Two global statesmen — India's Dr Manmohan Singh and the United States' Jimmy Carter — died in the last days of 2024.
Both were remarkable for reaching the pinnacle of political leadership in their countries with their basic human decency shining through.
I want to focus on Singh because he was prime minister for a decade in a country with a fairly similar background as ours.
India is a diverse country with a British colonial history and is also a federal democracy, which heavily influenced the government and legal structure of Malaysia.
What is remarkable about Singh, an economist from humble beginnings who graduated from Cambridge and Oxford, is the fact that he broke the mould of Indian prime ministers coming from the country's Hindu majority.
As a Sikh, he came from a community that makes up less than two per cent of Indians.
I am sure much has been written in India about how Singh accomplished that feat. Could Malaysia one day follow suit with someone from our minority communities becoming prime minister?
As in India, there is no constitutional bar in Malaysia for a non-Malay to become prime minister, but both countries have practical realities which hinder an individual from a minority community breaking the political glass ceiling, although not insurmountably, as Singh proves.
That said, it is nevertheless important to bear in mind how rather unique circumstances caused the stars to be aligned in Singh's favour.
An Indian caveat absent from Malaysia is the provision that Indian prime ministers may come from the upper chamber of Parliament. Singh was never an elected member of Parliament's lower house, a mandatory requirement in Malaysia.
Also, Singh's premiership arose from special political circumstances.
The Congress Party, which then held the parliamentary majority, was headed by Sonia Gandhi. Italian-born, she felt that her foreign origins might provide some insurmountable obstacles to her assuming the mantle of prime minister of India.
When Singh was tapped by Gandhi to take her place as government leader, he was already making waves as the country's finance minister.
True to form, he ushered in economic reforms as prime minister that made inevitable comparisons with those under China's Deng Xiaoping; all the more remarkable for performing this feat in a rumbunctious democracy — the world's largest.
Singh represented a dream – mostly unattainable — for a technocrat to lead an effective, yet democratic, government.
Could someone in his mould can one day follow him into the premiership? And what of the same happening in Malaysia?
Perhaps we can give some thought to the possibility of amending the Constitution to allow a member of the Dewan Negara to be prime minister?
It is also noteworthy to examine the wider ramifications of what followed India and, for that matter, the US having their respective first minority leader.
In the wake of Singh, a pronounced Hindu nationalist party and leader have taken over. President Barack Obama in the US was succeeded by Donald Trump, who spouted anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Perhaps in our case, it will be different and rather the opposite of what happened in India and the US.
Our first minority prime minister (and most plausibly, as with India, from a more obscure minority rather than a bigger minority) may actually follow, rather than precede, a more "nationalist" political phase.
* The writer views developments in the nation, region and the wider world from his vantage point in Kuching.