It is Reverend Dr Martin Luther King's birthday. A historic day. Today, America is celebrating the birthday of this great African-American spiritual and civil rights leader.

Along with Malcolm X, also known as El-Hajj Malik Shabbazz, he fought for civil rights and sparked a major "revolution" of the 1960s.

Both were assasinated before their 40th birthday. Both taught dangerously and lived a life of profound commitment to social justice. Both were opposed to totalitarianism, militarism, materialism and capitalism.

America honoured them and wants her children to embody their spirit of freedom. King's birthday is now a public holiday in America.

It's a historic day for me too. On this day last year, I chose to start writing for the Malaysian public. Thank you, malaysiakini.

I've turned one as a columnist for this socially-conscious and journalistically-liberating online news portal. I saw its first year of operations and followed with sympathy its plight in the first five years of its existence. It is a friend of free speech.

My thanks go especially to editor-in-chief Steven Gan for giving me the opportunity to share my views on social imagination and radical political alternatives and possibilities. My thanks to malaysiakini too for publishing my unedited thoughts in the true spirit of committed journalism.

Through the column, I have made many friends among people of different walks of life and through many emails received thoughtful comments, commendations and words of encouragement. I cherish my friendship with students, politicians, architects, engineers, activists, professors, journalists, lawyers, doctors, community and NGO leaders, civil servants, judges, teachers, and many others from within and outside of the country.

These emails are testimony that middle-class Malaysians are now highly sophisticated in their understanding of the concept of a just society and of our way to develop a critical mass of people who are ready to challenge authority and seek newer frontiers and demand a more ethical government.

Malaysiakini has helped raise the issue closest to my heart - academic freedom and the need for us in academia to embody the spirit of free inquiry. It has emphatically but objectively carried the story of the dismissal of me and my wife (Dr Mutiara Mohamad) from Universiti Utara Malaysia for refusing to sign the Surat Akujanji. Our plight, as well as that of others vicitimised by public universities, have been brought to public attention.

The document contains clauses that are cancerous to the well-being and the intellectual advancement of the Malaysian academic. It is a document of the 1970s, of the post-World War II and used in the year 2000 with a strange psychological stranglehold on even the best and the brightest of the Malaysian minds.

This is the power of ideology and hegemony one must learn to understand and dismantle. Academicians must now understand their role as intellectuals in post-modernising societies.

How is it possible for the government to force academics to sign a document that will make them fearful of their responsibility to question authority and pursue truth? How is it possible that this form of mental domination and stupefication is allowed to monitor the corridors of academia?

Some day, will disillusioned students and faculty file a class action suit against the government to remove the letter as well as any totalitarian structures made legal, against the mind of thinking Malaysians? In a democratically evolving country such as ours, such an actionis possible.

I share the vision of malaysiakini and those publications that try to uphold the ethics of journalism.

'A Beautiful Mind'

The movie "A Beautiful Mind" starring Russel Crowe as Nobel Laureate mathematical genius John Nash prompted me to write and share my views on the range of issues that continue to plague us. I was imagining what it must have been like for our nation to construct an educational system that not only respects human imagination, critical thinking and radical perspectives, but actually celebrates these gifts in individuals and next, develops them.

What must it feel like if, 100 years from now, our public universities have evolved into a Princeton of Nash - with its intense rigour even at the undergraduate level? In what ways might our universities benefit from such a culture of neither fear nor disfavour of radical opinions, in which creative, imaginative, critical and divergent thinking are the norm rather than the exception or a liability?

We must become part of this creation of such truly democratic and dialogical institutions that develop human potential. We must fight the systematic killing of the critical sensibility of our students, faculty and nation, and let freedom of thought ring in every classroom.

I taught in the place where some scenes of the movie were shot - in a campus in Madison, New Jersey where the estates of the Vanderbilt family adorn the landscape. I taught graduate classes in education, making me more nostalgic for the possibility of a profound and engaging learning environment Malaysians can create, given the time and commitment to teaching.

I have been to Princeton University on several occasions and also have studied with professors who had studied there. One of my mentors and dissertation advisors at Columbia - a philosopher of education and a believer in the power of digital technologies - is a Princeton alumni. I have therefore been enculturalised into the thinking culture of such a university and have embodied the ethos of America's spirit of intellectual freedom.

Radical forum

It is not only Columbia University that shaped my opinions but a range of other life experiences too - beginning perhaps from childhood when I was growing up in Kampung Melayu Majidee, Johor Bahru.

I found malaysiakini as a radical forum to share my views, as I said in my first column entitled 'Seeking the history of questions'; when I wrote that I want to plant the seeds of radical thinking and to view teaching as a 'subversive' and liberating act.

We live in an increasingly fast-changing time when human agents in the form of policy makers from inside and outside our nation transform the social relations of production and define and redefine our means of subsistence.

Johor Bahru and Kuala Lumpur changed not because change is natural and inevitable, but because the present government believes in the ideology of Western-style developmentalism.

There are human beings that are aware of the forces of change, and there are those who are not. Those who are not aware will view change as a 'reality' and accept it. Those who are aware will question these forces and the policy makers and will view change as a 'construction' and possibly resist, reject or reconstruct it.

We have been blinded by these happily-imported and prohibitively-expensively paid change-management gurus who teach us to manage change, but not how to analyse it and resist change. We have imported them to teach our executives how to manage change and skim off from the poor, using more efficient methods.

We have allowed them to create a Corporate Malaysia through our misunderstanding and abuse of the concept of Malaysia Incorporated and our policies of Looking East, Looking West, but not Looking Deep Enough Within.

We have paid these consultants astronomical fees to teach us how to transform our landscape into money-making, rent-seeking properties and make the most money, while the poor live in 'Sting Gardens' (rumah setinggan, squatter homes) that we call rumah haram atas tanah haram - in places such as Kampung Baru, Kampung Pandan and Kampung Kerinci.

In Johor Bahru in the 1970s, human beings who live in these bantusaan (ghettoes or shantytowns) are thrown out of their Sting Gardens so that the corporate and political elite and the artistocrats among us can play golf daily and hang out in those country clubs in Tasek Utara. Those slums continue to proliferate, proportionate to the proliferation of signature golf courses and mega-malls. We have those slums in places such as Kampung Melayu Majidee and Kampung Ubi.

And therefore we have these questions on social justice and equality among us. We must answer them by first seeking the history of those questions. In our society, who gets to even ask these questions? What premises of human rights and human development did these questions emanate from?

In short, have we been asking the right questions all these decades?

A thinking nation

Let us continue to explore the history of the questions asked and to find out how we arrived at this or that historical juncture. I believe these questions will help us go back to the origin of things and in the process, to understand the world we live in.

I believe that these questions can be one way for human beings to go back to the Centre and its Primordial Nature through what Rousseau calls "sentimental education" or to explore, as Indonesian poet WS Rendra once said in his play Kisah Perjuangan Suku Naga (The Struggle of the Naga Tribe), the "world within and the world without".

Through these questions, I believe one can break free from the shackles of domination and release the imagination.

And as Rousseau continues: "Man is born free... and everywhere he is in chains", and that the first language he needs is the cry of Nature.

We are born into a matrix of Chinese complexities and we will spend our lifetime understanding it, possibly escaping it, and consequently constructing an understanding of ourselves. We are born to be makers of our own history.

In this world without borders, we are all essentially transcultural citizens differentiated only by our national identity cards and passports.

I want to continue to share the experiences I have in developing the human mind and in teaching multiple perspectives of knowing. I hope my ideas have been useful to readers.

Let us work towards developing a nation that will truly appreciate the value of radical humanistic thinking. Let us first educate the government on what freedom of expression means.

Thank you again malaysiakini, for a wonderful year and to you readers for giving me the motivation and inspiration to continue writing.