Singaporean

Columns, The Today Paper, Corporate Life

Graceless Singaporean

Newspaper column in Today on 2 Aug 2008.

We Singaporeans have a problem. We are graceless, they say. So we train ourselves to say the right magic words at the right times and to smile at random intervals. We still come across as a bit graceless at times.
We have to bite the bullet and face the music; we may be a bit on the rude side — when judged by the western norms of pasticky grace popularized by the media. But we don’t do too badly when judged by our own mixed bag of Asian cultures […]

Columns, Malayalam, The Today Paper

The Worldly Malayalees

I wrote this piece on the World Malayalee Conference 2008 for a Singaporean newspaper. I was away in India during the conference (22-25 August, 2008) and did not see it in print. This post is about my home state of Kerala, its language Malayalam, and those who speak it – the Malayalees. If those words make no sense to you, you may not be interested in this post.

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