Kindly Yours

It can be both interesting and disappointing to hear from news media about cities vying to have the most impressive fireworks on New Year’s Eve. When you reflect quickly about it, the end of a calendar year is just an administrative measure, a daily turn of the Earth as a planet and an excuse for crowding up again. A lot of taxpayer money is literally burned up in oversized sparkles in the sky that seriously remind both humans and animals of the excesses of warfare, with the added thunderous boom, flashes of aggression and the competitive passion of who and what can come up with the largest, the most spectacular, the highest and the most colourful. The huge effort to maintain personal and public security, optimal logistical processes and executing clean up matters is often not recognised enough, compared to the brief consumption and gratification fulfilled from fleeting and temporal burn up of chemicals in the surrounding environment.  A great city’s reputation, character...

Below are several cover issues from a magazine that is still publishing after so many years.  My eldest Brother inculcated in me a love of interest in world affairs. It all started with reading Newsweek seated in a balcony at home.  There have been other memorable publishing ventures like Readers Digest, Asisweek, Time, Australian Who, Forbes, Fortune, New Yorker and Bloomberg Businessweek. The character and purpose of some of these publications have possibly changed  over the years. I note with disdain and amazement how many of the English language news publications specialising on covering Asian affairs have ceased publication.  One reads media output with caution these days especially in an intense age of so called fake news, but all along there have been powerful vested political and financial interests behind the editorials and content of all published output. These days, paper based publications are thinner in content than those in cyberspace and on li...