He graduated — from SMU
For a good chunk of my life, I responded to that perennial question with the classic answer that always shut everybody up. “Lawyer,” I’d say curtly. And that was that. Everybody understood. And approved.
The truth was, I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I thought I did — growing up in a society like ours, if you did well enough at school, and displayed certain abilities, your pick of professions was expected to revolve around medicine and law. It wasn’t easy to say: I want to be a roving photojournalist. Even as early as seven, I had a vague idea — the bylines at the back of photo essays and reports from the field excited me. _Photography by ABC in Baku, additional reporting by XYZ in Astana…_ The sound of faraway places, particularly those in Central Asia, still excites me. I wanted to be in all these places, make all those pictures and write all those words. I wanted to work wherever, have no home or office or wardrobe — just me, my backpack and my laptop. I didn’t know how, but I wanted it somehow.
The year I started university, I switched to a Mac. Part of what that meant was that I tuned in to everything Steve Jobs had to say. That year, Steve Jobs gave a “commencement speech”:http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505 at Stanford. It changed my life, and how the coming four years were going to be. The gist of what he said was, “stay hungry, stay foolish”, “you gotta find what you love”. He also talked about connecting the dots.
My past 3 years have been all about connecting the dots. I write this now in a Bangkok cafe, slacking off from work — I have a ton of work, pitches, previews, drafts and reports, to catch up on and send around the world. Next month this scene will be repeated in Chennai, Mumbai, Puri, Delhi, perhaps even Pakistan. If you asked me a year ago what I’d be doing with my life, I would have said… well, I dunno, something to do with writing and photography, I guess. It didn’t take me very long in university to decide I hated school and didn’t want anything more than to get out of it asap — I also had a good feeling about India, and always thought there might be something waiting for me there. I didn’t know what. But I had to find out. So I took off for India, for the second time, with one backpack. I saw the Taj, rode camels, mastered the Indian railway system, ate amazing street food, had diarrhea too many times, and… the last week before I was due home, I met a man in Bombay who would be the one factor that would unwittingly change the course of my future. He was a photojournalist of some repute, and his journalist had just left abruptly. Would I be interested in taking over? The job scope, he said, involved going to one of the world’s wettest places _during the monsoon_. If you’re up for going to the Northeast, and living in the world’s wettest town for a while, you can write the story. He mentioned the publication which was likely to buy the story; but he didn’t have to. Something clicked. I came back to Singapore, and I was back in Bangalore less than 30 days after leaving. That work took me to Bangladesh, then to Meghalaya, where for a month I spent time in places I wouldn’t otherwise have gone, speaking to people few had ever seen. I sat 2 metres from a man with multi-bacillary leprosy, who had travelled from Bogra to Sirajgonj (200km) for treatment, and because he had just two toes left he had to come by lying on an oxcart. I had to sit in front of him while Dr Mujibur Rahman pulled out some of his last toes and cleaned up all that pus, and say, _apnar naam ki, apnar gram-er naam ki? bosch koto?_ The next week I was learning Khasi in a Khasi tea house and having the Khasis talk about finding a Manipuri husband for me. I made as much as I would have, perhaps even more, working 9-5, Mondays to Fridays, once you factor in favourable exchange rates.
The story I eventually wrote was to be published in January. It wasn’t. February. It wasn’t. March came and I was getting a little worried. Then _that_ email came — can you furnish some clarifications, and write an extra 200 words about this and that? I did that within 24 hours, and by the middle of March it had gone to press — and it was going to be the cover story. Beginner’s luck, perhaps. What if I had stepped into Barista in Colaba, Bombay, that fateful day, and decided this man was either trying to pick me up or was a complete weirdo, with his goldie dreadlocks and bizarre sarong? Or if he offered me the opportunity, but I was too scared to take it up, too scared to return to work with someone I’d met for an hour in a supposedly dangerous part of India (terrorist insurgencies galore in the Northeast)? Or if I’d gone — and let the fact that at no point was this story ever _confirmed_ to be published, bother me so much I couldn’t write it? I choose to believe I never know until I try, and the worst that could have happened was that I wouldn’t deliver but had a nice holiday in Bangalore, Calcutta, Meghalaya and Bangladesh anyway. It was all luck, yes, but even if luck stared you in the eye, the onus is still upon you to connect the dots somehow and make it work for you. It takes a huge dose of being hungry and being foolish, all at the same time.
I haven’t _made it_ yet — there’s still so much to conquer. But I now know what I am capable of, and what is within my reach. For someone with 6 months of school left to go, it’s not bad at all: I’m spending my entire summer on assignment, chasing the fantastic stories I’d always wanted to write and shoot, and not having to worry about where they will go. Having absolutely no talent for being the CFO (Chief Filing Officer) at Morgan Stanley or other such esteemed organizations, this will have to do. And it’s doing mightily fine. In a way this feels like the only way I know ‘work’ can be. I leave the city tomorrow at 5am to catch a 7 hour bus to the Burma border, just me, my backpack and my gear, and _khanom jinn_ for breakfast. I have one major assignment lined up but that won’t be until 3 weeks from now, so in the meantime I’m going to chase a story I think could work. I don’t know how. I don’t know how much money I will make. I can’t even tell you for sure where I will be next month, the month after, certainly not after December, after I graduate. I know I can’t be more thankful for the way things have turned out, and for an amazing family and significant other that’s been behind me every step of the way. Or for friends who have dreams as strange as mine — especially that Indonesian rockstar-to-be, you know who you are. When you have massive Jakarta concerts, get me a front row seat, and remember our Bangkok.
possibly related
Things I’ve Quit /
Dream vs Plan /
It Was A Very Good Year /
Eulogies /
Ten Simple Pleasures /
So, what do you want to be when you grow up?
He graduated — from SMU
For a good chunk of my life, I responded to that perennial question with the classic answer that always shut everybody up. “Lawyer,” I’d say curtly. And that was that. Everybody understood. And approved.
The truth was, I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I thought I did — growing up in a society like ours, if you did well enough at school, and displayed certain abilities, your pick of professions was expected to revolve around medicine and law. It wasn’t easy to say: I want to be a roving photojournalist. Even as early as seven, I had a vague idea — the bylines at the back of photo essays and reports from the field excited me. _Photography by ABC in Baku, additional reporting by XYZ in Astana…_ The sound of faraway places, particularly those in Central Asia, still excites me. I wanted to be in all these places, make all those pictures and write all those words. I wanted to work wherever, have no home or office or wardrobe — just me, my backpack and my laptop. I didn’t know how, but I wanted it somehow.
The year I started university, I switched to a Mac. Part of what that meant was that I tuned in to everything Steve Jobs had to say. That year, Steve Jobs gave a “commencement speech”:http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505 at Stanford. It changed my life, and how the coming four years were going to be. The gist of what he said was, “stay hungry, stay foolish”, “you gotta find what you love”. He also talked about connecting the dots.
My past 3 years have been all about connecting the dots. I write this now in a Bangkok cafe, slacking off from work — I have a ton of work, pitches, previews, drafts and reports, to catch up on and send around the world. Next month this scene will be repeated in Chennai, Mumbai, Puri, Delhi, perhaps even Pakistan. If you asked me a year ago what I’d be doing with my life, I would have said… well, I dunno, something to do with writing and photography, I guess. It didn’t take me very long in university to decide I hated school and didn’t want anything more than to get out of it asap — I also had a good feeling about India, and always thought there might be something waiting for me there. I didn’t know what. But I had to find out. So I took off for India, for the second time, with one backpack. I saw the Taj, rode camels, mastered the Indian railway system, ate amazing street food, had diarrhea too many times, and… the last week before I was due home, I met a man in Bombay who would be the one factor that would unwittingly change the course of my future. He was a photojournalist of some repute, and his journalist had just left abruptly. Would I be interested in taking over? The job scope, he said, involved going to one of the world’s wettest places _during the monsoon_. If you’re up for going to the Northeast, and living in the world’s wettest town for a while, you can write the story. He mentioned the publication which was likely to buy the story; but he didn’t have to. Something clicked. I came back to Singapore, and I was back in Bangalore less than 30 days after leaving. That work took me to Bangladesh, then to Meghalaya, where for a month I spent time in places I wouldn’t otherwise have gone, speaking to people few had ever seen. I sat 2 metres from a man with multi-bacillary leprosy, who had travelled from Bogra to Sirajgonj (200km) for treatment, and because he had just two toes left he had to come by lying on an oxcart. I had to sit in front of him while Dr Mujibur Rahman pulled out some of his last toes and cleaned up all that pus, and say, _apnar naam ki, apnar gram-er naam ki? bosch koto?_ The next week I was learning Khasi in a Khasi tea house and having the Khasis talk about finding a Manipuri husband for me. I made as much as I would have, perhaps even more, working 9-5, Mondays to Fridays, once you factor in favourable exchange rates.
The story I eventually wrote was to be published in January. It wasn’t. February. It wasn’t. March came and I was getting a little worried. Then _that_ email came — can you furnish some clarifications, and write an extra 200 words about this and that? I did that within 24 hours, and by the middle of March it had gone to press — and it was going to be the cover story. Beginner’s luck, perhaps. What if I had stepped into Barista in Colaba, Bombay, that fateful day, and decided this man was either trying to pick me up or was a complete weirdo, with his goldie dreadlocks and bizarre sarong? Or if he offered me the opportunity, but I was too scared to take it up, too scared to return to work with someone I’d met for an hour in a supposedly dangerous part of India (terrorist insurgencies galore in the Northeast)? Or if I’d gone — and let the fact that at no point was this story ever _confirmed_ to be published, bother me so much I couldn’t write it? I choose to believe I never know until I try, and the worst that could have happened was that I wouldn’t deliver but had a nice holiday in Bangalore, Calcutta, Meghalaya and Bangladesh anyway. It was all luck, yes, but even if luck stared you in the eye, the onus is still upon you to connect the dots somehow and make it work for you. It takes a huge dose of being hungry and being foolish, all at the same time.
I haven’t _made it_ yet — there’s still so much to conquer. But I now know what I am capable of, and what is within my reach. For someone with 6 months of school left to go, it’s not bad at all: I’m spending my entire summer on assignment, chasing the fantastic stories I’d always wanted to write and shoot, and not having to worry about where they will go. Having absolutely no talent for being the CFO (Chief Filing Officer) at Morgan Stanley or other such esteemed organizations, this will have to do. And it’s doing mightily fine. In a way this feels like the only way I know ‘work’ can be. I leave the city tomorrow at 5am to catch a 7 hour bus to the Burma border, just me, my backpack and my gear, and _khanom jinn_ for breakfast. I have one major assignment lined up but that won’t be until 3 weeks from now, so in the meantime I’m going to chase a story I think could work. I don’t know how. I don’t know how much money I will make. I can’t even tell you for sure where I will be next month, the month after, certainly not after December, after I graduate. I know I can’t be more thankful for the way things have turned out, and for an amazing family and significant other that’s been behind me every step of the way. Or for friends who have dreams as strange as mine — especially that Indonesian rockstar-to-be, you know who you are. When you have massive Jakarta concerts, get me a front row seat, and remember our Bangkok.
possibly related
Things I’ve Quit / Dream vs Plan / It Was A Very Good Year / Eulogies / Ten Simple Pleasures /