The Singaporean Sojourner

Will be taking a break for the next few days after a whirlwind of this new chapter in Tashkent.

Watching "The Sound of Music" past 12 AM with great company is food for the soul. "Climb ev'ry mountain Ford ev'ry stream Follow ev'ry rainbow Till you find your dream" 🌈

June 6, 1944: D-Day 72 years ago on this day 156,115 brave souls of the Greatest Generation landed on the beaches of Normandy to liberate Europe from Nazi tyranny. Last year as part of the 80th VE Day celebrations in Washington, I had the greatest honor of meeting Senior Master Sergeant (Ret.) Harry F. Miller who arrived in France three months after the Normandy landings and participated in the Battle of the Bulge. We owe an unpayable debt to the Greatest Generation. May we preserve the peace they fought for and repair this broken world that others have sought to destroy.

Missing those open-mic jam sessions at Wild Card in Singapore. “Our Love is Here to Stay” by the legendary George Gershwin

"Here's to alcohol, the rose colored glasses of life." — The Beautiful and Damned F. Scott Fitzgerald

Grand days of intellectual rigour at the Library of Congress in July 2024. Was preparing a brief for former White House officials on the future of an Asia-Pacific security architecture drawing from lessons of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty. Wonky stuff.

One thing I do miss in Tashkent is my old guitar. Perhaps I should get one here. From more than two years ago just as I was settling down in DC and living my childhood dream of studying in Georgetown. A dream is a wish your heart makes, from Cinderella.

Doing everything I can to fend off writer's block. What is your method of overcoming a creative impasse?

On the first floor of my office in Tashkent is a corner shop still waiting for a tenant. The red banner is prominent: “FOR RENT”. Below it the number for the agent who will probably charge you more than market price while perhaps sweeping the unit’s defects (quite literally) under the rug. During every tea time stroll through the office complex, I am greeted by the faux Apple storefront hiding the empty unit. The iPhones on sale are vintage. We are back in 2013 when the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5c were all the craze, the latter proving a less profitable product. (But why did they have to get rid of the home button!?) I am warped into a familar past where such Apple stores were universal in the globalized world I inhabited. If I stare too long, I am 14 again, but my body knows that the material world around me is no longer of that time. This decade has gone by and so many of us begrudingly admit that we have failed to become wiser or to have built a better world to replace what we knew. That brief moment of despair washes over me everytime I see this benign picture. Those faces and silloutes of nameless faces haunt me. Do they know of what lies ahead? Does the Apple store technician (let’s call him David) know what our world will be like more than ten years from that moment the camera froze him in time? David stares back at me. I cannot tell him what is to come, he will not hear me. Trump. Pandemic. Wars. Inflation. AI. Worry. Fear. Death. Destruction. Despair. But I cannot tell him that. Anyone who dreams of time-travel knows the cardinal rule not to disrupt the space-time continuum! If I could cross that portal into the past, I would just say that the future will be bright and great, there is nothing to fear. You never tell a child - unless they know better - that Santa Clause is not real. My 14 year old self was somewhere in the world then, too. I know that if some rouge time traveller sought to tell me the truth of the future, I would have said that I will do what I can to make it right. David reminds me everyday not just of the blind confidence of youth, but that unashamed hope that things will get better. I say this as if this sentiment has passed. It feels that way, but one must know that nothing has truly changed. The world hasn’t, but we have. Perhaps thanks to those very devices that David is encouraging you to buy. "Not today, sir. I’ve had enough screentime today.” I tell him. He doesn’t say anything. He just stands there in his blue t-shirt, black shorts, and white sneekers. “I like the fit!” I would say, hoping to make up for dissapointing him. There was no response. ”I’ll see you around, David. Anyways, back then, I was a militant Android user. You couldn’t have changed my mind”. Until a new tenant is convinced by the red banner, I will continue to pay a visit to my friend David. He never ages a day, but he reminds me so convincingly of who I once was, what we were, and that beautiful old world we had that was barreling, blindly, unashamingly, into the future.

Some random writing inspired by a benign poster of an empty storefront in a Tashkent office. Read here: https://higherstandard.substack.com/p/david-from-the-apple-store

Night school

Wisdom and Knowledge One of my favorite destinations during my time in America was the Rockefeller Center in New York City. There one is immersed in how art deco portrays the greatness of humankind. Every visit to New York meant a pilgrimage to this very spot beneath "Wisdom". How does one not feel humbled by one's own ignorance? How does one not fail to recognize that progress depends on the wisdom of our own insufficiencies? Truly, the mantra to live by is to learn as much as we can from the pages of books and the stories of great people. That, is knowledge as wisdom.

“You can’t edit a blank page” This is something I tell people who want to write. I often remind myself too. If you have an idea, even what seems to be a silly one, write it down. You never know what it may turn into. Some of the best writing I have done started with scribbles on scraps of paper and paper napkins. (Photo of my typewriter in Moscow. Taken on my Soviet film camera - Zenit - 35mm)