A good country to go missing

Puchong, 21 July: If you want to get lost, Malaysia is probably the best place in the world to go missing. Why? Because nobody will really notice, not even the police, and people will forget that you’d gone missing as soon as their minds make them forget, which is very quickly. 

The case of the former tv personality Zalina Azman, who has gone missing since Nov last year - yes, it’s almost end-July 2022 now - has gotten sone Malaysians concerned. At least more concerned than they would be if a 10-year old girl of the average Mat goes missing. So concerend that the police had to explain why it took them so long to finally broadcast the news of the missing Zalina. [Not very reassuring, though: if that’s how lonnng it took the police to coordinate efforts with the other government departments, bad news for the missing and the lost. Read Kenapa lambat hebah kehilangan Zalina? Ini penjelasan polis.] 

But, hey, I’m not sitting on the cops, okay? We the media didn’t do much better, actually. I sent a phone message to an editor of a Melayu news portal on Dec 1 last year to tell him that I heard a police report had been lodged about Zalina going missing. He sounded genuinely concerned, this editor,  but nothing in the news every came out of it. If it had, the police would have to come out a lot sooner and tell us that another person - this time a media celebrity - had gone missing in Malaysia.

And we would have forgotten all about it much earlier, too.

p.s Reminds me of Nurin Jazlin, every time someone lodges a missing person report. And, what do you know: the hunt for the killer is still on, or so say our police as reported by our media.