Cairo is an amazing place, the modern capital of an ancient kingdom of what used to be the middle of the known earth then. The kingdom lasted for thousands of years, which is basically close to forever, putting it up there in the ranks of the herpes virus and radioactivity for longevity.

But nothing lasts forever, not even radioactivity. The ancient Egyptian kingdom fell to other kingdoms and empires or just plain marauders, from the Romans, the Persians, the Ottomans and the usual western suspects. What we see now is just a faint shadow of its glorious former self.

Egypt appears on most lists of failed nations and ironically enough, on many travel bucket lists too. It’s better known for turmoil and instability, with many of its brightest having left it. Malaysia is home for a number of them, though we don’t seem to care enough to have them stick around and help build our own nation.

Giza, the city across the river from Cairo, seems to go on forever, with many old ramshackle buildings coexisting with many newer ramshackle buildings. But if you drive south long enough, the buildings end suddenly in a fenced-off desert, and there stand the most magnificent man-made pile of rocks that ever existed – the pyramids.

Even if you’ve been expecting them – who hasn’t heard about the pyramids? – suddenly coming to face them is still a shock. They appear out of the mist, or more likely the smog, guarded by a carved-out sphinx within a park that fences out a huge swathe of the desert, and a ticket booth that would’ve appeared inadequate even for a local funfair.

You have to come and see them. You can’t quite understand the logic and the engineering of building such stupendous (it’s easy to run out of superlatives when describing superlatives) monuments. There are indeed the greatest ancient treasures left behind by our ancestors. Nothing quite compares, and even now science hasn’t quite figured out how they were built, which of course leaves the field open to many alternative crackpot theories.

I heard an interesting explanation long ago that such theories are born out of innate racism, as many, especially the white ex-colonialists who tried to find explanations for their existence, couldn’t quite find it in their heart and mind to credit a bunch of brown and black desert people wearing loincloths,. So, UFOs and aliens then.

Near the Great Pyramid are some much smaller pyramids dedicated to the engineer (and his family) who built the pyramids for his pharaohs 45 centuries ago. Assuming he’s not an alien, he has to be one of the greatest engineers who ever lived, and in all likelihood he’s also the architect, project manager and CEO of the Pyramid Construction Company Private Limited that was tasked with building them.

My admiration for him, and for people like him elsewhere in the ancient world, is boundless. The pharaohs signed the cheque, which was the easy part, but the engineer was the one who had to literally invent new mathematics and engineering and supply chains and processes to get the monuments built.

All these were done to please the overweening ego and ambition of the leaders, some great and some less so, from this ancient world. But think of similar modern monuments built by more recent leaders, and you realize things haven’t changed that much.

The first impression of Cairo is of how crowded it is. There are people everywhere. True, China’s also crowded, but there seems to be some order to their crowdedness, whereas in Cairo, people – and vehicles and cats and dogs – seem to be like smoke particles agitating energetically in a Brownian motion science kit.

It’s certainly energetic, if a bit messy. No, it’s more than a bit messy, it’s a few orders of magnitude beyond that. It’s similar to places such as Calcutta or Caracas, Mumbai or Manila – all with the same frenetic hustle and bustle, the same edge, the same risks and rewards equations, such as on how and when to cross the roads in that traffic. At the next corner there could be a delightful pastry shop, or an impromptu garbage landfill, and possibly both.

Back to being failed nations. To have failed is to fall off the high perch your ancestors have reached earlier. Egypt has all the qualities of a failed nation, if only for the fact their ancestors had set the bar extremely high. It’s certainly tough to keep up the standards, especially over millennia. But credit where credit is due – the ancient Egyptians stayed on their high perch longer than anybody else in history.

Their drift towards failed nationhood is more recent, involving a lot of factors, not the least of them are religion and nationalism, greedy and covetous foreign hands, perhaps unearned easy wealth from oil and the Suez Canal, and a fractured relationship with democracy.

Take out the Suez Canal and we could be describing Malaysia. In this era of increasingly shorter civilizational lifecycles, some seem to feel we have gone from being on top to being a failed nation within a mere handful of generations.

But perhaps we’re blowing things out of proportion. We aren’t a failed nation for a few simple reasons, one being that we never really managed to get up there on top of the pyramid (so to speak) for us to have such a big failure. The other being that I can categorically say Malaysia ain’t one, having seen what many describe as failed nations.

Egypt shows, however, that no nation is immune from such a calamity. Things go in circles. The closer you are to the edge of the circle, the higher your highs, and the lower your lows as it turns. At the centre of the circle, there are no highs or lows at all. Malaysia is probably somewhere in between.

No, I wouldn’t say Malaysia is a failed nation, and neither would I conclude that about Egypt. But we’re underperforming and not meeting expectations, scoring lots of own goals even as our Mo Salahs are busily scoring goals on the other ends, both literally and figuratively.

We’re still prone to taking one step forward and two steps back, which isn’t a winning combination whether in life or in football.

But perhaps the challenge is bigger for Egypt, given its sheer size and complexity and the often-unwanted attention of major world powers in its affairs. It sits at the crossroads of major trade routes where every Tom, Dick and Harry has strong opinions on how things should be run.

But Malaysia is in a similar situation, sitting uneasily as her huge neighbours eye each other warily. We’re trying our best in increasingly difficult times to find our day in the sun while, increasingly like crabs, we sabotage ourselves every which way.

But to me, these countries, balanced precariously on the edge and perhaps having slid on the other side too, are the most interesting kind of countries there is. You’d see life at its rawest, but you’d also get to see people who’re having a go at things the best way they know how, feeling proud but probably a little ashamed at what their own ancestors have achieved.

It’s a bit like life in general, full of highs and lows. Those who achieved the highest of highs also often get to experience the lowest of lows. It can be a wild ride, but for a keen observer, such as a visitor like me, these are the best kinds of places to visit.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.