just wonging.

Today it is difficult to imagine that Joo Chiat Road was once a muddy cart track in a rural area owned by one man as an arterial road to his own properties. Thanks to his generosity (or self interest), the road has gradually become a beacon of racial and class harmony in Singapore, at least on the subset. Roads are formed over time, but not all roads manage to keep their historical imprint intact, practicalities for their local residents and allow one to trace back through its phases of development. Character requires the test of time. As a resident in the area would perhaps realize quickly, even if we were in the pre-internet age, one could survive quite well without stepping out of Joo Chiat Road. But functional practicalities aside, it is the community dynamism and racial harmony that makes this road so full of character. Let us embark on a thought-induced tour beginning from Geylang Serai. Functional Dynamism At the start of the street, the classic Joo Chiat Complex stan...

It was a typical day of land travel in Malawi. I had arrived from Cape Maclear on a motorbike, shared taxi, and minibus. The distances are not particularly long - around 90km in total - but add on the long waiting times it became a 2-3 hour journey. This was typical of local transport. Those are stories for another time. At the Mua junction, I had taken a 30 min hike into a hill in Mua Mission - a cluster of cultural centers and churches built out of red brick. It was started by a Canadian missionary and taught generations of wood carvers who could make a living out of their work. On my way back out from Mua Mission down to the main road, a man had appeared from the series of wooden food market stalls. It was church day and humans were scarce; empty food stalls were a site in itself. The man was in tshirt and shorts, middle aged, bearded, with a couple of teeth gone. He greeted me with a smile, exchanged a few lines and asked where I was going. “Salima,” I said. It was the tow...

WFH - a topic befitting the times. For those who are not acquainted with social media parlance, these three letters mean “work from home.” The acronym “WFH” apparently is also used in Indonesian communities, despite the acronym representing three English words. One would have guessed that in a country that has such a strong tradition of keeping the prominence of its own language (compare this to, for example, the use of English in many former English colonies), it would have developed its own acronym. It is perhaps also a stark reminder that, in this country, foreign influence lies not in usage of language but in the formation of the language itself, evident in the number of loan words from various influencing cultures. Living in a “foreign” country, my hypothesis would have been that the “experience” of WFH would be different as one traversed country boundaries. After running a few thought experiments, my conclusion is that in fact they would be more or less the same at a persona...