Recently, the immigration department has proposed that Malaysian permanent residents in other countries come back to renew their passports.

The current practice is to renew the passports at the Malaysian embassies.

The reason given is to ensure that these citizens return home regularly to keep abreast of developments in the country. An official from the Home Affairs Ministry said many Malaysians who have been residing abroad for long periods depended on foreign news reports about the country and were not aware about actual happenings at home.

In the information age, the Internet has promoted borderless communication and information is widely available. These permanent residents have choice of popular Malaysian news websites to catch up on developments in the country.

As for the inaccurate reports by the foreign media, there is not much to be misconstrued in the first place as there is not much news about Malaysia anyway.

In Europe, there is not even a daily stock market report about the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange on CNN World Business. There are so many things happening around the world each day, nobody takes to heart the 30-second reports about Malaysia. Moreover, in the West, they refer to us as Asians and see the market as the Asian market of which Malaysia is a small part. The more 'well-known' markets are Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia and Thailand.

As for the important documents, imagine renewing your driving licence every five years but only using it when you are back in Malaysia. Isn't this a waste? In the first place, if you were planning to stay in a foreign country for a long time, wouldn't you have sold your car already?

Globalisation has cast a subliminal uniformity to our lives indirectly. Living in Malaysia and living overseas in another city is not much different from living in Kuala Lumpur.

A good example is this letter itself. It was written in Europe the same day the news came out (yesterday) about this baseless proposal by the Immigration Department.

Keeping abreast of developments in Malaysia? No problem!