The Archives - 2014
2014 (18 posts)
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I was just telling someone tonight: I force myself to meet a different stranger in Jakarta every single day that I'm here. Even if I'm exhausted after work (which I usually am), I try to meet a new person, or eat a new food. Go to a new area. The first time I lived outside of Singapore was when I…
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I've moved to Jakarta to take part in Ideabox with my startup, WoBe I'm writing more on Medium these days. The blog format is unsatisfactory to me at the moment Over there, I've started two collections which may be interesting to some of you. In The Java Diaries, I obsessively track my time in…
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Call it what you will - if there are some among us in Singapore who fashion ourselves the conservative majority, the silent majority, the moral majority - that line, and its consequent political implementation, is bound to fail. It is not enough to view what we are currently witnessing as a 'culture…
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Ten years ago the Internet was a different place. Singapore was a different place. While it wasn't exactly the sort of pitchfork-wielding, gay-vilifying environment you would imagine, you certainly did not feel like people understood. You felt, at that time, at odds with large swathes of society, as…
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I wrote this piece some time ago about video games for Memory Insufficient, a games history ezine. This is it. Click this link to download the PDF. I’ve spent the last couple of nights binge-playing through the Mass Effect trilogy, which reminds me a little bit too much of the late nights I’ve…
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I turn 29 in a couple of months. T-W-E-N-T-Y-N-I-NE. This is doubly a shock because in my head I feel forever young, partly as a function of always having been the youngest person in every single circle I have run in, from friends to career to everything else really. I started blogging when I was 15…
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As you may know, I set up The Gyanada Foundation last year. We've spent the past year building the organisation and learning as much as we can. Last year, we supported 150 girls in India. This year we hope to raise that number to 350, including the existing students we have onboard currently; also…
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Two years ago I found out I have an autoimmune disease. I will always have it. It changed everything about my life from what I do for money to where I live. It prompted a reinvention of myself which was at turns painful, but ultimately necessary. This is what I learned. Never forego sleep.…
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At the hotel I had the receptionist scribble the name of my lunch spot in Burmese. Lunch that day was to be outside my sphere of Yangon familiarity: I had never been there, but I had been told by some locals that I must have a typical Burmese lunch at Aung Thu Kha. Yangon in motion: traffic, heat,…
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If you are anything like me, you've walked by Peninsula Plaza all the time and perhaps even entered it when you've needed to buy cameras and stuff. You've probably also wondered about all the wondrous things there. What is the paste they are mixing, what is this delicious-looking food and how can I…
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At 18 I certainly believed I knew everything. I did not know just how much it'd hurt this boy's heart if I told him the inevitable: that I was in love with someone he could never be-a woman. We went to our favourite bar and sat glumly while he tried to drink away his pain and anger. At that time it…
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In peninsular Southeast Asia there is a word of Malay origin, bastardized by Chinese pronunciation that perhaps best describes the prevalent mindset of the middle class in everything from career to politics: lugi. More than the losing of face and the losing of status, our collective great fear is…
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Almost exactly two years ago I was, too, on a flight to India.Only then I did not know exactly how drastic a turn my life would take on when I returned. More and more of my friends are getting diagnosed with diseases similar to mine. Autoimmune diseases are the new black.Across all of these…
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I've been coming and going from India for the last ten years. In 2004 I started to hatch the first plans to flee the terrifying life laid out for me - that of a student in a Singapore university, doomed for the corporate world or for the civil service - into the wide open arms of India, which…
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When I think of the 1980s, I think of the news. In English and Mandarin, both brought to you by Raymond Weil. When I think of the 1990s, I think of Michael Stipe's sonic-drenched wailing about his religion, or his lack thereof. And about the one sorry period of global history when everyone wondered…
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2009. "If you are really a lesbian, proveeeeittt! Kiss me NOW!" A giggly girl shrieked, rather loudly, flapping her long, luscious hair about as well. She also had the Arabic equivalent of a Valley Girl accent. In most situations, this might have been a proposition to consider. Except we…
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I have become one of those people. For the fourth time this year, I am sitting at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf at Colombo airport drinking the world's worst coffee and the worst food. I am also strutting around in heels. Here. Also in Indonesia. In the Philippines. Everywhere. I walked into a TASMAC…
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(63 Random Things in 2012) 1. Causeway I still remember the day you drove me across the Causeway with our dog and all of my life's belongings in your little car. We made that journey many times, usually in the other direction. Singapore to Kuala Lumpur. Happiness, not desperate anger. We were even…