Popagandhi

no one will do your dishes

cooking is hard if you’re as clumsy as me

grocery shopping for one is harder

it is always going to rain 5 minutes after you put out your laundry

I need to learn to drive, fast

OMG I’m getting a dog?

you can always count on housemates for a drink

secretly, I’m Martha Stewart

home decoration for people with no artistic bone in their bodies

Befriend an artistic person, especially if it’s the inimitable Jason Li of iheartrecession and iheartbrown (Barcelona).

Smoke shisha with him (Dubai, en route to Saudi Arabia).

Promise to have his babies (Dubai).

Invite him to visit you (KL).

Several beers and a nice dinner = Free mural and paint job. (KL)
Happiness (my room).

Each panel stands for a region I’ve had a particular affinity towards. Elephant/dog, oddly enough, is Thailand/Indochina. Camel and castle is, of course, the Middle East. Spaceship and cow (or, Second Coming of Cow), represents India — and err, India’s gleaming future? Space beneath each is to be filled with my best pictures from each region. I want to do squares of canvas prints, but… at $50 a piece, it’s understandably taking some time.

Other things which have been taking time: all my online endeavours. I’ve been quite far behind on both Popagandhi and Fortylove. A week shy of my 24th birthday, I’ve been spent most of the last few months in some kind of an existential re-evaluation. I sometimes wake up thinking, no, wishing, I was in Beirut or Damascus or in a mountain somwhere, but hot, musty, humid tropical Southeast Asia is now home, as in a home I live in, along with all the adult responsibilities of rent, education loans, insurance, and business.

My friend Lainie, the uber-talented designer, recently relocated to Melbourne. We hung out on my frequent trips to KL back in the day, and the many parties at the house meant I was fairly familiar with the house and all the people in it. I took over her room shortly after. I live in Kuala Lumpur now (okay, to be more specific, Petaling Jaya), most days, and commute to Singapore and other parts of Asia in between. There are several good reasons.

First, so that I could live, for the first time, in the same city as my girlfriend. We chalked up so much SIN-KUL and LON-DXB mileage, and had a lot of fun doing so, that it appeared the only way to avoid bankruptcy was to live in the same place. (Okay, okay, I kid — it really was that my poor heart had no way of doing long distance anything, any longer.)

Second, AirAsia. Living in the home base of the best Asian low cost carrier is a definite plus — we’ve already gone to Taipei for under US$100 return, and our next few holidays are, I can safely say, planned around AirAsia’s promotional fares. They’re my favourite carrier. I admire their vision. I love how they link me to all the destinations that are handy for a. going home to Singapore b. going back to south India c. travelling all over Southeast Asia d. visiting the obscure destinations I seem to enjoy e. heading back into the Middle East, which I will, at some point.

Third, the food. Living in KL has some fantastic perks. The local food that’s available is cheaper, tastier, and also far more varied than the local food we get back in Singapore, which, as a poll on the ground will indicate, is now becoming increasingly… inedible. Not sure what’s up, but a combination of rapid development, soulless food courts, and the older generation of hawkers dying out (and being replaced by people who don’t know what they’re doing) definitely has something to do with that.

Fourth, I love this city. I really really do. If your knowledge of KL is only restricted to KL city — and all its horrible taxi drivers and tourist traps — you don’t know this place at all. Instead, the disorganized jumble of hotspots within the Klang Valley, many of them largely residential, like Bangsar, Petaling Jaya, Subang, Klang, come together to form a city that’s never short of things to do, and never short of great people to be around.

Fifth. The girl, the girl and the girl. She’s pretty amazing.

For all its disadvantages (terrible traffic, and the nightmare of public transportation) and political shenanigans, this city is, essentially, not difficult for me to assimilate into, since it’s not different at all from where I grew up (with the notable exception of… infrastructure). I enjoy living here. I live with really cool people who have been my friends for some time — in the self-styled hippie commune we call /SLANT (it used to stand for all the people who lived here, past and present… but no prizes for guessing what the acronym also represents). The cost of living is low, I still earn in foreign currencies, and the exchange rate is good to me. I’m also continually inspired by all the wonderful people I’ve met here. I said on Twitter some nights ago that whereas Singapore has no shortage of passionate, talented people either, it appears as if the ones in KL possess a certain attitude that’s markedly different — one that has them pursue their art with seemingly little care for conforming to expectations of “career”. That many of them make wonderful careers out of their passions. The arts scene is small but active, there are always great shows to go to, and great projects to be involved with. My decision to base my projects here, both personal and professional, is one I will not regret. I commute to Singapore regularly for some other work.

“So, what exactly do you do for a living?”

I’m not really sure how to answer that. If this were an elevator pitch, mine would read:

I write and I photograph (60/40). I have been for some time. What do I write and shoot? Travel stories, food stories, documentary-style stories. For whom? Magazines. Books. How can you do this too? I’ll tell you some day. I run a Europe/Middle East travel short film site in my spare time (although video editing is not my forte, so some time to update). I travel. I eat. I’m now re-evaluating career options. The economy isn’t great for what I do at the moment, which makes writing/shooting commercial/lifestyle work more viable than the human interest work I love. I’m happy to do the commercial/lifestyle work, but I’ve reached the point where I feel like it’s not going to change anybody’s life, not even mine, although I love the lifestyle. I’ve always wanted to startup my own tech thing. This is what I am doing right now, running two of my own gigs out of KL, out of Singapore. It has something to do with travel. And tech. And travel tech. I still write and shoot, but only when it’s something I really care for. I’m also writing a novel about post-war Malaya.

Short answer: a combination of all the things I love and am good at, brought together by two important things — that I don’t have to wake up to an alarm clock every morning, or need to be in any specific location everyday. That’s all I’ve really wanted (in addition to being super fantabulously successful), and I think it’s working out.

So, KL. I’m quite happy to live here for some stretch of time. To prove it, I bought myself a stove and an oven. Although I still need a bed-frame. I also need to bloody learn Cantonese and Malay… and how to drive. The quicker the better.

I’ve been freaking out a bit more than usual these days, at all the oddest and most mundane things. Things that wouldn’t have made me bat an eyelid in another life.

Peeking into my wardrobe made me panic slightly. I… have a wardrobe? With clothes in them? I haven’t had one in years, or what felt like it. I’ve lived out of backpacks for far too long. Even when I ‘properly moved’ somewhere, to Dubai last year, it never felt like it could be home, so I never put things into my wardrobe. Not that I had to since I left Dubai every other week.

I could not understand the logic of wardrobe organization for a couple of weeks. Where should blouses, pants, jackets or underwear go in one, and how they should be folded. I now have a permanent room, i.e. a place at which I did not have to pay a daily rate, and which wasn’t a friend’s couch in a random city, but for the first few weeks I lived like a vagabond out of my own room, out of several suitcases. Now I’m doing a little better — most of my clothes have made it out of bags and into the wardrobe. I even got myself an iron so I could feel reconciled with the idea. (Though there’s still a suitcase with some of my possessions sitting in a balcony in The Greens in Dubai, the boxes with my pillow, bicycle, water jug and some clothes from a London apartment near Regent’s Park have finally arrived…)

Life has a funny way of getting back at you. As a child (and a teenager) I knew I would live outside Singapore the first chance I got, but in those daydreams the venues were inevitably in the northern hemisphere. What happened? I got there, found neither America nor Europe as attractive as they once were, yet instead of Bangkok or Bombay — my probable destinations in Asia — I found Kuala Lumpur. Love had a lot to do with that, but life is working out for me in and around this city.

It’s a familiar city. The food, the people, the languages. The fact that I’ve spent most weekends here in the last two years, that I visited very frequently from childhood, and never once thought of it as foreign. It’s a city with my favourite haunts and favourite people in them, one with a circle of friends and acquaintances, and opportunities wherever I want them. One in which I have been paying rent for some time.

For all the insane travel of the past years, I never properly moved into a city. I made bases out of a handful: Bangkok, Bombay, Bangalore, Dubai. I passed through many of the same ones on my way somewhere. I made my plans for every aspect of the year ahead, right down to what airlines I fly and which cities I fly in and out of and in which order, around passing through London at least once every five or six weeks. Chalked up frequent flyer mileage and was upgraded to Emirates Silver way too quickly. But I never had to put anything into a wardrobe.

Never had to buy an air-conditioner. Never had to own a water jug. Never had to do laundry on a regular basis. Never had to go shopping for tables, bed frames, or measure the width of curtain rails. About this time six months ago I agonized over how much I missed owning my own pillow, and plotted madly to aim for some measure of ’stability’, ‘constancy’, and normality. Now that I have it, I’m enjoying every moment of it but I find I have to re-learn some very basic things.

From graduation until now I have aspired to relish whatever I could grab — the quirkier, weirder, the more dangerous the better. I needed to have relatives of former headhunters tattoo my back with tribal tattoos the traditional way — with sticks and needles. I needed to live in a mud brick house in Sana’a’s Old City with descendants of the Prophet. I had to smuggle myself into a Yemeni bus in a full burqah/balto for 12 hours so as to pretend to be a local, since foreigners were banned from riding certain routes for fear of risk of being kidnapped or shot in the head by terrorists. I meandered from Beirut to Damascus to Palmyra, Homs, Aleppo, Antalya and Istanbul in a succession of buses, taxis and trains. I needed to go straight from a longhouse deep in the jungles of Borneo straight to Barcelona so that I could eat at El Bulli. I needed to wander about Europe with no plan and no money. I lived out of a backpack and quite successfully made a living with a pen and a camera. That life? It was beautiful. Wonderful. I consider myself lucky to have had the chance to live it. It was also incredibly hard. And pretty fucking lonely. (Which was okay, for a while.)

Since I’m now here, it evidently got the better of me. I’m never going to give that up, but like all my photojournalist (and other hobo type) friends, I’m coming around to the idea that I’d like a place, and person, to come home to. KL, and the girl in it, is that place and person. Life is, as usual, throttling ahead and I’m fumbling in trying to catch up with it. I’ve learned they always work out in the end.

So here’s to paying rent, painting walls, filling wardrobes and building a life in a city not too far from my own.

P.S. I wrote a book. It’s out at Borders, Kinokuniya, etc.