the limbs of petty thieves as a deterrent?

"You're not punishing drug users any more? Drug use will explode!"

"Now everybody can shoot up!"

"The drug lords will be happy!"

Decriminalising drug use is not a free pass to use drugs. It must come with measures to deter relapses to be effective. If you're a user, the money they'd spend to try you in court and jail you will be used instead to detox your ass and send you back out to society. If you repeat the offence, well, good luck.

People who resort to drugs to cope with crap in their lives need help. Considering the state of local jails, locking them up will either break them or mould them into criminals of a worse stripe. Then there's the stigma of being an ex-convict, and as Malaysian society in general doesn't believe in mercy or second chances, they're going back to their old habits again.

Drugs will f— you up, but people who see them as a better alternative won't know that until it's too late. Penalties for users are almost as harsh as those for traffickers, which means they are reluctant to seek help - or snitch on their pushers.

Users, mules and peddlers are the most visible parts of the drug trade, so they're easier to catch and report on. Rarely do we see kingpins, manufacturers and their enforcers punished. More must be done to move against the latter bunch. They peddle misery and ultimately death. Among the worst are those who pretend to be friends with people and get them hooked on drugs to line their pockets.

Some will ask, "But wouldn't pushers pass themselves off as users when caught and get off the hook?" While some pushers are users, I doubt many are. People deal drugs to get rich quick and being your own best customer is a no-no. I doubt cola manufacturers would allow their kids near a bottle.

And who funds our prisons? Rather than jailing users, why not clean them up and return them to employment? Most, I feel, won't turn to drugs again after a stint at rehab. Every user jailed is out of the workforce and not contributing to society or tax coffers, and money is wasted on unnecessary prosecution and incarceration.

People who want the retention of heavy penalties only want to sleep better at night. I don't think they've ever been involved with or witnessed the effects of the drug trade. Because they don't see it, and with reports of the arrests, trials and executions of traffickers and mules, they think the laws and penalties are working.

"Only fools - and bad people - would get involved with drugs."

"Drug users and traffickers are bad for society. Hang them all."

"Problems? Be positive! Pray! Spend time with family! Why turn to drugs?"

People who bark this sort of thing tend to be unaware - or wilfully oblivious - that they're doing so from a position of privilege. Two major factors driving the drug trade are extreme poverty and crippling psychological problems - which they probably have never faced in their lives, or have the means to overcome.

Society needs to be less crappy and not rely on the government to wage war on drugs. We need to be less punitive and judgemental. While some willingly go into the drug trade, many who resort to it tend to do so out of desperation. Why punish or stigmatise the latter?

Killing or jailing mules and users might disrupt the trade, but there are far more suckers out there, and the suppliers can just go elsewhere. As long as the raw materials and the need for drugs is there, the suppliers will bounce back.

The big-stick approach to the war against drugs has been tried to death and hasn't really proved itself. Why not kill the trade with kindness? Bet that's never been tried in these parts before.

Saving addicts from their habit and keeping ex-addicts from relapsing will go much farther than merely punishing them. Their stories will serve as a deterrent - drugs are no solution to one's problems = and a message of hope for those struggling to overcome their addiction.

Dry

When the recent water supply disruption ended sooner than scheduled I was grateful. Then, last Saturday afternoon, I returned to dry taps.

Again.

Though supply was normal, it seems water isn't reaching the upper floors of my apartment block. The weekend was ruined.

Any time they announce a water supply disruption, I remember the drought in ... 1998, I think it was. Water was rationed, and neighbourhoods were grouped into zones with each zone taking turns to go dry for a few days.

I remember the nights I spent filling all the buckets I could when the taps ran, my blood running cold at the thought of another few days of a parched throat, an unwashed body, and no plumbing.

Twenty years later, it seems nothing was learnt or done about it. The Klang Valley is becoming more uninhabitable. Neighbourhoods suffer shorter water cuts every time a pipe bursts, whether from age or the actions of a clumsy contractor or pipe thief. Every burst or leaking pipe gives me the shivers.

Don't come at me with "at least we're not some other country where you don't see a drop for months". We are NOT that country. We ARE NOT supposed to be that country. It rains here, and frequently. Where is all that water going?

We could have nipped all this in the bud but we didn't. Why? And once this round of water cuts ends, will anything change?

It better, and fast. Twenty years from now I won't be in any condition to fill buckets in the middle of the night. Heck, the next major water rationing exercise in the Klang Valley might happen sooner.

Is The World Being Over-engineered?

Simon Winchester's concise history of precision engineering and its impact also asks some incisive questions

first published in The Star, 18 December 2018


"My father was for all his working life a precision engineer," British author and journalist Simon Winchester writes in The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World.

In his childhood, his father would show him around his workplace. He also describes his first encounter with gauge blocks: non-magnetic metal tiles "used for measuring things to the most extreme of tolerances" with ultraflat sides that would bond when placed on top of each other.

These memories were triggered by an email from one Colin Povey from Florida in the United States, who managed to persuade Winchester to write a book about the history of precision and had a personal reason for it. So now we know who, apart from the author, to thank for The Perfectionists.

Besides a brief history of precision engineering through selected milestones in the field, it also has ruminations on the nature and importance of precision and what we stand to gain and lose in the quest for more precise measurements.

The author also argues that the word "precision" is a much better word than "accuracy". "‘Accurate Laser Tattoo Removal' sounds not nearly as convincing or effective ... And it surely would be both damning and condescending to say that you tie your tie accurately—to knot it precisely is much more suggestive of élan and style."

As expected, perhaps, of someone who wrote two books about the Oxford English Dictionary (The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, published in 1998 and reissued in 2005; and The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, 2003).

Each chapter in The Perfectionists is a part of a timeline in the history of precision engineering, from the discovery of the Antikythera mechanism (an ancient Greek analogue computer) to advances that would usher in the digital age. Some chapters feature vignettes from the author's life and his research for the book, which suggests the project is more than just a scholarly pursuit.

Humankind has for most of its civilised existence been in the habit of measuring things. ...All life depends to some extent on measurement, and in the very earliest days of social organization a clear indication of advancement and sophistication was the degree to which systems of measurement had been established, codified, agreed to, and employed.

The narrative begins with how British inventor Joseph Wilkinson fixed problems with leaking steam in the early builds of Scotsman James Watts's steam engines. Wilkinson pioneered a method to make cannons out of solid cylinders of iron, and he applied this method to the engines.

We are also told of the lives and accomplishments of Winchester's gallery of "perfectionists", including English clockmaker John Harrison, whose marine chronometers revolutionised navigation and made long-distance sailing much safer; Swiss inventor Carl Edvard Johansson, creator of the gauge blocks that once fascinated the author; Kintaro Hattori, founder of Seiko, which released the world's first quartz watch; and Frenchman Honoré Blanc, who mooted the concept of interchangeable parts for guns. Curious how some of these early engineers cut their teeth in the firearms industry.

All in all, this book is a solid piece of literary engineering comprising intricately fitted components, tempered with academic rigour. The hefty and deeply intellectual material, however, demands the reader's full attention, which is challenged by the staid, schoolmasterly prose and verbosity.

Even the trivia and the occasional display of that trademark British wit, mostly in the footnotes, don't help much. A titbit: Apparently a genetic descendant of Sir Isaac Newton's apple tree is growing somewhere near a lab in Beijing.

Things get more interesting around the third chapter, as the author warms up even more to his subject – that is, if one hasn't quit the book by then. Which would be tragic, given how much effort went into it.

Precision is a much better word, a more apposite choice than its closest rival, accuracy. “Accurate Laser Tattoo Removal” sounds not nearly as convincing or effective ... And it surely would be both damning and condescending to say that you tie your tie accurately—to knot it precisely is much more suggestive of élan and style.

To a degree, Winchester has achieved his (or maybe Colin Povey's) aims with this book. Some questions arise: how far should the quest for precision go? Is there a breaking point? Might the frenetic pace of contemporary life, shaped in part by precision engineering, have moulded us into perfectionists as well? Is a "perfect" world a good idea?

With regards to the last, probably not.

As measurements become more precise, the margin of tolerable error shrinks, raising the risk of human involvement in engineering. According to Winchester, an error measuring 1/50th the thickness of a human hair caused the Hubble space telescope to capture fuzzy, unusable images (a NASA optical engineer found a way to repair it after a eureka moment in the shower). We also hear of aeroplane crashes caused by human error.

Perhaps that's why people don't think about precision, except when baking. Nor should the non-engineering majority be obsessed with "the need for endlessly improving exactitude".

So Winchester looks to Japan for a "third way". Among the aspects of Japanese culture he explores is wabi-sabi, which he describes as "an aesthetic sensibility wherein asymmetry and roughness and impermanence are accorded every bit as much weight as are the exact, the immaculate, and the precise". One gathers that the Japanese worldview regarding transience and imperfection asserts that everything, no matter how precise or flawless, won't stay that way forever.

Humankind would perhaps do well to learn to accept the equal significance, the equal weight, of the natural order. If not, then nature in time will overrun, and the green strands of jungle grass will eventually enfold and enwrap all the inventions that we make ... Before the imprecision of the natural world, all will falter, none shall survive—no matter how precise.

Even these "perfectionists" weren't perfect. For one, who knew that Eli Whitney of the cotton gin fame had scammed the US government by pretending he could produce muskets from interchangeable parts?

Regardless of what one takes away from this book, at least we now have a measure of how high these innovators towered, how fascinating their disciplines can be, and how epoch-making their creations were.

---

The Perfectionists

How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World

Simon Winchester
Harper
395 pages
Non-fiction
ISBN: 978-0-06-265255-3

Whale Of A Scam

To say Malaysians were hyped about Billion Dollar Whale is an understatement. Thank goodness for 9 May, otherwise we'd never get our hands on books like it. But the unexpected GE14 results delayed the release.

"When we first wrote it, (former prime minister Datuk Seri) Najib Tun Razak was still in power," co-author Tom Wright told The Star, "we had to change the ending. We never thought the book would ever be released in Malaysia. We thought perhaps, we would be selling copies from Changi Airport."

Nor did the publisher expect the book to zip off the shelves. The first several weeks stocks kept running out. Lines of people stretched outside the local Kinokuniya waiting for autographs by Wright when he dropped by. A pirated digital file of the book circulated on WhatsApp was later revealed to be an earlier edition, sans the GE14 aftermath.

(Someone even reviewed the pirated e-book on Goodreads and got called out by Wright. That a stolen copy of a book about stolen billions is being read and circulated might be a reason this scam was possible.)

To be expected, I guess. A senior figure in local publishing thinks it's because Malaysians love reading about themselves, especially when written by Mat Sallehs. As is the case with this book about the 1MDB heist by Wright and co-author Bradley Hope, both journalists from the Wall Street Journal.

Instead of boring money flows or dry blow-by-blow reporting, what we have is a gripping, cinematic financial thriller that sucks you in within a few pages, regardless of where you open it - not the ending, please. That's how I ended up reading it twice, cover to cover.

The focus is more on how the plot unfolded, even as the main characters are fleshed out. The protagonist is the titular whale, Low Taek Jho, now better known as Jho Low, thanks to, among other things, reports of his wild profligate parties and a track called "Check My Steezo".

The prologue, describing Low's decadent Las Vegas birthday party in November 2012 that stunned even the now-late host of the TV series Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, sets readers up for the displays of debauchery and ostentation to come.

On campus, [Low] drove around in a maroon-red SC-430 Lexus convertible, which he had leased but passed off as his own. He deliberately didn’t correct rumors that he was a “prince of Malaysia”, a claim that made the other Malaysian students laugh when they heard it.

Wright and Hope trace the rise and fall of 1MDB and its players, with Low in the centre. Just about everyone is here: his immediate family, his collaborators, and those who helped to unravel the scheme.

In the book, Low is portrayed as a bullshit artist who could sniff out rich, powerful yet gullible patrons for his schemes, dazzling them and his collaborators with his charm, other people's money and his connections with celebrities, artistes and assorted power brokers.

He started young, from online masquerades to passing off a family friend's yacht as his. Parental influence is cited as another factor; his dad Larry Low may have cultivated Jho Low's social-climbing tendencies by sending him to Harrow, and then Wharton, to cosy up with scions of the elite. One of those Wharton connections led him to the Middle East and planted the seed of what would end up being the biggest kleptocracy case in history.

I had few nits to pick with this book. It is the hot read we've been promised, and it's such a rollicking ride from start to finish you barely notice the typos, no doubt due to the rush to release it for the Malaysian and Singaporean markets. Even those well acquainted with the scandal will be whisked away, breathless as they try to keep up with the heart-thumping kin cheong pace.

No surprise many readers are outraged, disgusted and dismayed. The whale and his fellows used the global financial system and the help of greedy bank executives to put up Malaysia's natural wealth as collateral for cash that went to extravagant, eye-watering spending sprees at nighclubs, designer boutiques, jewellers, casinos, hotels, art auctions and real estate markets; producing a movie about financial fraud, believe it or not; and possible attempts to rig an election.

And we could be footing the bill for years.

...in a cascade of bad luck, taking all of ten minutes, [Jho Low] lost $2 million. The stunned entourage couldn’t compute the way he parted with money—seemingly without breaking a sweat—and some began to whisper about this guy, and how he acted like the cash wasn’t his own.

Speculation about Low's motives are rife, but I think bukan duit punya pasal je. The authors' profile of him suggests a guy who wants more than what money can buy. And what's better than being the sun of his own galaxy, the fairy godfather of the top one per cent, the genie to these upper-upper-crust Aladdins?

The billions he allegedly stole let him play that role, but how he went about it, like he did with the 1MDB caper, was crude. If he couldn't throw money at a problem, he would try to talk his way out of it, or rely on the clout of his influential friends.

Reading about the excesses is like witnessing a Lovecraftian beast feeding itself with humongous fistfuls of humans: maddening, horrific, gory, yet so fascinating that one is compelled to watch with clenched jaws as it shambles along, leaving destruction and despair in its wake.

But the beast was careless, and for that it would be taken down. Almost all the perpetrators soared stratosphere-high before exploding spectacularly and crashing to earth like spent bottle rockets.

As in most crime thrillers, you know who the good guys and the bad guys are. This is the Jho Low, Najib and Rosmah many of us have come to hate. The at-times cartoonish villainy of culprits here earn them no sympathy and all the derision we can muster, to the point we forget that for all their faults, they are still people.

Other allegations such as the murder of Kevin Morais and UMNO-BN campaigning in GE13 with 1MDB money spice things up, raising the book's popularity among those who already assume the worst of them. Is there more to the tale? How much did the authors omit to keep the book at a mere 379 pages?

...Low would offer [Jordan] Belfort $500,000 to attend an event in Las Vegas with [Leonardo] DiCaprio. Red Granite had paid him handsomely for the rights to his memoir. But Belfort was starting to distrust this group. Eager to stay out of trouble, Belfort turned them down...

Damn kwa cheong hijinks with billions of brazenly stolen dollars leave us gasping, time and again, "No way all of this is true." The authors say it is, backed up by dozens of interviews and piles of documents, records and correspondence the DOJ is using to make their case, with editorial and legal oversight from the WSJ.

And it seems Wright had said the book was written for the sake of the story, not to rescue Malaysia or for a movie deal, and he was uncomfortable with the notion that he and Hope "saved" the country with it.

But wouldn't the publication of this book prejudice the ongoing 1MDB case? So far only several people have been formally charged by the United States' DOJ. Or is it fine because the guilt of the thieves have long been established?

At least, the guilty plea by former Goldman Sachs executive Tim Leissner suggests there is some truth to the allegations, and it looks like he's started spilling tea.

I am also a little annoyed by the author's descriptions of "palm-fringed" Penang and "jungle-covered" Sarawak, as if this part of the world is still Noel Barber's exotic, inscrutable patch of green. Environmental NGOs might argue to the contrary.

The authors' real-life thriller approach has paid off, but I won't blame those who feel the book is a hit job. At some point I wonder if the authors are as guilty of exaggerations as Low. For one, Malaysian officials smuggling files locked with the password "SaveMalaysia"? Why not just go with "HelpMe06biWanKenOBIYouAreMyON1yHopE"? #UseStrongPasswords.

If it gets Malaysians to read...

[1MDB] was supposed to have created jobs for Malaysians, but instead would be a burden on state finances for years to come. Most of the borrowings weren’t due for repayment for a few years, but 1MDB’s debt was a ticking time bomb, waiting to go off in the future.

Months after publication, whale fever hasn't abated - how else to explain why Kinokuniya is always "out of stock" every time I go there? (I know my luck isn't great but come on!) Also, the leviathan is still at large. The scheduled release of a Malay-language edition this month, the upcoming movie adaptation, and latest developments in the investigation are keeping temperatures high too.

Perhaps miffed that her victory lap was overshadowed by the hype over Billion Dollar Whale, Clare Rewcastle-Brown of Sarawak Report has accused Wright, Hope and their paper of not being honest about the source of their 1MDB reporting, plus other stuff. And who knew she had plans to shoot her own "how I broke the case" blockbuster?

(They did credit Sarawak Report for breaking "the first stories on Jho Low" and stated that it "was an important resource for us", but that probably wasn't enough.)

Whistleblower Xavier Justo meanwhile has disputed some of the details in the book regarding himself and announced that he's going to pen his account of what happened. However I look at it, it was about the money (not a cent less or more than what he believed his old bosses owed him) until - from what I could gather from this interview - he became a dad and, later, was convinced to do the right thing by Sarawak Report and The Edge.

And no one is blind to the whale-sized void in the narrative of how a supposed tukang kelentong from Penang managed to get Wall Street, Hollywood, and the world to dance to his tune, past raised flags, gatekeepers and blaring alarms.

How far did the con go? Who else was involved but not named? Why did Low do it? Why, as Wright asked, did he not stop when the financial hole got too big? Why didn't he put that money to work instead of living large? Given his pull, he could've gotten qualified professionals to manage and invest those billions.

It’s easy to sneer at Malaysia as a cesspool of graft, but that misses the point. None of this could have happened without the connivance of scores of senior executives ... Low straddled both these worlds—Malaysia and the West—and he knew exactly how to game the system.

What little that's published of him so far does not indicate any inclination towards candour. Nor should we expect any writing flair from his lawyers or PR advisers, who I expect will ditch him once what remains of his money runs out, or if the evidence piles up.

If that happens, wouldn't it be ironic if he ultimately had to approach the guys who helped expose him to write his side of the story?

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Billion Dollar Whale
The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World

Tom Wright and Bradley Hope
Hachette Books
379 pages
Non-fiction
ISBN: 978-0-316-45347-9