error with man

[Karthik Vishwanath]

Hello,

Am running redhat 7.3, and on trying to access any man page, I get the
following error:

[karthik @gandalf karthik]$ man man
/usr/bin/gunzip: /usr/share/man/man1/man.1.gz: Permission denied
/usr/bin/gunzip: exec: /usr/share/man/man1/man.1.gz: cannot execute:
Permission denied
fgets: No such file or directory
Error reading man page /usr/share/man/man1/man.1.gz
No manual entry for man

[karthik @gandalf man1]$ pwd
/usr/share/man/man1
[karthik @gandalf man1]$ ls -l man.1.gz 
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         4347 Mar 25  2002 man.1.gz

The file seems to exist, and I can force gunzipping. What could be the
problem? 

Thanks,

-K