There is this Indian movie that I love, in which the protagonist is a Robin Hood style character, someone who helps the poor but is forever at loggerheads with the corrupt government and the police. He befriends a local ganglord, who like our hero is a dog-gooder but an arch enemy of the authorities, and ends up being his right hand man. The story reaches a climax when a new mayor is appointed to the province. They mayor, being a good man, is determined to get rid the city of all the evils, like our hero and his leader. In the midst of the ensuing battle, our hero finds out that the mayor is in fact his half brother and promises the mother that he would not kill him. However, in the midst of the battle, the hero's leader is captured and beaten up. On his release, he tell's the hero to kill the mayor, which he refuses. Visibly stunned at this defiance, the leader demands an explanation and the truth comes out. So the leader asks the hero "Why? Why after knowing that h
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I once went for a course in conversational Chinese. For those of you who do not know, every character in Chinese has 4 tones, none which my Indian tongue managed to master even after finishing the Intermediate Level. As such, the day I found out that Vietnamese has 6 tones, I realised that trying to learn it was a lost cause. Let me get this straight. Speaking Vietnamese is tough, as in REALLY VERY TOUGH. I can remember the day I met some of my Vietnamese friends, I could not catch their names during the introduction that I had to go back home and check out their facebook before I had some idea of what the name somewhat sounded like. Though do not get me wrong. There is nothing really uncomfortable about listening to it. It is simply very hard to catch and even more hard to say, with the right tone. Though if you are travelling to Vietnam, do not let that daunt you. Over my years spent travelling, I have learnt that while people might not always really understand what you say, th
If there is anything about Dak Nong that moves you, it is the children. I remember the time I stood watching a school assembly in front of me, with children chatted away on the school courtyard, half listening to the instructions of the teacher blaring over the microphone. Some wore shoes, some wore slippers, while some had no footwear. Some wore jackets, some wore sweaters, while most wore just their thin layered school uniform. As I stood there with my hands tucked tightly into my pocket and a fur thicket jacket covering my body to protect me from the chilling cold, I wondered, ‘Don’t they feel cold?’ In fact they did. As the doctor’s delegation, whom my team was helping, later revealed, many had severe throat pain due to the cold. Given the high attitudes they lived at, they had little or no access to proper medication or food. The vitamins and other medicine we gave out would last for just a few months. After that what? It was interesting to note that there were countless childr
Imagine your friend passes you a fully boiled egg, garnished in onion and sauce. You use your chopsticks, lift it up to your mouth and bite of half the egg. It does not tear away as easily as you thought it would. And it tastes queer. Then while chewing away at that half, you look down at the other half on your plate and you see tiny grey feathers and a tiny leg bone staring back at you. My exact feeling at that moment was like I was making love to a woman and she suddenly reveals in the middle that she used to be a man. In short, I wanted to puke. I am not a big fan of Vietnamese cuisine. During my 18 days stay there, my Viet friends were kind enough to bring me around and let me taste about every kind of street food and drink, from snails to sticky rice to Viet baguettes to local alcohol. Other than certain items here and there, I generally thought the food lacked any kind of strong flavour to it. Plus, for some reason, I could not understand why the Viets went to the extent of ea
During my stay in Vietnam, a friend once asked me ‘Describe Vietnam in 1 word?’ ‘Chaotic’, I replied. Though chaotic would be a bit harsh to describe a country that houses one of the friendliest group of people I have seen so far (But given the word limit and that she asked me to describe the country and not the people, I came to the above word). And when I say friendly, I do not mean the standard smile followed by a ‘hi’ and a wave of the hand. The Vietnamese, there is something about the way they treat guests that is truly admirable. There was an occasion when I was invited to a dinner with the vice-principal of a school with which my group was going to work with. For a vice principal, he lived in a house (the size of my bedroom) where his bedroom, living room, study room, dining room was all in one room. His roof was quite rundown and there was no kitchen to speak of. Even then, he went to the extent of preparing a mini steam boat and even killed one of his chickens, just to keep
I know I do not have it in to be a businessman. I am not very good at asking people for money. When I was in secondary school, my parents once bought me a bicycle after much nagging on my part. Like any other boy, the novelty of the bicycle wore off after time and it became a symbol of my wastefulness. The once shiny steel rims looked like it had a new coat of brown paint thanks to the rust and the tires deflated to the point that it needed to be replaced by new ones. At this time, I was surprised one day to see a foreman with his bangla knocking at my door. They enquired about the bike and asked if they could take it if nobody was using it. I sensed a moneymaking opportunity and I told them, "You can take it for $5". That they readily accepted. Later that day, when my parents came back home, I expected much praise from them for displaying some business acumen. Though in life, what you expect is not always what you get. As my father would never cease to remind me "
The main frustration that I have had with my life in NUS was that I felt I was never really learning anything meaningful or anything that I felt would come useful in my life in the long run. My father has always insisted that NS was a waste of time, but to a certain extent, 2 years spent navigating around a difficult routine and even more difficult people has taught me to stand up for myself, something that can never be emphasised enough. Whereas in NUS, I knew I was never going to be an academic in the future, but here I was, studying 90% of the time. To have some life, I involved myself in CCA's, but still academics have pretty much dominated my life here. Though, every hour spend in front of my books, I have rued the missed opportunity to have spent it on something that I would have learned more from, something that would have added value to me. It is during these moments of pessimism when you need someone to come along and give some meaning to the things you do. For me, I h
During my first semester in NUS, I took a philosophy module ( Reason and Persuasion), partly out of curiosity and partly out of a budding interest in the subject. The module mainly covered the dialogues of Plato, on his concept of morality, justice etc etc. Soon it became frustratingly obvious to me that philosophy was something that never really provided any answers, but just lead to even more question. The only notable highlight though was halfway through the module, the professor predictably enroached on the ground of religion, on the idea and the purpose behind religion, existence of God and so on. The depth of the discussion soon started to plant doubts about my own attitude towards religion. All these years, despite being an Hindu, my concept of religion was more that of an agnostic. I believed in the existence of the all powerful God but not in the forms that all the religions presented him to me. Religion to me was simply a human creation, a philosophy,a code of conduct. I
An uncle of mine once presented me with a motivational book in J1. Called 'You can Win' and written by motivational coach Shiv Kera, it was my first encounter with such a book. Initially I chucked it aside, thinking of how my uncle managed to get away with giving me such a cheap present. But as time drifted and boredom got to me, I dug it out of the dark recesses of my room and started reading it. And for a while I could not stop. It seemed to pinpoint, with rather remarkable accuracy, the mistakes I was making in my life. Somehow, from it I drew inspiration to change my life, to cast aside my reclusive existence and be more dynamic, more disciplined, more optimistic and more gracious. And by the time I was done with that book, I tried to get my hands on every other such motivational book out there. Anthony Robbins and Dale Carnegie were my new role models. Somehow, everyday I seemed to be on my way up. As a boy gets tired of his new toy car after a while, I soon got tir
A very close friend of mine lives in the East. Not that it adds any particular glamour to him, but whenever I requested his presence in my humble abode, which was in the West, distance was always the premier and forgiveable excuse. Then one day he got attached. And more than a year later he broke up. He visited me some time later and I took him for a walk around my neighbourhood. And surprisingly, he knew the place pretty well. Apparently, his girlfriend stayed somewhere near. And even more surprisingly, he visited her quite often. All the way from the East. To the West. To which I asked him "Bro, all this time I called you, you never turned up.A girl called you and you turned up every week." To which he laughed. Maybe it is because I have not been in his shoes, but I do honestly find it quite amusing the things guys do for girls, sometimes at the expense of the friends who have been with him for so long. Things that he would declare to be unthinkable, when his rel
“ Thou shalt not be a victim. Thou salt not be a perpetrator. Above all, thou shalt not be a bystander” Holocaust Museum, Washington DC October 13th afternoon around 5:30, a car accident occurred in Huangqi, China. The victim was a 2 year old girl who was run over by a van, which then fled the scene while she lay bloodied. Over the next 7 minutes, 17 passerbys walked past her and did nothing. It took the 18 th person, an old woman who was a garbage scavenger, to rush to the aid of the kid and bring her to the hospital. She now lies in coma, has been declared brain dead and could die anytime. A few weeks ago I was in the bus, on my way to school. Being rush hour, it was packed with students. At one of the stops, one of the passengers who entered the bus was an elderly man, old enough to be offered a seat. Though the only one who offered it to him was a middle aged woman. The rest of the students were
com·plain [k uh m- pleyn ] verb (used without object) to express dissatisfaction, pain, uneasiness, censure,resentment, or grief; find fault: He complained constantlyabout the noise in the corridor. I complain a lot (more to myself than to anyone else). People around me complain a lot. Pretty much everyone I know have complained at some point in their lives. Not that there is anything particularly wrong with it. To some extent, especially in Singapore, I think it is perhaps the one of the few forms of expressing our dissatisfaction with something. I mean, we Singaporeans are one of the most obedient groups of people you can find anywhere. The government increases GST, we complain, but we learn to live with it. Our schools and workplaces bombard us with endless work, we complain, but we still do it. In other countries, when higher authorities over exercised their power, people have usually taken to the streets. Good and Bad. Good because, it shows these autho
This is not my first attempt at blogging. A few years ago I once started a blog called zefrenchguy@blogspot.com. After the first few sentences, I did not know what to write and so over time I forgot about the blog and when I tried to revisit it, I found that blogspot no longer wanted to waste any space keeping it. So why am I writing again? A couple of months ago, I started writing a journal. The reason was that one day when I grow old, it'll be nice to read back and laugh at the shit that was my life. Over time, I realised that writing a journal was just be about one of the most worthwhile things I did in a long time. Reason being that one writes slower than one thinks. As such, writing allows for more time to look at the whole issue and more often than not, I realised that I was ,more often than not, complaining and worrying about the small things in life. Briefly put, writing helped me to put things into perspective. Of course, this blog will purely repeat some things that