Can't the person who blew up the Mongolian Model think of a better way to hide the evidence? And the Naza Suria.

The headlines of most newspapers these past few days are about some political/strategic/defense analyst together with 3 policemen being involved in the murder of an exotic looking Mongolian model, who purportedly had an affair with this analyst, the cause of death was a couple of bullets in the model's head and then, trying to cover up the crime by blowing her up with C4 explosives.

The moral of this story is not about someone who did a bad thing and got caught and deserves punishment. But, someone who did a bad thing, and didn’t know how to cover it up properly. It’s like watching an action movie, where the person who got killed, usually the baddie, gets stabbed, then shot, poisoned, then gets thrown out of a building. Why do you need to kill a person so many times for him to die? Or if you want to dispose of the evidence, other means are easier. Like stuffing the corpse in a barrel, filling it full of cement and dumping it in the middle of the straits of Malacca. Not nuking some bushes or trees together with a Monglian model near a densely populated area like Puncak Alam, Shah Alam.

Now the question is not whether the analyst really did such an act or did not do such an act in the first place, but why a learned man would stoop so low and end up in such turmoil. If this person, who graduated with distinction at some glorious English College, associated with tons of professional bodies, written tons of stuff, advised ministers, planned strategy and who knows what other crowning achievements, manage to be silly enough to be embroiled in tabloid fodder like this. I think that somehow, the leaders of the nation who’s being paying him visits and asking him for advice have been played like a fiddle by this guy. I mean, if he is part of this mess, or in the first place had a messy affair which led to the model being pregnant and so forth, his advice on world affairs, politics, defense and strategic planning would be actually rubbish. He however would be good at giving advice on how to have an affair with someone or tips on extra-marital sex or ways on how to bed an exotic Mongolian model. The reason being, if he were anything good on strategic planning, he wouldn’t be in remand in the first place. Or he was thinking with his loins instead of his brain.

I suppose all of us do that most of the time. You see an object of beauty and it’s not your brain that registers first. It could be your brain, but the loins actually sends impulses soaring and you (if you are a guy) may get a hard-on, if the object of beauty is a girl; or in the case of a guy in a Fiat Punto HGT in Desa Sri Hartamas last Saturday night, other guys.

If it’s a car, it would surely be some Pininfarina designed Ferrari or Maserati, a Mercedes CLS, a Jaguar E-type and so forth. But being civilised men, would you kill for a woman or would you kill a woman because you were stupid to get caught by the affair you started in the first place? Would you kill for a Ferrari Enzo? Of course that is even more unlikely.

Somehow events like this tell me that we actually have not so clever people telling other not so clever people how to run the country. It’s like the blind leading the blind. I suppose we Malaysians are a tolerant lot, we don’t like coups, we don’t like change to an extent and we just like to be left alone to enjoy our teh tarik. Unlike the Americans recently, they had their Congressional Elections and showed the current ruling party the actual sentiments of the people. We don’t like to rock the boat, and as such, the boat sinks slowly. Something like Proton; on a much larger scale.

Which brings us to my opinion on Naza’s overlapping 1.1liter cars. Recently Naza launched their rebadged version of the Kia Picanto. This car is one compact car which made waves when it was launched in UK. It did so many things so well that Autocar magazine rated it as good as the European Car of the Year, the Fiat Panda. I like this car in that the plastics used are of a quality rarely seen in small cheap Korean cars, or all Protons including their latest offerings. I know that the Picanto can corner well. Once I was on the interchange from Jalan Duta/Damansara towards Jalan Lake Gardens, a Picanto went past me doing around 80-90km/h on the bends. It looked utterly composed from behind. However, being a fully imported Kia, it costs quite a lot for a 1.1 liter car. I suppose this is why Naza, who is the importers of Kia and the assemblers of rebadged Kia MPVs decided to sell the Picanto as a Naza Suria (approx. RM44,000).

However, doesn’t Naza already have the Naza Sutera (the pic to the left) as their 1.1liter car? Talk about trying to get a bigger slice of your own cake. I know that the Sutera is based on a Chinese car (the Hafei Lobo), with lower build quality and a much cheaper price (approx. RM36,000). But somehow, this would still eat into its own market share instead of the market share of others. Somehow the corporate wheels at Naza want to just grab the market share, have a monopoly and the consumers get confused with choice. I suppose the Malaysian ‘local manufacturer’ scene is as confusing as clever people in Malaysia who do not so clever stuff.