(On dalliances with all products, & social X factors, plus plus.)

“You have to get the campaign out in 15 minutes. That is not art.” Penning my first commercial in 2 days, 3 hours, and 15 minutes (faster than a beef bourgignon, slower than a pizza in a 1000Kelvin modern wood-fired brick kiln) is actually more exhausting than the schematics drawn on an architectural scale, or long-form theology paper than crafting something from concept to finished copy (twice revised) only to air for a measly 15 seconds on the radio.

Sometimes we can’t identify the point of differentiation between the experience of becoming an artist and a commercial correctly. Is it the money or the ingredients, or the time it takes to produce one? What exactly consists of artisanal when it comes to creating a one-off, across all industries?

When traditions have been whittled down and innovated, does that make the...

When you work at a collaboration space, like at what today exists as a co-workspace, your co-working style is termed “collaborative” since you work not in the venn diagram of your regular organisation. The people you physical are at work is only location-based / co-habitative. Their bottom line does not directly impact yours. And vice versa.

When you are in a group that’s as diverse, and collectively serving the democracy of say, a curated limited number of rotation in the space - there are only a 40-seat limitation, then it is the space’s right to choose the type of entrepreneurs that will exist, thrive, and put in their collaborative genius to the front, for everyone’s benefit.

They pay the minimum effort amount, what is called a membership fee. And the rest build towards their products with the help of the solution-providers/ funders/ magic providers in the curated space. This is...

Oh hello, fancy bumping into you here.

As you walk down the fresh food aisles at the green mart, you bump into ex-college-mates, people who were in your philosophy class whom you can’t remember, nor really engaged any serious small talk with.

Didn’t you go to Brown? Or to Bryn Mawr? And now you’re the female coach of the eco-environmental startup incubator? What does that pay like? Are you not supposed to be a yuppie, and go to corporate? Or worse, But what, do you Do, like do? And twenty other probing questions on, you are exhausted, and no extra-strength doppio in sight.

When actually, you are living on paychecques that can hardly actually afford you a cup of coffee for the week. Let alone a three-floor brownstone in the very sociable district. Oh how am i going to ever get invited by the crawleys now? is not a real concern for the real trite, & skintly un-trivial. How do you help...

Sitting down to daily coffee, and the literature that is the garble that i write after having a massive episode-uptake of a series of western-worldly ammonia (the NH3 of smelling salts), coming up roses in our otherwise uninitiated ears, eyes, and sensibilities. Mostly, i drink up the comic satire of politics, the weekend funnies, or the cult American comedy series, and now have been taking to beauty editorials versus that of the beauty bloggers.

Being a journalist/ blog writer/ marketing person, i am akin to taking up the space that needs to be as professionally tackled in my mind, as possible. Sometimes, that can breach the cultures that people who ascend to their own ladders actually relate to - and having minded that you are their possession, get into a mild shock on where to put their reliant alliance to - you who have a mind, or you who have a voice. If you have both, sadly, you...

The following article has been incensed by the fun adventures i’ve had in both the massive Advertising industry, & doing special sections for Editorial.

Creating communications directed by special needs of mass marketing, is what the advertising industry is good - and the adverts are the same, but under strict editorial control - it is within the guidelines of the editors & publishers rather than strictly the clients that need to advertise on the pages of your magazines.

The perspective of a writer, team-wise is a more corporate one in Advertising - your ideas & creations, commercials / advertisements made for the holy trinity of TV, Radio & Print as well as all down-the-line materials included in the folder of the campaigns made - cinema placements, billboards, mall placards, bus ads, the internet banners, the caricatures of - and every bit of media placement as well as where it is...

cc: LOVE

I was conducting a study experiment on mobility for the last three and a half years, living in a fairly situated moderately-sized apartment in northern singapore, where the locals consider not as ulu, in a condominium that
packed with families, and children from the international school across the road. So yes, noisy weekends without a vacant chair at poolside in sight.

Which led me to thinking about where to put the budgets when you are at an intersection of a circumstance where you no longer have the privilege of a certain nationality/ job/ and quite recently, marital status? All these changes are for the better, but without context, they are considered vague, and to a certain non-millenial set, even unpalatable.

So, mobility tackles being in the state of motion - but more from point A to point B - which is actually a pointed subset of migration. And with what happens...

When i wrote about pantsuits in my other blog, i had this notion that they were a thing of the past. They still are.

I remember boarding an airplane on my first-ever pair - a Georges Marciano beige nylon-linen non-crease number that went over a plain white top and warm tights underneath for a New York destination in August.

It had the glorious might of keeping my on track, to go where i needed to go, even as i had kept my heart from ripping apart - having to leave my friends was the last thing i had in mind but it was a school thing, and had to be done. It was shiny, with a little shimmer in the detailing, and was structured, tailored to my (then) size 6 frame, and became my travel go-to for any brave plane ride - or scary uproot, in any case.

I was invincible. I sashayed in aisles of business class (where my travelling party had stayed), and economy (where they stashed me and my...

Did you know that our lives are summed up in just the one box?

You have lives - present, obviously a past, and tentatively, a future. And these are all fitting, whether fully descriptive of you, ideally, in just one box.

In this timeline, you can organise your many facets - if you’ve to be likened to a gem - to be treatised into the many aspects that people see you as having functioned as a daughter, sibling, girlfriend, mother, ice-skating champion, real estate scion, failed laundromat expert, business mogul, ironing master, star editor of several iconic underground magazines, brilliant designer, genius creed-changing nun, opinion piece editor of a swiss-based economic small press. There are loads of you that existed - but none are known, because they don’t fit the box into which you need to launch into the ether, or be kept for others to find.

When you move from one place to...

So, you realised funding a startup was really hard?

What do you do, when the government systems aren’t really silicon valley?

1/ cry
2/ go seek consults (they might charge you)
3/ be optimistic, and go to your local venture capitalists
4/ actually prepare a pitch deck, and take on the campaign trail (in 10 countries and incubation spaces)
5/ like there was no tomorrow?

I guess all of the above.

What say you? Is there a way that governments can actually serve the mass will of a startup, and not maintain the way of the Lean Startup? There might be a better way to keep your social self intact - it might crash the rest of the networks - but isn’t that the job of the equalisers (whether that was for the VC’s to suss out, or the policy makers) where the point is that we can’t sink the whole economy engaging in the war of being in opposition to the laws of nature: that we must remain to...

When the caffeine-deficient go out at night, (and it’s imperative, they always will), they ought to bring a pack of what will water down the effects of having too much (a very subjective term these days). I like water, to start.

C8H10N4O2, something that chemically stands to our conscious selves, wake us up, and cognitively making us pay a solid amount of attention. This jolting substance, albeit in our central nervous systems, can remain active in the bloodstream for the next 4-5 hours after, whether it had been gulped down in 5 seconds flat, or slowly ingested with sips while typing a la laptop. I have on my 2016 version-of-a-rolodex efficiently mapped out all the emergency caffeine shops by train stop, take-away or sit down, wifi or non-wifi, & time-opened in the city of these watering holes called cafés - to create what is my survival guide to an oases of invariable wealth in...