COMMENT | I am losing it – my mind.

It can’t seem to focus on the weighty implications of the conviction of PKR vice-president Rafizi Ramli and former bank clerk Johari Mohamad for whistling a tune of shady deeds without it shooting off at odd trivial tangents.

Like it throwing up, in apropos, as a first response, a common childhood insult from over half a century ago – “You got cow sense,” and its synonym, “dungu.”

The folks and stall-keepers I chatted with during lunch in a coffee-shop in Old Town PJ the past couple of days, may not have used this particular term, but that was the unanimous response – Where got meaning? The people exposing dubious deals ‘kena’, but those who bought luxury kandangs (cattle-pens) in Bangsar are still free-range grazers and not penned.

(NB: My unscientific poll only took in the opinions of a couple of dozen Chinese and Indians. Since whichever-God knows when, Malays are extinct in Chinese coffee-shops, except for isolated pockets in the country. Not even for a cup of kopi 'o' and slices of toast with butter and kaya. They haven’t missed much with the latter. Now it’s slices of white soft-board with a thin smear of margarine and kaya.)

They didn’t care that Rafizi didn’t submit the information to the authorities for investigation before whistling it to the public. The cynical lot laughed at the suggestion of official bloodhounds following the trail; their verbal abbreviation: NFA (no further action).

Is it NFA on NFC? Nobody could remember. Understandable, because there have been so many bigger “fake news” since – 1MDB for the longest time, in recent months, Felda, Felda, Felda. How to keep track?

Umno Wanita chief Shahrizat Abdul Jalil, plaintively claimed the mantle of victim, noting that she had suffered public opprobrium before she had a chance to answer the charges.

My failing memory prompts: what’s the answer? Where are the millions, the cows?

Then my crazy mind jumps from Shahrizat to a couple of lines of Shakespeare’s “Othello” that I didn’t even know I remembered – "That we can call these delicate creatures ours/And not their appetites."

That led me to ruminate on the cow’s four stomachs. One of them breaks down the tough fibres of the feed. The other three are basically storage bins.

So a cow always eats more than it needs. Actually, it doesn’t eat immediately. It stuffs itself full; later, at leisure, it regurgitates a small part of it, and slowly chews the cud, breaking down the tough greens into small pieces, before sending them down for a final acid bath.

Don’t know why I thought of this unless it’s a random thought of dozens of luxury watches, handbags and cars, jewellery by the glittery fistfuls, and stacks of money worth millions, ready-at-hand for daily household expenses, unearthed in houses.

Ah, the lifestyle of the rich and the infamous.

Rafizi’s entanglement in the legal system is far from over. He’s in a not-so-select group of politicians and NGOs who have been and will be at the courts so many times, they should get reserved parking within the complex compound...