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I’m sitting in a circle with a dozen men and one woman and we’re talking about what it’s like to be a man in Singapore. 1,311 more words

Visiting Kuala Lumpur last week, I checked into Hotel Majestic for a couple of nights to be near the Malayan Railways headquarters and train station. It had been a long time, and I wanted to wander around this part of my hometown. 2,618 more words

I’ve been wondering whether to delete this, because things changed. But I like the photos too much so I will leave this here for now. The Conversation project did not work out as I’d hoped and after waiting too long for news that we would go ahead, I decided one day to take the photos off the wall and return home. 1,557 more words

There are too many sad days to count, from tragic accidents which shattered families, to aeroplane crashes, SARS and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami which was unimaginable in scale and immeasurable in the depth of grief and extent of loss across so many countries. 1,350 more words

If you asked me to name one thing I did more than everything else over a lifetime of doing journalism, I’d say it was copyediting, being a rewrite guy. 2,121 more words

Oh man. The audacity of getting on stage and facing a roomful of people who came to listen to three authors talk about writing autobiographies. Throughout the hour at the Singapore Writers Festival on November 4, I expected someone to burst into the Blue Room at the Arts House and blow the whistle on me, screeching: “That man is a fraud, he never wrote an autobiography!” 1,621 more words

It’s September 21 2016,  forty years since I started work at The New Straits Times in Kuala Lumpur. Here’s how I became a journalist and what my first editors taught me. 3,049 more words