Life, Laughter and Everything Else

Your father pokes in just your head through the kitchen door He knows I love it when he does that You stare at me with those big blue eyes You have seen me sitting here before Having the same breakfast day after day Yet you look at me curious, intrigued, unfamiliar I cannot help but smile Like you are the first rays of sunshine in a cold German sky Those big blue eyes, those fluffy cheeks, Those chubby hands and feet Your attempts at speaking that comes out as a shout Incomprehensible yet screaming Here I am. Look at me. Your sweet, addictive smile Your heartfelt , genuine laugh That makes me want to do The strangest of dances The stupidest of voices The most childish of actions The most idiotic of gestures All so I can make you laugh Just one more time. One day you shall grow up By when I would have gone my way. If you were ever to feel one day And one day you will That your life was worth nothing That it had no meaning Reme...

It came without warning, though like the seasons, a week of summer had to be balanced by another week of winter. Was it fatigue? Was it loneliness? Or was it both? I could keep my mind off it during the day, clicking between tabs, choosing between entertainments, alternating between colleagues' requests. However, what had begun on a quiet Sunday, laid dormant, waiting for me to finish my tasks so it could drag me down again, into an uninterrupted melancholia. Longings for home, family, friends, anything that was familiar and comforting replayed in my mind. Old and once dismissed hurts came back to sting. Though worst were the questions, why I a feeling this way? What happened to drag me down for the optimism of the previous week? What was making me sad? I turn to literature, spirituality and writing. Rumi verses placate me and gives me hope. This human being is a guest house every morning a new arrival A joy, a depression, a meanness some momentary awareness comes an...

Why do I long for the past?  For the family  with their familiar tongues, their familiar faces,  their familiar laughs, their familiar comforts Why do I long for the past? For the youth,  with its youthful friendships,  its youthful energy, its youthful ignorance,  its youthful promise. Why do I long for the past? If they were once all, past, present and future.

So I called my mother and told her “Ma, I am ready to get married. Go find me a wife”. It was clearly not my intention to take this track, but after years going through an all boys education, 2 years in the testosterone filled army, another 4 years in Engineering and then jumping from one Engineering firm to another, all I remember seeing was men, men and more bloody men. And when you ex finally decides to find herself a boyfriend and all your closest friends decides to get married within the same 2 month period, it hits you. “Fuck, I need to find someone”. The general tendency in such cases was to grab the nearest woman you can find and ask her out, but when living in a country where foreigners are generally viewed with overall suspicion, any kind of grabbing ,of anything, was highly advised against. And when your white friend next to you with his crappy pictures was getting more Tinder matches than you with your best pictures, at some point you come to realise that 1) Yo...

The night did not go according to plan when what was intended as a fun fact for the day turned into a heated discussion. She just could not and would not understand. "H ow is it you can accept such a system, this lack of political freedom? How can you be ok with it?" , she drilled me, outraged at what she perceived was my cowardice and compliance to a political system that bordered on dictatorship. " Well, we Singaporeans don't really care about political freedom. Some slight fear aside, we trust our government who has done a great job in providing us with security, jobs, housing etc", was my defense. But she would not let go of the topic, which irritated me and brought me on the brink of pointing out how her own country with all its political freedom was perpetually bankrupt and living on EU loans, not forgetting the jobless masses. However, sense prevailed and a friend brought an end to the night. To the West, in particular to those who have never been outsid...

It was something that I was certain of. While friends with new jobs and newly found riches started looking for nests of their own, which they could furnish as they wanted, where they could play music as loud as they wanted and have all the privacy they could wish for, I felt otherwise.  I wanted to be around people. To say I would have been ok being around any kind of people would be an exaggeration. After having lived in student dormitories where people did not clean up the kitchens or toilets after they used it, I was painfully aware of how living with the wrong type of people could make the experience  absolutely horrible. However, assuming there was a certain level of respect and shared responsibility, that experience could be flipped. Not only could it be flipped, but it was evident to me how the constant presence of other people in your life, the conversations you had with them, the stories, moments, things you shared with them almost daily was so critical to my...