It doesn’t matter who we are, what we have, how knowledgeable we are, or where we live; we struggle. The man with incredible wealth, the man garlanded with success, struggles. He has no time for family or friendships. He works all the time. So he’s lonely. Do people like him for him or his money? Who can he trust? Nobody understands him except those who seek to take advantage of him. The woman with the …
To survive and thrive, I feel I have no choice but to consciously cultivate and live with a relentlessly optimistic and aesthetic outlook on life. The alternative is unconsciously backsliding into a miserable, depressing, hopeless cynicism. You may rightly point out that there is a middle between those ends. The choices of our outlook are not binary. It is a spectrum of infinite gradations. I acknowledge that. There is a middle, of course. But it …
Sometime last year, a lawyer friend called me up. We’ve known each other for some time. After exchanging pleasantries, he told me he had a matter he needed help with. ‘I thought of bringing you in. But then I realized that I didn’t know your practice area. Sorry for not knowing despite knowing you for so many years.’ ‘Aiyah, no worries lah. My practice area… How about this? Why don’t you tell me what help …
In my lifetime thus far, I have been all three. The only roles I have not been in are that of a prosecutor and judge. Who knows. The future is a strange place. As a patron of the courts I resorted to it to assert my rights under the Consumer Protection Act 1999 (‘CP99’). I wrote about my experience some time ago in The Day I Was a Litigant | Unfair Contract Terms. In summary, …
I asked myself that question from time to time in the first few years of practice when I ran the gamut of debt and traffic claims and defences in the lower courts for the firm. I asked myself that question during those long, dull and lonely waits. If I weren’t waiting in the subordinate court registry, I’d be waiting in court waiting for my case to be called up. In the good old days, whatever …