Posts tagged "blog"
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To the Young Queer Nerds
Dear (your name here), Imagine for a second that the year is 2000. Holding hands with your girlfriend in public is either an act of defiance or shame. The world is years away from The L Word: nobody knows yet that it sucks, that lesbian life does not have to be "like that". (Bette Porter is bad for you; Jenny…
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Don't Work With Assholes
There's a wealth of literature out there about this, but it can never be said enough. Too many people work with assholes. You see them everywhere. The cafe owner that takes a shortcut by hiring an asshole barista? The barista plays shit music at your cafe and nobody wants to go there. The startup founder who values…
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Stress Balls.
Some time ago, some people (read: entrepreneurs) I follow on Twitter posed a seemingly innocuous question. What drives us, as so-called entrepreneurs, to do what we do? Is it hubris? Ego? Is it an out-sized and unrealistic view of one's abilities? For most of us, choosing this life also means the opportunity cost we…
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A Tale of Two Cities
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was a bit of both, really. I'm not one for the mumbo-jumbo of the Myers-Briggs test, but I suppose it was striking that when I did it before my startup I rated very strongly as INFP, and yet now I'm very much on the ENTJ spectrum. It appears that having to do shit…
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Do You Know About Galau?
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 moved to Dubai in 2007…
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Some Updates
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 Jakarta in the name of…
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Singapore's So-Called Moral Majority
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 war', as 'us vs…
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The Freedom to Love
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 though it would…
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Videos Games & Political Consciousness
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 pulled work- ing on…
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All In
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 — nearly 15 years…
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Gyanada 2014
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 expanding…
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What I Learned
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. "You'll sleep more over…
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Mahabandoola
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, and everyday rhythm.…
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Culture Kitchen 2: Little Myanmar
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 have some of it, if…
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The Geography of Hope
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 felt as though life…
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Don't Lugi Be Happy
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 the fear of losing…
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Rebuilding
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 experiences the one we've…
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An Indian Decade
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 changed everything, and…
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I Follow Cities
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 too much about…
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Strange Damascus Memories
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 were in Syria. And I…
194 posts tagged "blog"