Life, Laughter and Everything Else

It was the size a tad less than the tip of your forefinger, of a proud uniform orangish brown colour from its abdomen to its antenna. With those antenna, long, wavy and thrashing the air like a whiplash, it was an eye catching creature, scurrying across the damp, coarse surface of the thin plank of wood a hands reach away from me. And for some reason, right in front of me, it turned and stopped. It now faced me, like a bull about to charge at its bull fighter. The combination of that angry orange and the incessant probing of the long antenna, akin to a swordsman intimidating his opponent with an artful movement of his sword before a fight, intimidated me. I grew nervous. "I think its going to jump at you", my friend laughed. And it suddenly jumped at me. Like an almost knee jerk reaction, my natural instincts assumed control of my panic stricken mind. First task, spot the devil. My eyes scanned the fading orange expanse of my life jacket. Nope, not there. Next, my expos

I write this after my sisters' graduation ceremony, a rather ostentatious ceremony considering that the graduation from my own college took place on the last day school and the ceremony was not very different from the usual school assembly. But times have changed, practices have changed and people have changed.  Around me are all the proud parents of the graduates of this elite institution. When you look at some of them, it is difficult to say to whom this event assumes more significance, to them or their children who are graduating. There are some who are there simply there to fulfil their customary duty as parents but unless I am wrong, most are here because this event signifies not just a milestone in the lives of their children, but in their very own lives. As t he principal kicks off the ceremony, listing the names of the elites of the elites and boasting the numerous academic accolades of the students. Names such as Harvard, Cambridge, DSTA, A Star all comes up frequen

Just last week, when I was about to use the urinal in the male restroom at Paragon (Shopping Centre), I noticed a pretty cool contraption placed inside the urinal. It was a dartboard, about 15 centimetres in diameter and exactly like the one professional dartboard players use. And every urinal had one, which meant that it was placed there with an intention. An intention that had something to do with the male psychology. The concept behind it was simply. When males saw the dartboard, they tried to aim right at it. It was a kind of natural male instinct. To hit the target, right in the middle and the longer the 'stream' of rounds kept hitting it, the greater was the user satisfaction. As for the shopping centre management, it meant that the liquid waste ended up where it was suppose to and not out of the firing range. Though, on a personal note, I would like to remind the management that cleaner toilets should not mean less cleaning. Because just today, in the middle of

I have always thought that the story of the hare and the tortoise was a very misunderstood tale. Think about it. A hare and a tortoise decides to race. The faster hare bounds off, sees that the tortoise is far behind and decides to knock off for a while. The tortoise catches up, overtakes and crosses the finish line. And next thing you know, generations of humans laud the tortoise's achievement and writes it into their folklores and storybooks for their children. Furthermore, parents and teachers ceaselessly drill impressionable young minds with the message that, Slow and steady wins the race. Though, if you think about it at a much deeper level, the tortoise did not win because it was slow and steady. It won because the hare was fast but stupid. All the way in front and still far from the finish line, he decides to take a break. The only person whom I knew to have done something like that was my cousin when she was a 8 year old and took part in a race in her school. Halfway

I happen to be taking a business module, in which teams are given a specific business case study to analyse and answer a set of questions, which they have to present the following week. To be honest, the presentations converged on mental dullness, as multiple teams answered the same question about the same case study. The lecturer, to make the proceedings more interesting, then told the teams that even if they were given questions to answer, they could choose to completely ignore them, come up with their own set of questions and answer their own questions. Sounds like a delicious prospect doesn't it? Like you walking into the exam hall and there is a blank A4 size paper in front of you with one instruction, 1. Read the passage. Come up with a question. Answer it. (20 marks) Though ironically, nobody took the bait. Instead, week after week, they stuck to the same given questions with the oh-so-typical answers and the lecturer was left scratching his head (which perhaps exp

Just a few days ago, I was at the dinner table with my mother, having a chat about, well, pretty much this and that. Expectedly, she started to drift off and complaining about people, about events off the past, about old wounds that still scarred her. It was not the first time I was hearing this and to be honest, I was getting a bit tired of hearing the same old stories of resentment and who wronged who. Me being me, attempted to put an end to all this. So I started my own lecture, about forgiveness, about forgetting events of the past, of not bothering so much with the business of others, to make her change. To which she replied, rather bluntly, "You sitting there, with your meditation and talks of peace and forgiveness. Once you grow up, start your own family, go out to work, you are going to meet quite a few people, who are not going be so nice to you. After you deal with them, you try your peace and forgiveness then. And if you can do it, good for you." Must say

Recently, an old colleague of my father paid us a visit. After he left, my father revealed to me an interesting story about his friend's father, who had been a Hindu priest. Being a man whose life was devoted to his duty to god and family, he led a life of simplicity and discipline. When he died, his own son remarked, "The old man wasted his life. No drinking, no pleasures, no money." When I look at my own life, the goals I set for myself, they are rather grand. Find my passion, travel and perhaps work overseas, live a life unobstructed by the burden and responsibilities of family, be a free bird. Though it is ironic that the generation just before me lived by an entirely different set of goals. They were brought up with the mindset of starting a family and working hard to provide the best quality of life possible for the family. Getting married, having children, working, looking after their old parents were all a duty, not a choice. Job satisfaction did not matter as

I am witness to a time, when the rain was a relief from the intolerable heat of the sun a wish come true that closed schools an inspiration for innumerable novelists and poets.  When it rained then, it poured. And it would coax nature  into releasing a strange scent. A smell so unique to it one reminisced of it as the smell of the monsoon. But the monsoon did not just pleasure the nose. A comfortingly cool breeze would blow against the body and escape through its gaps. Tingling, soothing, cooling body, mind and spirit. One would spent ages staring out of the windows listening to the clatter  of the raindrops against the zinc panels. the muffled gasps as water touched solid the wail of the gale. It was an orchestra whose volume reflected the strength of its ensemble. Sure enough small childish ponds  would appear on my lawn. On which I would float little paper boats. Not that they floated for long.

A few months ago, in the middle of my exams, I was the victim of a gas attack. Fortunately or unfortunately, this gas attack was internal or in other words as a result of gas generation from within. It seems like a trivial problem, I mean if gas builds up inside, it is bound to escape, either when one burps or when farts. For some inexplicable reason, mine just stayed inside like gas stored in a huge LNG container and gave me 2 of the worst days of my life. It was like a storm within and never in my whole life had I ever prayed to God to let me fart. The good thing was that this experience made me look at my eating habits. When you come from an Indian family, where you drink curry like you drink water, a healthy diet is unthinkable. In which case, the only option left was to eat healthy at school, which wasn't happening with all the nasi lemak, nasi padang, chinese mixed rice with 3 meat and 1 veggie and the frequent chocolate waffle that I treated myself to every now and then

Social sciences books seem to have an excellent track record of testing my patience. Recently, I borrowed a highly rated book, The Paradox of Choice : Why More is Less. The fundamental concept explored by the book was that having more choices usually resulted in more disappointment. Well, My Barry Shwartz(author of the book), I kind of knew that. I was hoping you would tell me how to get around it. Instead you go around for 200 pages saying again and again why more choice equals to more disappointment. You throw in all kinds of studies done by psychologists, employed perhaps for the sole purpose of creating employment. All your studies point to the one ultimate truth that is the title of your book, which makes me wonder why they did not stop at one study but kept doing more to prove something that had already been proven? You state 'We get catalogs for clothes, luggage, housewares, furniture, kitchen appliances, gourmet food, athletic gear, computer equipment, linens, bathroom fu

I was rolling up the sleeve of my uniform, preparing for a call up that might never come, when I realised that somehow I was overcome by a strange sense of pride, a pride that wanted the length of my sleeve to be precise as I have always pictured in my mind. Any longer, I would look shabby. Any shorter, I would look amateur. Then I donned the green, tightened the velcro around my waist and looked in the mirror. It was just like before and the memories started flooding me. I never really liked it when I donned it for 2 years in a row. Then I was in a place where I detested the culture, the harsh discipline, the unreasonable demands and the lack of purpose in everything I did. But now that it was over, when I look back, it was perhaps the greatest time of my life. The suffering, the digging, the starving, the cold, the banter, the rowdiness, the jungle, the marches,the mountains, the food, the stories, the friendships, it was all worth the 2 years. A girl friend of mine once asked

Recently, I had the opportunity to be part of an interview selection process for a scholarship, in which I was grouped together with a bunch of other scholarship applicants and the group was given a topic to work. At the same time, a couple of the the HR people closely watched us with a rather big scoresheet in their hands, attempting to evaluate the performance of every member in the team, picking out each person's strength and weakness. And the subsequent discussion went pretty much as I expected. Everyone wanted to make their voice heard and ideas and opinions were thrown from all directions. And some of the ideas were undoubtedly brilliant, but some were not and when they were followed up with a one minute justification, it was a pure waste of limited time. The biggest problem though was that this form of disorganised brainstorming lacked focus on the end goal and went on till somebody said '5 minutes left'. I realised that people tended to forget that quite a bit o

No, this is not a story about me, but about a dog that my family adopted when I was a kid running around half naked on the house lawn with a broken stick. Adopted because he was the neighbour's dog that the neighbour fed but did not shelter, for Blacky never really liked to stay in one place. He would wander around the streets and come back in time for the customary breakfast and dinner. But for a dog of no special pedigree, a fair stature and physique and an extremely loud personality, Blacky was a very protective dog, a quality that convinced my uncle that he could be tamed. When I first saw him, it was on my way back from school, chained to the pillar near the front porch. It was quite a joyous moment, my first pet.  Though, I never really dared to stand around when he was unleashed. He was jumpy and I was timid. I would pat him when he laid down bored or when he put his head through the window. I still remember the time he caught four rats scampering around the lawn. He bit a

For those of you who have taken a good look at my face, and not lost you sanity, would have noticed a small scar between my eyebrows. A scar that I got as a child when I chose to pick a fight with a group of boys older than me for reasons that I cannot remember. But what I do remember is that the fight had started with my signature move, whereby I bit the guy's hair. While I was left disgusted by the hair that got stuck between my teeth, my victim gave me a shove that sent me flying against a strong teak bed that cut open a small wound on my forehead. Those were the times, when arguments were won by fights, when the strongest of your friends was always right, when I only argued with those I was sure I could beat if I had to. Which was pretty much just this thin guy in my class who was too weak even to start an argument. And then I grew up, with my last known punch thrown in aggression being sometime in Secondary 2. Lately, I realised that as you grow older, sometimes the diffe

I see him now and then But always along the same path That leads from my house to the MRT. He would have been like you and me, treading mindlessly along the path so familiar, had he the bliss of vision that we are so blind to feel. He wears no shades to cover his grey eyes that stare emptily into the sky. What his eyes fail to see, he makes up with a thin white cane that he swings ceaselessly in a faultless semicircle at an unerring pace left to right,  right to left. left to right,  right to left. A swing punctuated by frequent tappings on the ground Tappings, indistinguishable to the layman, but tappings that warn him of paths rising and falling, of marble changing to concrete, of concrete changing to road, and of things but he along knows. He leaves me in awe of his awareness of his surroundings, and his courage to take the step into the big black unknown. Yet he hears, feels and knows  that lies beyond thi

I admit it was not very typical of me, but it just happened that when I woke up, I realised that a whole day lay free in front of me. And since the last out-of-the-world thing I did was to water my plants with multi-vitamin water in the hope they would grow faster (only to see one of them consequently poisoned and left with 2 leaves now), I thought it was time to be me again. In an hour, I was out of my house and on my way to the East Coast, to discover where riding east of East Coast would lead to. 2 hours later I found that it ended in Changi beach, though come to think of it I could have just referred to the street directory to satisfy my curiosity and saved myself the 3 hours of cycling. But as Master Card said, there are some things money can't buy, and the journey was as such, even if I did have to pay 16 dollars to rent the bike. I had started of pretty upbeat, optimstic about the inspiration the sea would provide me for the next blog post. Sadly, the sea had better things t

"There's a story behind every person. There's a reason why they're the way they are. They aren't just like that because they want to. Something in the past created them, and sometimes it's impossible to fix them."                                                                                                                                                              -  Unknown I love a story, be it the one I read in a book or the one I hear from someone. And over time it is interesting to note that some people tend to be great storytellers, while most prefer to simply indulge in the few sentence gossip. Though I feel that what most people don't realise is that we are all walking novels, with lives filled with enough drama, joy and everything else. Just that, either we forget them, we don't observe them or we feel that there is nothing much in it to tell. In the internship that I am doing at an insurance company, one of the noteworthy

I was having a chat with a good friend the other day. He was telling me about how he was interning at a place and how he had come across a girl that very much matched up to his description of an ideal girl. And he went on and on about how down-to-earth she was, how cute her facebook display picture was, how all rounded she was and on and on. And then he shared a story with me. He narrated, "A few days ago, there was a fire drill at my workplace. While everyone was rushing down, I tried to find my ID first. But after searching for quite a bit, I still could not find it and I was getting a bit desperate. Then I saw her sauntering along the corridor to the Exit as if nothing was going on. She stopped by my room and asked me what I was doing and I told her I was searching for my ID. Then she told me to go ahead and search and that she will wait for me." And he paused, waiting for a reaction. I replied, "Hmm ok. So?" He literally screamed, "Don't you g

Have you been to Raffles Place MRT at 9:30 in the morning? It is a sight to behold. Scores of people, dressed immaculately, wearing some of the best brands that even a month of my NS pay would never be able to afford, exit the MRT and systematically make their way to the exits. Huge escalators run noisily with a distinct chug up into Raffles Place and the mass of bodies slowly and patiently separate into 2 man streams with their heads bowed down, not wanting to start their day with a misstep. The few rebels diverge from the main group and head to the staircase where the journey up, though more tiring, is certified fit by their health minded conscience. Once on top, the streams converge into a river and then diverge again into the different tunnels that lead to the different destinations, but to the same goal. A few lost souls pause at the junctions, aware of their goal, but unaware of their destination. But the river sidesteps these pebbles and continues flowing into the tunnel. Ho

Recently, I took part in a Technopreneurship programme organised within NUS. One of the guest lecturers, a man with quite a lot of credentials in this area, kept emphasising to the audience to go visit Silicon Valley and immerse ourselves in that culture. He said "Go to any cafe, any Starbucks and you will keep overhearing people who are sharing new ideas, discussing new developments. The atmosphere there is perfect for every entrepreneur. The conversations between people there, unlike in Singapore, do not dwell on where to get the cheapest plate of chicken rice". I am a local boy. Maybe not born here, but I have lived here long enough to be witness, victim and perpetrator of the most lengthy and pointless conversations. In short, if I am with people, most of the time is spent with me talking cock or with me spending time listening to people talk cock. In one of my earlier posts, I pointed out how this ability to perpetuate nonsense was quite important in making friends a

There is this nature reserve near my house, a nature reserve with a rather steep running trail that I frequent with my friends when in the mood for some stern mental and physical challenge. Though I have always kept to the same trail ever since I started running there, usually because I did not have the time to be adventurous. Though today was different. With the expectations of academics 2 weeks behind me and no work due anytime soon (other than the dusty ceiling fan my father has been pestering me to clean for the past 3 weeks), time was for the first time this year unequivocally on my side. After my run on the usual trail, I was walking back when side trails that I barely noticed during my runs started to make their presence felt. With a tinge of curiosity, a touch of adventurousness and an abundance of time I took it. And one unknown trail led to another unknown trail. By the time, I came back into contact with some form of human civilisation, it was with a certain se

If there is anything about myself that I am still to come to terms with, it is my astounding ability to waste time when there is a lot of it. During normal semester, I am perhaps the only guy out there who wakes up at 630am daily so that I can finish my round of meditation before going to school, who does his daily run once every 3 days and leads a life so disciplined that serving NS would actually be a step down in discipline. What I don't understand is that once the holidays start, all hell breaks lose. I have all the time to meditate and I deicide to push it to the next day. I borrow a whole lot of books and the only thing I do with them is renew them. And the goals I set for the holidays, they become but a reminder of what would have been. And now 3 more months of time lie in front of me. As expected, since the holidays began 3 days ago, the meditation has stopped and the books have been borrowed. And now I am going to set the goals.  Firstly, I want to take one last

Only a man with too much time on his hands and maybe too little hope in his heart will ponder about his bucket list when in the prime of his life. A bucket list, for those who do not know, is a list of things that you want to do before you die. It originated from its more well known cousin 'to kick the bucket'. Me, I thought about it when I had neither much time in my hands nor any lack of hope in my heart. The thought was by all means intentional because what one wants to do before one dies is perhaps what one really wants to do in life, but never thought possible once life started 'doing' him. Though the greatest wonder about our world, despite all the efforts of every mathematician and scientist to model every possible event and outcome, is that one can never really predict what is going to happen tomorrow. It is this unpredictability and how we dealt with it that has both made men and broken others. And so when my friends asked me about what was in my bucket l

I had a bet with a friend That the old woman worked Not to fill her time But to fill her pocket So the next time she came in wearing the same green uniform and the same white tudung and the same black gloves and holding the same old forceps I could not resist but engage her in some chit-chatting She was 77 A mother, grandmother and very recently, a great grandmother Her chattering belied her age Half Malay, the rest Minglish I could barely comprehend what she said But I just nodded And she did not stop And in the middle I popped the question “Aunty, why you still working” “Aunty sit home, Aunty read book Aunty sleep” She said faking a dozing off Guess I lost my bet And my friend won a drink But the conversation with the woman in green was worth the morning Though I have but one regret I asked her almost everything but alas I forgot to ask her her name 

There are two sticky notes on my desktop. One for my assignments, one for my daily goals. In the latter, one stands out for its redundancy in being there: 'Talk less. Listen more', a statement meant to arouse in me some kind of mature, adult behavior. Not that I never tried. There has been days when I have kept a straight and mature face and nodded calmly when people were talking to me and gave the impression that I was always in deep thought. Such days really existed. Just that they did not last. Sooner or later, somebody would come along and make a rather stupid comment, a situation I call 'Asking for it'. The temptation to point out his brilliance would be too much and once it started, it never really stopped. Though the person you see today is a far cry from the same boy who used to rush to the library after lunch during primary school, the same boy who loved his books and the same boy girls loved to share their secrets because they knew he could do anything but

During my NS, I remember the army loved to measure everyone and everything. Even before you enlisted, all your body measurements were taken, your IQ tested and your suitability for each vocation checked through a series of long tiring tests.Once you enlisted, you had fitness tests, weapon tests, SIT(leadership) test and the list never really ended. Though, in my opinion, SAF only got it right with a few tests, out of which the most important was also the one that was more of an unofficial measure. The measure of friendship. The rule was simple. To see who your true friend was, wait until the whole platoon was going through some real deep shit. Wait until you cannot take it anymore. And then wait and see who would come to help you despite the fact that he was going through the same pain. And this test always tended to produce some extremely surprising results, at least in my experience. I remember clearly, during a particular training exercise in Taiwan, I was totally drenched a

It is not often I do a reflection But when I do I look deep and Try to find the reason Behind the things I do And the things I don’t It is interesting how things have changed While everyone continued to toil away I lost trust in hard work And settled with mediocrity Maybe it was NS Maybe it was NUS But suddenly the little pleasures mattered And the sacrifices lost its way Because the way I saw it I only had one life to play away Though only the man With food in his stomach And money in his pocket Can afford to philosophise Until the day I stand on my two legs I might never learn the cost Of that extra inch of effort But by then it might be too late Then maybe it is time For me to sit down And forgo some pleasures And undergo some pain So that the day does not come When it is too late

" Letter writing is the only device for combining solitude with good company"                                                                                                               ~Lord Bryon There was a time when I was a kid who spent his evenings killing red ants with stones and walked around the front lawn with a big stick in my hand and with an even bigger air of a king lording over his subjects that were caterpillars and all other kinds of insects one would only find on Discovery Channel. That was the time when my father was a sailor, the time when I lived with my mother and the time when people used to write letters. I remember the postman in his khaki uniform who dropped a blue inland (a type of postcard cum letter only found in India. refer to picture on the right) into my mailbox which I would bring to my mother to read. On opening it I would straight away ask her, "Did Achan(father) writing anything to me?" He usually did. Probably just a l

I was never really born to be an artist. When I was 8 years old, my parents enrolled me in a tabla class. This however was not meant to last as during the first lesson, I grew impatient with my tabla teacher for making me drum in the same slow, dull and repetitive tune. At that age, starting on the basics did not make sense to a kid who straight away wanted to be able to drum away like the guy on TV. And so my parents' dream of seeing their son become a tabla player crashed on the first day itself. Then about 2 years ago, I enrolled myself in a guitar class. Not really because I had a thing for guitar, but more because I heard girls had a thing for guys who could play guitar and so I saw it as the final solution to my predicament. Soon enough though I found out that even girls were not a strong enough motivation for me to prick my nails on the metal guitar string and so, my second experiment came crashing down as well. So I went back to what I had been before that. I became an

Recently, I happened to be manning a booth in campus for my CCA to sell cards and other items to raise funds. Next to my booth was another group selling food items to raise money for their own community trip to Vietnam. What was interesting about them was that there were 2 guys and a girl seated there, next to each other. In the period I was stationed at my booth, I glanced at them once in a while to see what they were up to. Sometimes,  they were conversing, sometimes they were looking bored, but most of the time they were fixated on their smart phones. Over the last decade, perhaps no piece of technology has evolved as fast as the normal handphone. I remember just about 10 years ago, I used to own a Motorola Handset that looked quite primitive next to my friends' Nokia Handset which had the ever so popular Snake in it. Before you knew it, handphones started having colour displays, then along came the Motorola Razr that made phones fashionable and stylish and soon enough there w

I am not a huge fan of Bolloywood movies. The song and dance, the forever affluent characters, the overdramatic endings, the all too typical storylines and the lack of variety makes Bollywood one of the worst reflection of the rich culture and heritage of the India. But now and then, a movie would come along that would touch the right notes here and there. I know a large number of my non-Indian friends who loved '3 Idiots', a movie that I felt hit all the right notes and then sadly plunged into the all too ridiculous Bollywood endings. Another movie that I felt a stronger connection to was 'Munna Bhai, MBBS', a story about an everyday gangster who decides to study medicine. One part I particularly like about the movie is when the hero points out to his friend an old cleaner who worked in his school, who scolded everyone who walked across the floor he had just mopped, who incessantly complained. And the hero goes over and hugs the sweeper tightly and tells him 'Unc

To my dear friend, As you wished, a small portion of my writing, I write about you. The girl you seek is like an oasis in the desert.  She is a beauty to behold.. Somewhere lost in the middle of the vast sand dunes  You search for her in vain but alas she is far and few. Yet you search for her As if she was your penultimate aim But one day you will find her Like how you found the rest Only to find that someone found her before you So I tell you my friend Stop searching  And start living Because only in the desert is the oasis too far and too few

NS was a terrible time for me, not simply because of the brain dead and physically arduous trainings, but also because of the time it allowed me to philosophise about life. If you were not training and you did not have a PSP to squander your time away, chances were that you laid on the bed in your bunk thinking What next? Why am I doing this? Is this what life is about? What is life? What am I meant to do with my life? Is life about being happy? What is happiness? One question eventually lead to more questions and as expected, it was possible to come to answers for some and come to dead ends for the rest. This kind of thinking did to some extend build some maturity, not just in me but in most of my friends (which is why I have been having a change of mind that girls should serve NS). Then after NS came NUS. NUS threw even more questions at me about life as I found little meaning in solving the grotesque equations that lay in front of me. But NUS was smart. Unlike NS, NUS knew how t

The person you see on top is known as a toddy tapper. Found only in certain parts of India, mainly in the South, he climbs coconut trees to extract the sap from the flower, that he pours into the pot hanging from his waist. Once he collects it, it is left to ferment and the end result is a strong pungent alcohol the locals love. Why am I saying this? If the British had not conquered India, if they had not abolished the caste system that defined what jobs the people from each caste did, if they had not put an end to a practise that reeked of inequality, that man on top of the coconut tree, that would ave been me. Not that I am ashamed to have come from that position (here the position referring to my lowly caste and not to that on top of the coconut tree). Just that yesterday when I talked to a friend of mine, he was lamenting on how different things would have been if only....The dots are his life story. The "How different things would have been if only" is everyone