Thursday, May 17, 2007

Find Me A Singaporean


I’m appalled. This is the first time I’m watching this show, "Find Me a Singaporean” and I didn’t expect it to be so heartwarming. The show revolves around host Belinda Lee traveling to all places in the world searching for a Singaporean. They were there for different reasons. In today’s show, she arrived at Yunnan China, to visit a psycho-therapist, Chen Fang-Fang.

The journey started off by introducing Fang-Fang who is a volunteer in China. She has been climbing up the mountains, bringing medical aid and therapy to the villagers. The villagers whom she is providing aid to are either orphans or mental patients.

In one of the residence they visited, there was this 26 year old guy who was kept within 4 walls (stack up by wooden planks), similar to a pig ark for 8 years. The host was shocked. The guy was suffering from some mental illness and it led him to go into rage at times. At the age of 18, he burnt down his house when he had an outbreak. His family had no choice but to put him up in a pig ark. As much as I know about how suppressed some villagers are in China, I didn’t expect that such things existed.

Towards the end of the show, Belinda broke down in tears. I’m impressed with how she had fought back her tears throughout the interview with the patient. I’m even more impressed with Fang-Fang, against all odds stayed and help out the needy people in this place for 3 years. This show really taught me something. I’m going to catch it again next week. You should too.

Sunday, May 13, 2007

Definition of Life


I met up with an army mate recently and man...was he inspirational! We sat down for a jug of beer at Pasir Ris Park soon after dinner and we started chatting about LIFE... He just got his advance diving lesson and I could tell he is very passionate about scuba diving...

This “diving” subject somehow got us to start lamenting about how we are wasting our life while we like our fellow Singaporeans, kept whining about how boring our life is. On the contrary, it is WE who made our life seem so dull.

We realized that a majority of us are stuck in the so call “Rat Race” where we’re forever chasing a bigger house (got to be condo) and better cars. We have seen people who are able to spend the whole weekend cleaning and polishing their cars, going to the accessories shop to “zhng” their cars (putting luminous light, adding spoilers as high as Taipei 101, etc). At the end of the day, they start to complain how boring life is.

You see, it is not uncommon for the general public to define “success” as being rich, driving big cars, staying in condos, carrying Gucci and LV. So what are we missing out? Experiencing LIFE;

So what do I mean by this? Well some of you may say, No… I do experience life. I make it a point to go on holiday every 6 months. I see the world. But what are you seeing actually? I told this army mate… We do more of a “sightseeing” rather than really experiencing the culture, mingling with the folks, enjoying the pace and basically… the whole package. Besides, you don’t really need to travel to experience life.

Let’s start with picking up a sport or any activity which you could be excited about, something which will drive you to look forward to before the start of the day. This way, you will start to meet more people, learn newer things and enjoy life. I know it’s difficult to explain my definition of life to you in just this simple post. However, everyone is allowed to have their own perspective in life and how they want to manage it. The adventure begins now...

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Yahoo Photo Shutting Down

How lucky I must have been... Just a couple of weeks ago, I was contemplating if I should be getting a Yahoo Photo or Flickr... I surf around and realized that Flickr brings out your photo in the best fashion as compared to Yahoo. There you have it... I'm right again...