Shiva's and Metta's Mother's Sutra

Last night a couple of friends and I met - kinda like our annual meeting - at Clarke Quay. We talked about politics and caught up and as usual the chat generally revolved around how there was generally no sense of the government being able to engage with any sense whatsoever with reasonable discourse. It is ok for the extreme bloggers to exist because they serve the government's purpose, but by and large moderates are just given a hard time because they are the real threat. So it kinda went along this vein. I have known many of my friends for at least 20 years and more or less they have been having this same problem for twenty years. Essentially the ability to ask for anything more meaningful in life from the PAP beyond this obsession with GDP and non-outcomes related results is impossible. The alignment of self interest with the interests of the country/state is however not just characteristic of Singapore, or indeed, this part of the world. IT is currently a malaise affecting m...

I think that to be Asian is to be born into a whole part of the world which is unafraid of colour... you know the can do, easy going, we can do it, chilled out spirit of Asia - that is what i love the most. From mosques next to temples from Bhuddist shrines, next to tree worship, from Christian churches beside chinese restaurants - it is all a complete organic mess which somehow just WORKS! It was Aid today and everyone was in the holiday mood... Today we packed it in as usual... here are the highlights. The trampoline park There's this trampoline park in Katong and the kids and us spent an hour bouncing around it... Man it was fun! Then we had sushi! The wasabi, the ginger, the shoya The choya umeshu! Ordering sushi like a boss And the variety of food Sukiyaki, endemame and salmon skin Ikura shoya Sushi with most of the ocean in it Arab Street - the nicest thing about Singapore is that you never need to leave i...

Our days are very strange in Singapore. Possibly because it is so small and possibly because there is so much going on and so much that can be done, time just seems to s-t-r-e-t-c-h... It's not like i am complaining. I like it when time stretches. Often i have too few hours in the day, so when the day just goes on and on and on, it is awesome. So the last 24 hours are a great example of what happened.... it all began in the Serangoon Gardens hawker centre... Pe tan chok for breakfast at the market with Ma The hawker centre is for some unknown reason, a self return tray hawker centre which no one returns trays in. I took this cos i think it shows that at least, superficially, we do think about halal and non-halal. Then...Ghin decides he wants to cycle after breakfast So he cycles At this point i have to say my sister's husband has this lovely cabin cruiser and since June she had been asking me to go to Nongsa, which is a marina in Batam Indonesia with them ...