Random-ish thoughts

• Yes, Minister is British satirical humour at its best – smart, precise and hilarious. Watch it or read it! (It’s been my bedtime reading the past few nights.)

• Listened to this on repeat for half an hour during one productive stretch of work today, then realised I could be missing important snatches of office corridor talk and snatched out my ear-buds, reluctantly.

• Am struck by iPhone envy. But learning to re-love my nifty E71, where I’m drafting this post :)

• Shall finally write about the enjoyable 天冷就回来 soon.

Homesick?

I think I must be, despite the great company of my colleagues.  I woke up one day humming a fragment of a song, and later in the day I found myself singing out loud in my head the lyrics.  They go like this.

景色依旧良辰不在，人儿几时回来。 [The scenery is as it was, but the good times are past; when will he come back?]

I don’t think I consciously meant to remember the rest of the song; at least, I don’t remember trying to recall the rest of the lyrics as actively as I sometimes did when I genuinely wanted to remember a song; but, all through the day, at odd moments, I would catch my mind turning these lyrics over and over; the sense was that there was more to look for.

Then today, I found myself singing another part of the song.

我有诉不尽的悲凄，寄托在梦里带给你，[I have uncountable sorrows, which I entrust to dreams to bring to you.]
虽然千山万水隔离，但愿在梦里相依。[Although mountains and seas separate us, I hope we can lean against each other in dreams.]

And immediately I realised (maybe it was an after-the-fact rationalisation; it occurred too quickly for me to tell the difference; our minds are mysterious things) that I had been singing that song because of the line “although mountains and seas separate us”, because that vast immutable distance from a certain bedrock of familiarity was what I had been feeling through all those colourless meetings, even though the meals have been uniformly good to excellent and despite the great company.*,** 

I prescribed a call back home for my homesickness, and I am happy to report that it’s abated, a bit :)

*Ok, not totally colourless - the meetings have been enlivened by a brusque Indian who breaks iron-clad protocol at his will and stands out like a caveman would in genteel society. 

**A recent “fruits of the sea” pasta – mussels, squid and shrimp tossed together with al dente spaghetti in olive oil and white wine – and the second prawn buffet in a week were particular highlights.  A galling episode occurred after the pasta meal: we went to a restaurant in the Old Town part of Geneva for warm chocolate cake – we had heard from a colleague who was stationed here that it was good, the warm chocolate cake – but when we ordered, the proprietess of the establishment (known for its roast chicken, which smelled delicious) told us that she had many customers and could not serve us if we didn’t order anything else.  The thing is, this was at 9-something pm, by which time all reasonable folk would have had their dinner, don’t you think?!***

***Ah well, it was really her perogative.  And the restaurant was crowded.  *grudgingly, still fuming a bit*  I guess in these times she would have an added reason to squeeze as much profit out of her operations as she can, and that’s what she did.

Geneva – 3-in-1 coffee, clumsy swans and Joseph Stiglitz

[Update II: Some points that I related from Joseph Stiglitz's address at the ILO Governing Body and others are captured in a recent Project Syndicate article of his, here.]

[Update: I edited some portions of this entry to make it sound better and to recount Prof Stiglitz's address more accurately, particularly at the second bullet point.]

I am typing this nursing some coffee (3-in-1 comfort coffee from Singapore – my mum’s great idea!) and listening to Stef Sun’s plaintive and demonstrative 我不难过 in my hotel room, which has just been chilled by the March Geneva night.  All is well in my part of the world.*

As I mentioned, I had the good fortune to hear Joseph Stiglitz speak about the global financial crisis a few days back.  About half an hour before he was due to speak, the assembly hall started to fill up, and the anticipation and noise built like a jet preparing for takeoff.  When the chair called the meeting to order with a bang of his gavel, no one could hear him.  He had to almost break the thing before anyone noticed.  I think this crisis is going to make economics a fad as a course of study and many economists rock stars. 

Prof Stiglitz

• made it clear that, far from being “decoupled”, the world’s economies were more integrated than ever.  This aspect of globalisation contributed to the pervasiveness of the crisis – for example, although catalysts of the economic crisis such as toxic mortgages and a philosophy of deregulation were centred in the US, this did not prevent countries with good monetary policies from suffering.  In addition, the interconnectedness and interdependence of the world’s economies meant that stimulus packages at the national level would leak i.e. flow outside national borders and that it would be more efficient to have a global stimulus package, coordinated by global decision making.  I suppose there is a sort of inevitability about this reasoning: if national economies cannot escape their impact on one another, then it follows that all the affected players have to sit together to work something out.  However, national and political interests being what they are, I can only see this happening at the pace of particularly clumsy swans.**
• described how he thought the crisis came about.  I’ll try to summarise it: As a result of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, during which the IMF lent money to many countries but only if they fulfilled onerous conditions based on sufficient reserves, many countries in this “class of 1997″ resolved to never again be in that position and therefore to build up their reserves.  This led to income not spent in these countries and resulted in a lack of aggregate global demand.  To Stiglitz, the unsustainability of the many bubbles and the lax regulations that abetted them were not a surprise – the lack of aggregate global demand meant that regulations had to be lax for economies, particularly the US economy, to continue growing.  (Here I must admit I would love to find out how one determines that aggregate global demand is lacking.  What would be considered adequate demand?  What indicator would one look at?)  To paraphrase Prof Stiglitz, if the global economy was based on American consumers, who made up the richest nation in the world, spending beyond their means, it was certainly flawed.  He continued to say that unless fundamental reform occurred, the world cannot return to sustainable economic growth.  To me, this is a little scary, because something like a country’s savings rate – the proportion of income that is saved by its consumers – is fostered over generations and would be difficult to change, i.e. it would be very difficult for the world to return to sustainable economic growth.  Or perhaps some sort of reform may mitigate the negative impact of over-high national savings rates?  Then a thought struck me (this was a surprise: it is not often I encounter violent thoughts – ok ok that’s a bad joke :p) – how are we defining sustainable economic growth?  Is not the natural state cyclical, with peaks and troughs?  Prof Stiglitz also noted that we have been measuring economic growth with GDP growth.  To assess economic growth, he said, we should look at how it benefited the individuals of the system.  In this regard, median income in the US – I suppose adjusted for inflation etc. – has not increased over the past 7 or 8 years.  So ideally, I take it, sustainable economic growth would involve growth in the common man’s median income.  (Wonder whether that metric has increased over the years for Singapore.)  And what does “sustainable” mean i.e. how long does the growth have to occur over?
• pointed out that the US’s brand of “capitalism” essentially meant socialising losses and privatising profits, the continuation of a system of perverse incentives that afforded no penalties for excessive risk taking.  If banks are too big to fail i.e. they will unfailingly get bailed out, as seems to be the case in the US, they are not going to worry about taking risks and failing, are they? 
• mentioned the concept of automatic economic stabilisers such as insurance and social protection – when the economy was weak, spending in these two areas traditionally went up and shored up the economy – and how the US had weakened theirs and therefore exacerbated the crisis. 
• noted that well-managed bankruptcies that entailed essentially financial reorganisation should be allowed to occur.
• demonstrated some quite appropriate gallows humour.  At the end of his address, when he clearly had more to say but had to cut himself short in view of the time, he remarked that the good news was that the crisis was going to go on for a while, so he’d have many opportunities to come back and talk to us all again :p

 I’ve only started to try to understand economics, so most of the above was new to me, and it is no exaggeration to say that I was quite captivated by the speech.  Because of my newness to this, I may well have miscommunicated some of the good professor’s remarks, so… well, just a little disclaimer :)

 *Not least because my beloved Reds just whipped their hated rivals in the football match of the season.

**Yesterday was a particularly fine day – spring is certainly coming – and the three of us got some ice-cream and sat by the rocky shore of Lake Geneva to savour the weather.  Soon two swans swam over, and… I can’t describe how birds with as regal a bearing as swans could seem to beg – maybe it had something to do with a certain supplication of their sinuous necks – but these swans seemed to beg.  When they realised there were to be no handouts from us, the swans looked mildly baffled, then disappointed, though to be fair they seemed used to the latter and accepted it with good grace.  Then a gentlemen came to sit near us, bearing a bag of bread crumbs.  The swans noticed him and paddled toward him, not too slowly, and sure enough he started tossing out small handfuls of the stuff.  The swans were just starting to settle down for the meal when seagulls began to swarm all over them.  They were several times smaller than the swans and so agile that they seemed always to be first to the crumbs.  They would pick the crumbs off the water right next to the much bigger swans, which looked anything but graceful – sometimes the swans didn’t notice the food right next to them, sometimes they took so long to turn or to manoeuvre their necks that the crumbs were long gone by the time they did.  One unfortunate swan had a bread crumb land on its broad back, and I worried for what seemed like many minutes that its back would soon be the target of seagull divebomb attacks before it finally twisted its neck behind to snatch up the morsel.  The speed of these swans, I fear, is the pace at which global decision making on the economic crisis can realistically take place.  (Boy that was a long and winding road to explicate that metaphor eh? :p)

Geneva – food and other memorabilia

It is coming to the end of my sixth day in Geneva – I’m here for about three weeks on a work trip – and I find myself  marking each day by the meals I have, especially dinner, easily the highlight of each day, possibly because each day is work and then dinner and then back to one’s hotel room.  On my first day here, my colleague – who’s been to Geneva many times – introduced me to Upper Crust, which specialises in ready-made subway sandwiches with generous fillings.  For dinner, we had beef pho at one of Geneva’s ubiquitous Chinese/Vietnamese restaurants; the pho turned out to be marvellous fortification against the chilly evening wind.  On the second day, a colleague who works in Geneva and her husband hosted us for dinner at their apartment, and her husband made some baked (roast?) chicken and summer veggie soup with sausages that really hit the spot on a cold damp night.  On the third day, this colleague herself made us some chicken rice for dinner!  The rice was painstaking studded with ginger and chicken skin, and the chicken itself was presented resting on a bed of bean sprouts and lettuce, ringed by tomato slices.  The meal was accompanied by a light stew of braised straw mushrooms and eggs and a clear soup that went very well with the chicken, fully up to the standard of professional hawkers in Singapore :)  On the fourth day, this dear colleague and her husband brought us to a different Chinese/Vietnamese restaurant, where I again had beef pho, which turned out to come in a beefier, tastier stock.  On the fifth day, we went to a restaurant whose 梅菜扣肉 (essentially pork belly braised with preserved mustard cabbage) my Geneva veteran of a colleague kept raving about.  Together with that, we had stir-fried pak choi and Sichuan chicken and white rice, and it was like a slice of home, it was.  The stir-fried pak choi was some of the best I ever had, the Sichuan chicken tasty and the pork belly was just a little too lean, but still mouthwateringly yummy.  If you’ve tasted preserved mustard cabbage, you’ll know how it combines a delicate sourish taste with a tender juiciness that makes it extremely appetising, and this dish really just demanded the rice to finish it with.  What a wonderful meal we had!  And today, just this evening, we went to an Italian restaurant near our hotel – another recommendation from that Geneva veteran – and I had a very good spaghetti aglio followed by some homemade tiramisu, which was of just the right texture and brimming with coffee liqueur.  The Italian restaurant comes highly recommended by me: the pizzas that my colleagues had came from a wood stove and were simply delicious, with just enough crust, not too much cheese and generous portions of ingredients; the music got my colleagues and I listening and commenting in an almost synchronised manner about how listenable it was; the service was superb; and certainly not least – I am still burping up coffee fumes :)

Geneva has been memorable because of the food I’ve had, and also because I’ve inhaled more second-hand smoke here in the past few days than I have in the last year in Singapore, because the buses and trams here are so punctual and technically advanced and I like the way they stop at every stop and don’t open their doors until a passenger presses a button to alight or enter the bus, because I saw a distinguished gentleman whose thin face was dominated by a moustache of fearsome bushiness bristling sideways past his ears, because the sky here is so calm most days – it’s been milder than I would expect here apart from a couple of gray chilly drizzle-pocked days; on the first day I think I could have gotten a tan from the sunshine streaming in through my hotel room window – that jet trails often linger and linger, because sirens – of the police and the ambulance types – are frequent day and night beyond all plausible explanation and lastly, at least for these six days, because my colleagues and I had to look all around the area near our hotel and then cross the river to the shopping district before we came by seemingly the only place in Geneva that sold Rolex watches, a place with a door lady (yes, a lady whose only job was to ask if you were visiting their store – which was the sort of place that makes me feel that I should use a more exclusive word than ’store’ and that sadly but understandably that more exclusive word is beyond my limited peasant vocabulary – and open the door for you if you were so doing) and snotty saleswomen.

Oh, and today Joseph Stiglitz gave what to me was an eye-opening and scintillating talk at a session of the International Labour Organisation Governing Body.  Man, you should have seen the staid old assembly hall hoppin’ like a rock concert venue before U2 took the stage.  I took some notes, so should be able to relate some of the topics he touched on in a later post :)

Touched

Today, I was given a very special gift.  (To be accurate, I got it last week, but I found out who gave it to me and I opened it only today.)  The person who gave it to me made it clear that there were only three of it in the world.

It turned out to be a 12-month calendar made of beautiful close-up pictures of flowers, painstakingly photographed.  I haven’t confirmed it yet, but, given that the person who gave it to me is a photo buff, she probably took the photos and selected twelve of them for a calendar.  To me, it’s an inspired yet practical gift.

I felt incredibly moved.  The photos were stunningly detailed, at least one of them – with a bee slightly off the very centre of the bloom – wondrous and achingly beautiful to behold.

In my past life…

I must have been a barnacle or some sort of coral polyp in my past life, I am so sedentary :p

“That cloud does impressions.” II

It’s been about two months now.  Since the Lunar New Year hols, I’ve been waking up at six-ish in the morning every workday (I say to myself, and others if they ask) to beat the MRT crowd, which honestly is something fierce during the school term.  But, really, my waking up early could easily be to look at clouds.

It used to be that I got out of my house at about seven-thirty.  The sun is up, and the clouds look like they generally would the rest of the day, and you would be able to tell if rain was coming fairly reliably.

Now, as I walk out of the house, the sky is just waking up.  The sun, off in its corner in the approximate vicinity between the roofs of two low-rise condos – I say approximate because it’s shifted a little these two months – starts turning up the intensity, so that eye-catching patterns of yellow and bright orange and pink and red and purple blaze and tumble and swirl and form an aura around it, and sometimes they obscure the sun but sometimes they set it off just right and there is a sense of rightness, of a complete picture.

And as I walk out of the side street where my house it and turn left onto the street leading to the main road, because there is no building in front of me, there is only sky and in the sky usually clouds.  I remember a recent bonanza, gorgeous cloudscapes several days in a row: small, tight patterns arranged like fish scales; bold splotches, dense and opaque, and brush strokes that slide carelessly off the side of a limitless canvas; classic cotton puffs, wispy and massive; and sometimes a combination; and once, an early morning jet stream, high, high up in the sky, lasing into a slash of cloud and out again.

I can certainly see why some folks are fascinated by clouds.

Of tests and a short quest for lychee

Last week, I made a couple of testing presentations and took the GMAT.  I’m happy to report that, all in all, the results were satisfactory.

Last week, I had two great meals.  One was with a pal on Wednesday evening, at Coffee Club.  I had tried the tiger prawn aglio olio a month or so before, and had enjoyed it, and it turned out that she had tried the same thing on a separate occasion and liked it too.  So we both ordered that, and it was disappointing – the pasta was not warm enough, so the bite of the chilli and the tartness of the tomatoes and the sweetness of the onion slices were all muted; someone was over-enthusiastic with the oil; even the prawns themselves were mere crunch, with barely a hint of the taste of sea.

We also ordered the same drink – my pal had enjoyed the rambutan drink when she tried it here the other time, she said, so I joined her in ordering it.  When the pink, smoothie-like drink came, she was a bit puzzled – she remembered that it was white.  Then she tasted it, tentatively, and said she thought it was the drink she had liked.  It was only later, when she reviewed the menu, that she realised that she had previously tried the lychee drink.

We finished the night with dessert at the Canele outlet at the basement of the Paragon.  I was quite amazed that we could get seats.  We had a slice of Le Royale and a strawberry tart.  The latter was frankly rubbish – stale pastry, over-glazed strawberries – but I was told that the Robertson Quay outlet has higher standards.  The company that evening, as always, made up for the food.

Strangely enough, I had a lychee drink – something with soda and lychee syrup and mint leaves and a single lychee, likely from a can – at TCC a couple of evenings later, after a stomach-busting Japanese a la carte buffet at Minori, during which I had sushi (ordinary), sashimi (generously sliced and above average for a buffet), maki (ordinary), temaki (ordinary), soba (yuk), yakitori (varied; one pork belly skewer was excellent – succulent and layered in texture – but another had been left  to grill for too long and was nearly petrified) and tempura (unremarkable), and smelled the most amazing pork belly soup I’ve smelled, an appetite-stirring combination of miso and rich pork juices.  I found the combination of lychee and mint weird and nearly overly sweet.

What 2008 brings

This is late. I’ve been meaning to write about some cool ideas I particularly liked in the 9 Dec 2007 issue of the New York Times Magazine, then I thought I’d make it a review of 2007 and a record of some lessons, so that the passing of the years is coupled with the gaining of experience and knowledge, then I got to thinking that my table is too high, and therefore my keyboard is placed at an awkward position for typing, and therefore maybe I’ll do the blog another day. Procrastination: I am a master at it. I don’t even have to try.

A few things happened to jolt me out of that.

One, a colleague got me a book that late KPMG CEO Eugene O’Kelly wrote in the roughly 100 days between the diagnosis of his brain cancer and his death in Sep 2005. Chasing Daylight is a clear-eyed memoir about dying, and, knowing you are about to die, doing a good job of it. Upon knowing his fate, O’Kelly describes how his accounting-trained mind resolved to complete a “to-do list”, and one of the items on this list was to “unwind” his relationships, to “beautifully resolve” them through a combination of reminiscing, appreciation and authenticity. A short excerpt from the book should make clear what I’m babbling about:

For example, take my college roommate, Doug… [w]e spoke maybe once a year now, but we shared a history, and we’d always enjoyed each other’s company and were intrigued by what the other was doing. I wrote him a note.

Doug,

As you probably have heard, my health is failing me as I deal with advanced stage cancer. I wanted to write to tell you how much our friendship over the many years since Penn State has meant to me.

Best wishes in your life.

God bless,

Gene

I’d planned to follow this with a call, to elaborate on my gratitude, but first I wanted to think about all the great memories we’d shared. The summer of our freshman year, when he and I had done ROTC duty on the USS Wasp… played cards against these two guys from Miami of Ohio… get served four meals a day and worked on the flight deck and in the boiler room…

Doug called me first… we had a good conversation… he reminded me that I had been the first among our group to reach a number of milestones – getting married, becoming a father – and now I was first to the next life. He and the other guys would be joining me later, he said.

Toward the end of the conversation, I told Doug how much I appreciated what he had added to my life. He did the same. I was not teary-eyed, nor, it sounded, was he.

…

At the end, Doug said, “Good-bye.”… No platitudes or denial. Just good-bye. I appreciated that.

Essentially, O’Kelly actively sought closure in each relationship he cared about. I think this is one of the wisest things I know of. What Chasing Daylight also made clearer to me was that successful people are driven – I think what made O’Kelly CEO of a big accounting firm also made him want to manage his death – so I should be a bit less lackadaisical about things e.g. blogging.

The second thing that jolted me out of my procrastination was a simple flip through the Straits Times’ Recruit section. I realised that little of my achievements in my five years of working would help in my successfully getting most of the jobs I wanted. That wasn’t strictly speaking a surprise, but the immediacy of it was a wake-up call. Ergo, I need to take more control of my career.

The third thing. In my room, there is a soft-board that I use to pin bills and warranties and so on – to remind me of stuff I need to do. I came across an envelope I had thumbtacked to it a while back. I knew it contained contents from my wallet that I had taken out before I went for reservist training, and that I had resolved to put back into my wallet when I had the time. Sorting through the discount cards and receipts, I was shocked to realise that I had last looked at that envelope more than six months ago. Time accumulates day on day like no one’s business.

So, I shall procrastinate less. Will be blogging about those NYT Magazine stories when I return, but first, a haircut and booking my GMAT date.

37 days to Christmas

I count down to Christmas every year. It’s a ritual that’s persisted, probably in part because, every few years has seen a special Christmas. There were a couple of early ones, when I was a teen: my brother and I would stay over at an aunt’s flat for a few days before Christmas, preparing for the party, wrapping gag gifts and thinking of forfeits for the games, playing wild games that made us laugh like loons deep into the night. There was the year in junior college, when I exchanged gifts with this girl. Then there was that year, my first at my current job, when my boss set up a department outing – part work, part celebration – that made me feel so much I belonged.

A couple of non sequitor things I came across:

• a review of the movie Beowulf in verse
• he is coming to town again! And I thought I might have seen the last of Jacky Cheung…