I still admire Dr Mahathir Mohamad after all these years because of his guts, determination and vision. In some ways, I will miss him. But to be frank, I am pretty unhappy with some things he did, and these things have hurt me really bad.

We have to thank Mahathir for getting us to work extra hard to be a world-class people (Malaysia Boleh!), sprucing up our infrastructure, improving our health standards, giving us an increasingly independent foreign policy, and marching us on into the space age (even when some of us, me included, are still technology-allergic).

But he has brought big calamities which should have been avoided at all costs, and these calamities have stunted Malaysia's march into world-class nationhood alongside Japan or Taiwan (we were already one of the best countries in Asia the day Tun Hussein Onn, the late great father of Hishammuddin, retired and gave the PMship to Mahathir).

These calamities include the rolling back of our democratic freedoms (the Internal Security Act which the British invented, was not abolished despite the communists giving up their subversion in 1989), the castration of the judiciary, the leniency in which he allowed Islamic fanatics to infiltrate the system (such as Anwar Ibrahim and Sanusi Junid), the excessive Westernisation he forced down Muslims' tummies which made the fanatic religionists spread like wildfire, and his great tolerance of corruption in the highest levels (he became the exact opposite of the upright Hussein Onn despite launching his PMship on the 'Bersih, Cekap dan Amanah' note).

While he today berates the Malays for their spoilt brattiness, he fails to realise that he more than any other person (with the exception of Daim Zainuddin and Ghafar Baba), was the main architect of the subsidy mentality which he often condemns these days. Tun Razak and Tun Hussein Onn never intended the NEP to spoil the natives rotten.

And while he laments the deterioration of English today, he seems to forget it was he, more than any other PM, who presided over the international language's sad neglect and marginalisation amongst Malaysians. Tun Razak and Tun Hussein strongly wanted English to be of high standards and great importance (not just because they were educated in Britain but because they realised early how important English was to the world).

Mahathir will always have a cherished place in Malaysian history, and like his three predecessors, will always be one of the fathers of the nation, in his case Bapa Malaysia Moden.

He can be likened to the modern version of Tun Perak and Hang Tuah, the great ministers of mighty Malacca, our country's great predecessor. After all, through his mother, he has the blood of Kedah's great Bendaharas including Wan Mat Saman, who built Kedah's grand canal without modern help.

And like Tun Perak, Hang Tuah and Wan Mat Saman, he has his fair share of flaws, brutal flaws, which the next leader can do well to rectify.

Happy retirement, Dr Mahathir.