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T.K. Letchumy Tamboo

From skewers though cheeks to sharp hooks embedded in backs and limbs, body piercers preparing pilgrims for the Hindu Thaipusam festival claim to do it without inflicting pain – unless it’s theirs. We find out how.

Sangeeta Krishnasamy made her name in Tamil-language movies before an award-winning Malay-language debut in 2017 film Adiwiraku, about an inspiring schoolteacher. Now she’s trying her hand as executive producer on a sequel.

Thousands of Malaysian women are benefiting from Project Rose, a cervical cancer screening programme. Unlike the conventional Pap smear, it allows women to take a cell sample in the privacy of their own homes, and receive their test results by phone.

Multiracial appeal of Amalina catapulted Santesh, until then a hit only with Malaysia’s Tamil minority, to national fame. ‘The song changed my life,’ says 31-year-old of track whose music video has had 25 million hits on YouTube.

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Devotees at the Thaipusam Hindu festival in Malaysia carry heavy decorative shrines known as kavadi – literally, burden – attached to their bodies by 100 or more skewers that pierce their flesh.

The office towers, malls and glitzy bars of the Malaysian capital conceal rising homelessness, a problem that prompted a social enterprise to give street sleepers a chance to earn dignity, and money, guiding tourists around the city

He may be Malaysia’s biggest rap star, the man who released the first ever multilingual album and creator of the first Tamil hip-hop song, but Yogeswaran Veerasingam is down to earth and appreciative of his success

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When an office chair fell from a height onto a schoolboy in Kuala Lumpur, illing him, it showed the risks residents of high-rises take when they throw junk and rubbish from windows. Yet the habit has not been stamped out