How to Build a Bridge

My father is incorruptible.

For the longest time ever, i've been thinking that my dad is a strong man. He perseveres through all the tough times in his life, and there have been many: motorbike accidents, getting a job without an education, and even after getting it, the menial nature of the job assuring each day to be arduous, brutish, painful. My mom's cancer later in life almost broke him down; but he found Faith, and the miraculous recovery of her cancer that accompanied it.

It takes a deep-rooted sense of discipline, courage and perseverance to be my father every single day of his life. To me, that was strength. Strength, pure and strong, able to overcome any obstacle in life.

Then he changed. With age, he learned the humility to suppress his chauvinistic, self-righteous self. With experience, he mastered control over his raging temperament. With wisdom, he gave a voice to his soul.

And i heard it today, steadfast, resolute and firm. That was the voice of strength. Not simply sheer willpower or endurance, for even the reckless have that. Nor constancy or discipline, for these may be misguided in efforts. I mistook strength for these, and blindly adored these values. But today I learned a most valuable lesson.

A strong person is the one who unwaveringly believes in and acts by his moral stand. A strong person never compromises his principles for money, power, popularity, status, or any lesser things. A strong person is incorruptible, and try what you may, you can never get him to sacrifice his values for self-interested material gains. Because as Socrates believed, it is in your self-interest to be moral. Because it is right, it is just; it is human.

And I've always felt, there exists such a wide, gaping chasm between the moral values you hold, and the actions you do in real life. Many never cross this gap. But today i listened to my father, and i saw the steadfast bridge he'd built over long decades of impetuousness, recklessness, stupidity and arrogance, mistakes all; and also good intention, grit, courage, blood and tears. I saw the way he strode forward straight into the sun, in the relentless belief that this was the right path. And i thought to myself, this is how a backbone is made.

Thank you dad, for showing me today how to build a bridge.

God's Algorithm

Today, I stayed so late in the office that i missed the last train and had to take a taxi home. No, i'm not usually that hardworking haha.

We had a great chat in our Moolah office, with arul, audrey and min. Then i had a call with pejman, marketing manager of GrowVC, about SEO and my idea for a crowdfunding event.

Well, thanks to this, i got to meet an interesting taxi uncle, and we discussed faith and religion. I ended up talking for some time in the taxi after stopping, and he even gave me a fatherly pat on the back when i left... Haha.

He believed in religion. That has always been something which i have always wanted to believe in, but didn't. Do we ever have a choice to 'decide' on the things we believe in? Or do our mind and personality, made up of all our experiences and thoughts so far, automatically make the connection, using some algorithm to match the dots together?

To extend it even further, how do natural events in the world 'choose' to occur? We have all these probabilities of them happening... at this very instant, the chance of a teeny-weeny asteroid hitting Earth is 0.2, and the chance of a dino-extinction sized one, 0.00000002. When we say that we leave something to fate, who or what actually 'decides' the actual event, out of a kazillion other random ones, to happen? If God is the one manipulating everything, does he have some automated decision-making system to churn out the outcomes for the many random events in this universe?
Pseudocode:

IF (human_behaviour == sucky) -> THEN (fricking_big_flood == ACTIVATED)

Now THAT would be God's Algorithm.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Wouldn't you know it... my U.S. trip got delayed due to issues with my German visa application.

The Good: Still in Singapore to celebrate Chinese New Year!
The Bad: My entire family has already booked a trip to Cambodia for themselves.
The Ugly: $500 ZUJI flight cancellation fee. WTF.

All thanks to the German embassy, whose inefficiency has given me new insights into how a failed system can screw up people's lives. Case in point: Out of the 10 over cases i witnessed while waiting for my turn, not a SINGLE one managed to complete anything they needed to do. One was asked to go download some missing doc from the net and come back another day. The next five people were similarly rejected. Another didn't have the exact cash for the processing fees, and had to go down to a nearby shopping centre to get it. Yet another was failed because of a minute detail that was conveniently unstated in the embassy website. Just one unreasonable little condition that ended up dragging the entire visa process by a month. Sadly, that last case was me.

But you can imagine. All these poor, needy souls submitting their applications anxiously, only to be rejected for the same issues over and over again, which could have been so easily solved with a little help, even something like a clearer instruction set on the website. Don't they even care?

These horror stories that recur every so often, that you wouldn't think possible in this day and age, especially not for an organization representing one of the most efficient of nations, Germany. It will shame Daimler, Volkswagen, Siemens to hear that their embassy still, for example, uses big thick books for some of their records. Or that it's downright impossible for them to pick up your phonecall queries. To illustrate it clearer: A long-term visa takes 1-3 months for Germany. It takes 4 days for a China one.

We get the idea. You just don't want any riffraffs in your country eh. That's a fantastic image of your country to portray, strong enough to override the beautiful impression i've had of Germany. All it takes is one bad apple to spoil the entire barrel.

Yea i'm pissed. All my weeks of planning... the short perfect holiday in Toronto with Wudao, the couchsurfing with strangers around the Bay Area... all gone in a flash.

As Archimedes once said,

"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall bloody smack your ass."