Prussian military strategist and thinker Carl Von Clauswitz (1780-1831) once said that to get power, one must be petty but to exercise it, one has to be a statesman. I have never been able to quite come to grips with this quote until Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad said "I have failed to achieve the most important thing — how to change the Malays" in the report.

The fact is in his early quest to rise to the pinnacle of power, he was the prime advocate of the Malay nationalist cause of affirmative policies to restructure society that he implemented through the National Economic Policy and National Development Policy for the last two decades.

Now that he is at the apex and in the position to exercise power in a statesmanlike manner for the betterment of his Malay Muslim constituency, and the nation, he is faced with the paradox that he cannot change the Malay mindset of clinging on to "crutches" that he more than anyone else has helped put in place in his climb to power.

So returning to the quote from Clauswitz: how does one get power from being petty and yet, after accomplishing that, try to exercise power as statesman to play a significant role in history when he cannot escape from and is haunted by the ghostly depredations of his earlier pettiness?

We always reap the seeds, good or bad, we sowed.