COMMENT | When I was a teenager, my ambitions moved back and forth from rock star to Jesuit priest to Marxist revolutionary.

Not quite the normal route, considering most around me were marching confidently towards careers in engineering, law and medicine.

In the late 1980s, I was living in Bangkok where my father was serving as Malaysia’s deputy ambassador. I had this vague notion that I should hop off the overnight train from Bangkok to Penang and walk into the jungle to meet the Communist Party of Malaya (CPM) members. As you do. 

What I did not know was...