As a lawyer, I am fortunate my father is a lawyer too. In terms of age, we’re a generation apart. That means he has thirty years of lived experience ahead of me. That also means he has close to twenty years worth of legal practice experience ahead of me. He was called on 29.11.1979. I was called on 6.8.1999. That’s 19 years, 8 months and 8 days. But hey, who’s counting? The best thing about …
My own behaviour baffles me. For I find myself not doing what I really want to do but doing what I really loathe. Yet sure if I do things that I really don’t want to do, it cannot be said that ‘I’ am doing them at all – it must be sin that has made its home in my nature. St Paul’s letter to the Romans [Rom. VII.14ff, Phillips translation] Whenever I am gripped by …
My father once recited Rudyard Kipling’s If to me. I loved it and resonated with every line in that poem. But some of those lines I hold fast to. One of them is: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two impostors just the same:” Because of that line, whether it is a personal win, a loss, a success, a failure, an achievement, something to be proud of, or something to …
Once in my teens, I went to see my usual doctor, a general practitioner, in what is now called Damansara Uptown. I was suffering from pretty bad diarrhoea. Time always seems to slow down when we are sick or in pain or need to urgently go to the bathroom. One minute is a century. After what felt like three centuries, I was finally called in by the nurse to see the doctor. I was impressed …
For a long time now, I have not been discerning about whom I teach. The gifted, talented and brilliant naturally find equally competent teachers who wish to mentor, tutor and grow with them. Not so for those who lack such qualities. I used to think there was a sense of unfairness about the whole thing – the brilliant became more brilliant, whilst the rest i.e., the mediocre, the less talented, the stupid, the ‘unawakened’, were …