COMMENT | An unforgettable year to forget

COMMENT | That’s what 2020 is (I use the present tense ‘is’ because it has been extracted from the normal stream of years, more resistant to the dimming of memories with passing time) – a year that will always be remembered... for all the wrong reasons.

Above everything else, the virus, and its early flowering, almost a year ago. Supermarkets running out of stock and empty store shelves. Road-blocks and quiet highways.

Barbed-wire barriers strung around neighbourhoods, confining lives and spread of the disease. The deadly environment battled by teams of space-suited men with toxic sprays. The hum of life stilled to a quiet pulse.

The setting for a dystopian society, the fertile ground for many science-fiction classics, except this was no fiction, just science.

Now, the Malaysian landscape is coloured blue, masked Malaysians carrying on with their lives and business, having their temperature taken, their details...