Category Archives: Life

Cyberbullying

Posted on by
Reply

The past few days I have been riveted to a saga on this micro blogging site I signed up for. I am not sure if it is popular in other parts of the world, most of the bloggers there seem to be from Southeast Asia.

What happened was that one of the more popular bloggers, let’s call him A,  went on a trip a reasonably faraway place with his wife, toddler, infant and parents and blogged about how difficult it was travel with young children/infants. One of the other bloggers, let’s call her B,  with children similar ages as that blogger and who does not live in this continent commented  that it was not too difficult, especially since in Asia you had access to help (parents, live-in helpers etc) which she apparently didn’t have.

This happened early in the month of July I guess. Then sometime in the middle of the month, the blogger’s wife, let’s call her C, apparently a popular blogger herself (apparently since I had not heard of her before joining this site) and one who makes a living blogging herself wrote a post on her blog, calling out B out in her blog in a very passive aggressive way – not naming names, but with enough details that her followers, many of whom also are on the micro blogging site, recognized who B was.

Then it started – a lot of the bloggers started calling out B and it degenerated to a lot of name calling, which was awful to read. People who supported B also were called names, which given that quite a few of the name callers are supposedly respected bloggers who make a living through blogging and have a lot clients whom they blog about. The irony was that A to whom the original comment was intended to has kept silent completely. C responded once and I understand from B’s posts that she reached out to C through email to apologise.

This whole incident has left a bad taste in my mouth. This is simply a case of Cyberbullying. According to Wikipedia , Cyberbullying is the harming or harassing via information technology networks in a repeated and deliberate manner. According to U.S. Legal Definitions, “cyber-bullying could be limited to posting rumors or gossips about a person in the internet bringing about hatred in other’s minds; or it may go to the extent of personally identifying victims and publishing materials severely defaming and humiliating them”

What was a non-incident has been blown up unnecessarily and made people take camps. While I have not yet commented on this in the micro blogging site, I decided to post here, mostly because this is something many of us may have experienced.  So if a person posts comments which may not be to your liking (maybe showing a hint of crack in the perfect life you potray on social media), does that mean, you and maybe your friends start bullying the person who posted the comment? Most of the people who commented negatively against B were those who were not involved – just friends of A & C. Where does the line end?

I am now seriously worried for my kids as teens are supposed to be experts at Cyberbullying. I need to educate them over the school holidays on the perils of posting online, especially since they now move out the secure primary school environs and more to a more socially aware and social media dominated environment that is secondary school.

More information on Cyberbullying, escpecially in relation to children and teen cyberbullying can be found here, here and here.

The internet never forgets, what you post anywhere will stay on forever – even if you delete it….

2015 Week 30 Update

Posted on by
Reply

We are in August now, where did the months go! Less than half the year to end 2015 and two months more to the PSLE!

FullSizeRender (2)

The Crowds cheering the mobile columns

The usual week which was enlivened by the NDP preview we went to on Saturday! This was our first NDP and the atmosphere was terrific. We got tickets for the Floating platform, and not at the Padang where all the action was, but the fireworks here was simply amazing!

If this was the case one week before the celebrations, I am sure the energy and atmosphere next week will be electric!! And the fireworks, they were amazing! I heard that what was shown at the preview was only a part of what will be shown next week, so if you are in Singapore next Sunday, do watch the NDP show. I’m planning another post on the NDP show later in the week and have more pics in my camera which I need to download, so more later…

But I was so tired after coming home and was even feeling it yesterday. A heartfelt salute to all the performers, presenters, motivators, ushers and volunteers who have been doing this every Saturday right from July….

Work-wise, I spoke to my boss about not going for the Delhi trip later in the month and he asked me to reconsider as the meeting is basically my baby and I have been planning and working on it for almost 3 months now, from logistics to agenda. So I will talk to S and the brats once more and take a decision soon!

The next two weeks are short ones (we get Friday to Monday off) as part of the Jubilee Weekend celebrations and I am really looking forward to the long and relaxing weekend…

Languages

Posted on by
Reply

Language: The ability to acquire and use a complex system of communication, particularly the human ability to do so, and a language is any specific example of such a system.

Human beings, unless living in a completely isolated environment use language innately – when a parent coos to their baby, they are laying the foundation for the language they are native speakers of in the baby.

Most people (around 40% of the world’s population) are very fluent in a single language, usually called their mother tongue, many are bi-lingual (around 43% of the world’s population) which means they are fluent in two languages, usually English and their mother tongue, few are tri-lingual (around 13% of the world’s population), very few people are multi-lingual (around 3% of the world’s population) meaning they can speak four languages fluently and miniscule percent of the world population (less than 1%) can be called polygots or someone who can speak several languages fluently.

Most people in Singapore are bi lingual, speaking two languages with ease, English and their mother tongue, depending on what that is. Growing up, I guess most people around me were tri or multi-lingual – knowing English, Hindi, their mother tongues and to some extent the state language of Marathi. Although notionally my mother tongue is Tamil, the languages I think and dream are English and Hindi as these two were the languages we used all the time – in school, outside and even at home. My paternal grandfather, a product of the British education system, insisted I and my sister speak English to him and the English had to be grammatically correct. For a very long time, I could not speak to him in any other language other than English and it was only a few years before his death, we started speaking to him in other languages, specifically Tamil. My paternal grandmother, on the other hand, used to speak to us in Tamil, which to this date is not too fluent for both me and my sister. My parents, used to speak to us in a mixture of languages – both English and Tamil.

When we started school, it was frowned upon to speak any other language other than English in school and so this started a life-long love for the language. Like I mentioned earlier, I think, feel and even dream in English, so can this be called my native language?
Living in culturally diverse city like Bombay meant that you had to speak another language to engage with others – this usually was Hindi and with neighbours belonging to the Northern part of India, it meant my Hindi also achieved that level of fluency. Friends also cemented this level of fluency and thus I can comfortably claim to be bi-lingual, maybe tri-lingual (can I be that if I can’t read or write Tamil?).

Other languages I have a passing level of fluency to are Marathi (my home state language), French (this was my third language in school and college), Malayalam (from neighbours) and Kannada (my grandparents moved to Bangalore when I was in elementary school and yearly holidays to the city ensured I learnt a bit of the language).

Yesterday morning while S was driving me to work, the local Tamil radio channel was on. During the morning show, one of the DJs was, using the wrong way to pronounce a certain alphabet. Now this is going to be difficult to show here – there’s a letter which is a very guttural Y, but many people can’t speak it as it should be spoken and instead pronounce it as an L, which is wrong. This DJ, on national radio was continuously pronouncing words with this letter wrong. I am surprised that for a country which prides itself on it’s national bi-lingual policy allows someone to get away to speaking wrong on air like this. Also surprising is that till date, no one has come forward to correct this person as I am sure many eminent speakers of the language are probably tuning into the station!

OK, here’s a bit of language trivia – Do you know which the most widely spoken languages in the world are? By the number of speakers in descending order you have:

  1. Mandarin Chinese
  2. Spanish
  3. English
  4. Hindi
  5. Arabic
  6. Portuguese
  7. Bengali
  8. Russian
  9. Japanese
  10. Punjabi

No big surprises there to see Chinese at the top and 60% of the top 10 languages are from Asia!

2015 Week 29 Update

Posted on by
Reply

Another week has gone by and we’re started our PSLE Prelims. The children had their language orals last week with the Mother Tongue written exams this weekend. The written exams are about a month away and the actual PSLE Orals will be before their Prelims written exams….

Like I posted yesterday, GG has an audition this week at the only school she applied for, so that’s a piece of good news for us.

As for work, I am going to have a talk with Big B on Friday. This is to sort out which days I will be working from home during exam days as well as tell him I am not going for a planned work trip to India next month as this is during Prelims. I am not sure how this is going to pan out as this trip is something I am/was looking forward to, but BB & GG are not too keen on me going. Let’s see what happens!

And on to another week – two more weeks and we come to the SG50 long weekend. Singapore celebrates it’s 50th birthday this year and we collected our funpacks also this morning. I am planning a post on SG50 soon, so look out for it.

Ok, have to get to work now, long week ahead as I need to do prep for the work trip I am not going (sobs)…

Have a great week folks…..

Luck: Chance or simply opening your mind?

Posted on by
Reply

The past few weeks, if you may have noticed, I have been moaning quite a bit.

Usually when things don’t go the way we want them to go, we attribute it to luck. So what is luck? Luck is defined as “success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than one’s own actions” or “the chance to find or acquire”.

I’ve been also, by sheer chance, reading a book called “Luck: The Essential Guide” by Deborah Aaronson, which as the blurb tells ‘is filled with everything you need to live a luckier life….information, advice, or if you just have to knock on wood”. I was probably drawn to the book because I was moaning about my lack of luck and borrowed the book.
So what exactly is luck? Different cultures view it differently from perceiving it as a matter of random chance to attributing it to faith or superstition.

In Hinduism, luck is said to bestowed by the Gods and if properly propitiated, Lakshmi, the Goddess of money, wealth and fortune, will bestow her blessings on you and so, the individual becomes lucky in business and commerce.

Many cultures have lucky clothing, items to be worn on the body and even directions to face to become lucky. In the Chinese culture, Mahjong players and gamblers especially, are said to be extremely very superstitious when it comes to being lucky. Most of us are guilty of this at some point of time or the other.

I remember when I was young, during cricket matches, especially those between India and Pakistan, if someone made a particular movement or sat in a particular pose or location when an important wicket of the opposing team was got, they were made to do the same till the end of the match! It was hilarious watching otherwise grown, rational and smart people behave like this – but then cricket in India is akin to a religion, albeit one that the entire country believes in!

In Singapore when something happens in public, be it good or bad like an accident or if someone narrowly escaped something, then people usually look for four numbers associated with the incident – number plates of a car or numbers associated with an address for example to be used while buying 4D, which is a local lottery system. I’ve seen many people religiously buy this lottery every single day, sometimes winning, but at the end of the day, I’d like to believe the house always wins. To be honest though, I’ve been quite tempted to put some money at the annual draw which takes place during Chinese New Year and in which the first prize can be in millions….

Some people seem luckier than others. I remember reading once about the winner of a mega lottery who won the same lottery more than once! What could the odds be of such an occurrence, something like probably one in a million I guess!

Can luck be learnt? Lucky people consistently encounter lucky chance opportunities whereas unlucky people consistently miss them. One reason it has been said that lucky people are less stressed and more relaxed, hence are more able to see everything around them – both the expected as well as the unexpected. People who consider themselves unlucky are so focused on looking for something specific or are so caught up in their lives that they don’t have time to stop to smell the roses, which leads them to having missed opportunities.

An article I read had four principles via which lucky people generated their luck. Lucky people are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, they are more outgoing and less loathe to break routines, they make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, they create self-fulfilling prophecies by positive expectations and lastly they adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

So there you have it – how to change your life and it’s actually quite simple. Open your mind to serendipity and when the chance to do something new or different comes your way, grab it with both hands. Who knows, your luck and perhaps your life may change at that point!

As for me, I too need to take my own advice and keep an open mind……