Humble

I have never worked for SendGrid. But one day my former workplace came up with a slogan for what they like to see in their own people. Hungry, Humble, Happy and Honest. The 4 Hs.

I was a little nonplussed by all that. I saw the purpose of being Happy, Honest and Hungry. I thought being hungry was the big thing. What was this thing about being humble?

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, it struck me that humble wasn't really universal, but it was the one thing that had to do specifically with what the place I worked for did for a living. What we did was UX related. And UX is about presentation. Everything you did, everything you were, was outward facing. UX is nothing if not being considerate about what you presented to the user. It was a very customer centric line. It was consistently and always putting the user first and yourself second.

We had a workplace that had a lot of ladies in it. And probably for good reason. Because the orientation was about something more feminine. How do I get him to notice me? How do I make him want to fuck me? How do I make him sit up and look? It's a lot of consideration for somebody else other than yourself. It's a lot of wanting to be a pleaser.

Does that sound a little more Asian to you? How would you feel if I were to say that my boss was Asian? I'm not working there anymore. It was great while it lasted, but towards the end, my outlook was diverging from them. I'd maybe say that my brain was probably built more for knowledge enquiry.

Lounges and spaces

I don't really remember when lounging around started becoming much of an obsession for me. Considering how much my childhood revolved around studying, it was notable that I hardly took any notice of where I did my work. And that's funny because I had a wooden desk, and I hardly used it. It would be in a room that was too hot to study in.

Later on, I went to college, and there were fine reading rooms in the libraries for doing your work. The dorm that I was in for my first year wasn't necessarily conducive towards doing work, but I started realising that being in the right room increased your concentration. I wish I had known that.

And after I left Snowy Hill and went back to Singapore, I developed a taste for reading, I also developed a taste for sitting at a cafe for hours with a book. It was probably not the best use of your time, but that came with my taste for reading. It was the trifecta I got a taste for: jazz, coffee and books. Infamously I spent my 30th birthday in Borders. By my 35th birthday, it had closed down.

I think the rise of Starbucks and Coffee Bean gave rise to the idea that tables in coffee shops were lounges, and people could hang in there for as long as they wanted. “Friends” made the cosy living room something attractive. Maybe when I was young, I didn't think that their ice blended drinks were too sweet, or too expensive. I don't know how many weekends and evenings I whiled away in those places, going to libraries and borrowing more and more books to read.

I think it was one of those things where a public space would be a form of escapism for me. One of them was a way of distancing myself from my parents as much as I could. I would just go out on a weekend and be on my own, either walking aimlessly through yet another mall, or hanging out for hours in a coffee shop during a down time, trying to make the one drink I purchased last for as long as I possibly could.

I think one of the first places where I thought of public spaces as places to hang out was the book shop, where I could just spend hours browsing the magazine racks, either for the latest computer games (I was a kid back then) or for music. Then it turned into whiling away all my time in a music store, looking at album covers and very occasionally making a purchase or two.

Then came college, where everything was tastefully furnished. Snowy Hill was a cold place, and a lot of time was spent indoors. Maybe the internet turned into another public space, but I did take a lot of walks into university buildings, which were invariably furnished with nice finishings – this was an American university, and the best ones had to make their interiors look good. Of course, this was coupled with a love for learning some kind of a bookish knowledge, but sometimes I wonder how much I just liked the way that the university looked. Years later, I read an article which stated, flatly, that one of the business models for the American University is that it served as some kind of a hotel. It made me cringe, but I recognised the truth in it. It's one of the reasons why it makes you feel so wonderful when you're in it – you get to study in nice surroundings, and kid yourself that you're there because of the knowledge acquisition and character building. IT's like telling people you read playboy magazine for the articles.

Then there was public transport. At one point I was such a bookworm that I would always have a book with me, and I would always be reading it when I was on the MRT, standing up. Or I would be at the back of a bus, slouching and reading it. It must have been one of those long bus rides from the city to Snowy Hill when it occurred to me that I would love just whiling away a lot of time, reading on a bus.

Then there was that time when I was training up for long distance running, and I just took it as a form of tourism to just run through streets of Singapore and try to see as much of this city as I possibly could, to go through housing estates that I've never seen before and I might never see again. I loved the dinners and suppers that took place after those runs, when I would just feel so hungry and actually gobble everything down. I had to burn off 10 miles running worth of fat in order to feel that way.

But I suppose that's why I felt a big sense of loss when Borders closed down. It was around the time when I was about to go to Mexico. I don't think I loved the University of Mexico as much as I loved Snowy Hill. It was a more austere university, although they tried to make a nice looking campus for us. We were the most wealthy department on campus, and there were always places to hang out, although I think most of the time I was more fretting about trying to complete my degree and also trying to land a gig. What I liked about University of Mexico was the vastness of the campus, and the great weather, although it was a rapidly growing university full of life and vigour.

I went to work at a tech firm, and the first few years were pleasant enough. It finally seemed that I had the life I had always wanted, a good pay, and a 40 hour work week. It wasn't to last, unfortunately, but that's another story for another time. I liked the office. Maybe the open pantry and the free snacks was not the main point – truth be told, we were in an expensive neighbourhood, and if not for the free snacks, I would have found it quite dreary. I would rather pay for good hawker food, but we weren't in Singapore. We were in an old warehouse that had been converted into work / living lofts. There was red brick on the exterior. It was a nice big space, and of course, the floor was bare concrete, as per standard Silicon Valley aesthetics. I liked it until I got tired of it.

Similarly, what I did like about “Mexico” was going into eating establishments, and usually it would not be too crowded. You could go somewhere for coffee, and hang out in there and not feel totally ripped off. I welcomed it at first. But here's the thing: of course it wasn't pleasant if it was too crowded, and at the same time, it also wasn't pleasant if you were there all by yourself. Just you, staring at the barista and the barista staring at you. I liked that it was less crowded in the US than in Singapore, but after a while, I got pretty sick and tired of being some kind of a stranger.

During my last year before I left Singapore for “Mexico”, I discovered a few other spaces. I was taking night classes at NUS, and NUS was always my “what if” place. What if I had studied there, what if I didn't have to juggle the college experience with being some kind of crazy alien. I also discovered the study room in my condo, which was absolutely crazy, because all this time I could have used that for my own reading and stuff and I never did that. And that year was also the year when we had a general elections, when the opposition was unexpectedly competitive, and suddenly there was a big raucous atmosphere. It wasn't just about the PAP getting threatened with expulsion, although that was part of the fun. It was the intoxicating feeling that finally the citizens were in charge and had a stake in running things. I haven't experienced that any other time in my life and I suspect that I might never experience it again.

At the same time, the public space in the US wasn't pleasant at all. If you were in the wrong side of town, you'd get surrounded by lunatics, addicts and freaks. Most of the time they were just scary, rather than dangerous, but you're lucky to be in Singapore and safe from all this. A lot of the time, you'd be sitting in a fast food place, and fast food restaurants have less latitude to tell a homeless person to just leave the place, and you might have to deal with their presence.

But here's the point about this whole piece. I'm a person who likes spaces, particularly urban spaces. I'm an introvert, but not an extreme introvert. I like feeling the buzz, the life of a city. And I don't get that anymore. Not in this pandemic. I don't feel that things are alright. And it will take me years before I feel safe in the outdoors, that this world is a welcoming rather than a threatening place. That's probably what's going to get me down.

Pragmatism vs Fun

When I was applying to college, I picked out three places. Two of them were “Bottom of the hill” and “Snowy Hill”. I met up with a guy who also considered going to both these places, and he ended up in “Bottom of the hill”, and he said he wanted to go to Snowy Hill, but Snowy Hill was more expensive. But he liked the entrepreneurial spirit at “Bottom of the Hill” better. I went to Snowy Hill, which was quite similar to “Bottom of the Hill”, because both places were founded within 5 years of each other. They were both large universities which tried to excel in a wide variety of things, but Snowy Hill was more austere, more monastic, more removed from outside life, not within an hour's drive from any major city. It was some kind of wonderland, detached from reality, where we looked at the world through a telescope and sat around and pontificated all day.

Whereas the other guy, he got caught in the spirit of the place, founded a company more than 15 years ago, and it's still alive and kicking today, he's a jet setting millionaire.

So sometimes I wonder, do I miss being him? Did I miss the boat? I'm not very sure. Maybe I took too much comfort from all this mental pontification. Maybe I not only think too much, but I like it too much. It used to be my job as a student to be thinking all the time, and I kinda liked that. And later on I'd have liked a job that required me to be more of a thinker than a doer. Unfortunately I never really got those jobs. They required me to have more executive functions, and I disliked that.

I used to spend quite a bit of time in the university cinema, I may have caught 30-40 films there in all of my time there. Maybe even more. I don't know why I saw it as a learning experience. I must have been daydreaming a lot in my time there. I always thought that I loved a life of scholarly pursuits, new experiences, new food, new places to visit, new music, new art. Maybe a life of ease. I roughed it out when it was required of me to master intellectually difficult material, but only because I enjoyed it. Maybe I didn't really give that much thought about building something that was actually useful for somebody else. I was probably better at figuring out how to spend a million dollars than to make it.

Having responsibilities, and having to think about the exact details about how to do things – maybe I just didn't like that sort of stuff. That happened a lot when I became a programmer. It was fun at first, to be churning out a lot of code and trying to see how things worked got a bit tiring. I kept on thinking about escape. I read a book about drug addicts – they kept on wanting to chase that next high, always wanting their buttons pushed and thinking about what next was going to push those buttons. Life is one high after another, and all the time in between. Maybe I haven't wanted to think about anything else – building a house for the future, earning shit loads of money. I do want to have a good musical legacy, but other than that, not much. Somehow I have the mentality of a wanderer, not thinking too much about the future, but instead just living right there in the present, watching, viewing. Rather than imposing myself upon the world.

And I've often felt that my pursuit of knowledge was a bit like consumption of entertainment. That's nice, that's something to play around with in my head.

But that was different from a real work ethic, the work ethic that produces something that's useful in this world. Whether somebody is dedicating it to a greater meaning, or he's doing it for pure money, he looks to be working steadily towards some end point. Maybe I haven't got that mentality of working towards a goal. Or maybe I get tired of it – I can do things that take 1 year to do, but maybe I have to change directions after that. I can't recall the last time I accomplished something that took more than 1 year, other than earning degrees.

When I got to the University of Mexico, it started to dawn on me that it was more important to pick up practical skills. I had come armed with practical knowledge. Based on the first few modules in Snowy Hill, I had picked up some programming. But there were other opportunities for me to have learnt more practical skills at Snowy Hill that I might have missed out on. For starters, I at first applied as an engineer student, because I thought it would maximise my chances of getting funded. And once I got funded, I decided to switch majors to mathematics, because I thought that it was the best compromise between studying something that was bookish, which appealed to me, and something that would somehow be more useful in the world out there.

As it turned out, I didn't exactly like the mathematics major either. Everything was incredibly arcane. It sounded nice and fashionable to talk about abstract entities all day long, but it started to grate on me. It was an uphill task. There's nothing like putting the university on top of a hill and making you climb the snowy hill in order to impress upon you that knowledge acquisition is an uphill task, but it was a pretty austere existence.

There were a few things I wished I had learnt. I only got the engineering mentality while working, when the mentality shifted from “this is intellectually interesting” or “this is a nice caveat to this other theorem that everybody else knows and look how smart I am” to “we're actually going to do something that people can use and run with”. God knows that even one or two of my bosses never made the transition from being book smart to doing something that had a real impact on the real world.

I finally saw “Bonjour Tristesse”. I had been meaning to see it since I was in Snowy Hill. I thought about the first few years since I left Snowy Hill, how directionless they had been. Snowy Hill shaped me into something, but what, exactly?

It was one of those major art films that I wanted to see. People debate over its merits, but it has some famous fans, including Jean Luc Godard.

It was one of those films that I liked to watch when I was in Snowy Hill: the post-war European existential angst movies, and it was some kind of golden age, because Truffaut, Hitchcock, Godard, Fellini and Antonioni were at the height of their powers. In a way, life was simpler and urban decay had yet to set in. Everybody just looked impossibly glamorous and at the same time fretting that their material prosperity was somehow spiritually void. In hindsight, I was in America during some golden dusk of America being the sole superpower.

What entranced me about those movies? Was it just the chilling out and doing nothing? Did I just enjoy lounging around too much for my own good? Because I remember that was when I developed a taste for lounging around. That was probably the height of me believing that my liberal arts education was going to serve me well in life. Of course, my education had some pragmatic bent to it.

I did some pure mathematics. I remember trying to study a lot of mathematics, in part to atone for what I took to be wasted opportunities – I never became a maths genius, in spite of showing some aptitude for it at a young age. Then I found that people in the reading classes were reading such interesting books – I just took a course in a new academic discipline every semester. I don't know why or how it was all related or put together. I basically behaved as though those 4 years were going to last forever. Of course they weren't. I did try to cover a lot of ground intellectually, but how about the meta-knowledge?

Perhaps I should have thought about how to arrange my knowledge acquisition around some more practical task. Perhaps I should have oriented myself around the principle that I was there to learn about my place in the grand scheme of things. What happened instead was that I saw myself a little as a passive learner who was just there to sit back and learn whatever stuff that came my way.

I think what made me think I didn't have to change my approach was seeing that I was taught very academic and arcane equations for some engineering discipline. That was the culture of Snowy Hill. Because it was far away from civilization, there was a lot of emphasis on basic research. I don't deny that basic research makes for a very good education, or that it makes you think deeply and try to understand profound truths. But there's also a lot that more application oriented stuff teaches you about how the world really works, that you miss out on. I got the fairly inaccurate impression that the arcane and complex equations I learnt in advanced mathematics were widely applicable in the world, and I oriented myself towards learning those things well. In a way, I still don't regret the time and effort I spent towards those ends, but that's only because it was satisfying in its own right. It wasn't useful.

So here's the rub – I wasn't finding the stuff that I learnt for fun useful, and I wasn't finding the stuff I learnt in order to advance my career fun.

Singaporean Dilemma

Since Sudhir popped up onto the scene to become a major commentator, he's been a refreshing voice. He's got a really interesting viewpoint to share:



True multi-racialism and multi-culturalism is difficult. Any progress that people make is extremely fragile. One of the good things in Singapore is that one big source of racism in Singapore was neutered right at the beginning of our nation building. Yes, I'm talking about white people. We took them out of the equation. Notwithstanding that there were big problems amongst the Malays, Chinese and Indians in Singapore / Malaysia, but at that time we were a united coalition, and we could enshrine in the national pledge, that all Singaporeans were Singaporeans, regardless of race, language or religion. Our commitment to multiculturalism was admirable, and somewhat ahead of the west, although you could sense that the European Union was a tacit embrace of multiculturalism, albeit a more limited one.

But here's the point that I'm trying to make. Singapore began as a Chinese majority city state, and it should always be one. Sudhir thinks that racial quotas for immigration, to preserve the Chinese majority is racist. I thought it was racist, until I saw what happened to the US. The US is so divisive because it's turning less white. I'm pretty sure that it's the main reason why Trump was voted in. Over the last 10 years, white people in America saw two developments they perceived as threats: a black president of the USA, and the eroding of the majority of white people in America: within 20-30 years, the USA is projected to be no longer white. Non-white people in the US are perceived to be voters against their interests.

To change the racial composition for Singapore is very dangerous. Perhaps we will expect Chinese Singaporeans to behave better than the Americans when the majority status for Chinese is under threat, but who's to know what's going to happen? Yes, it ought to be the case that Chinese chauvinism won't raise its ugly head, but who's to know what's really going to happen?

Or to take another example closer to home. This is going to be very politically incorrect but the main lesson from the Separation is that a Chinese majority city could not co-exist within a Malay majority federation. The era of peace and prosperity that followed emphasises that a Chinese majority Singapore is necessary. Singapore and Malaysia basically came to the same independent conclusion: the merger wasn't working. Tensions between Chinese and Malays were stoked up. One could blame the perceived aggressiveness of the PAP in trying to seek political office outside of Singapore, one could say that the go-getter attitudes of the Chinese dominated government in Singapore represented an affront to UMNO. But nobody could deny that the 1969 riots represented some kind of a backlash.

Singapore is the zion for Southeast Asian Chinese. It's not just 5 million people whose lives are going to change if Singapore stopped being Chinese, but it will have some impact on the entire bamboo network. Chinese people in southeast Asia have an uneasy relationship with both the other Southeast Asians and the mainland. Singapore represents some kind of a bulwark, some kind of a gateway to Southeast Asia that Hong Kong once represented for the mainland. Yes, it sounds paternalistic to suggest that for the short term at least, Southeast Asia would be hampered by the absence of Singapore. Hong Kong was rendered irrelevant once the rest of China rose up, and gradually, other cities rose up to the challenge of supplanting the unique functions that Hong Kong provided. We don't see this happening in southeast Asia.

Singapore is a balancing force against the racism against the Chinese majority that has always existed in Southeast Asia. Maybe in another way it is a bastion of Chinese privilege in southeast Asia, I don't know. But the Chinese diaspora in southeast Asia will have plenty to lose if Singapore ceased to be Chinese majority.

And the third argument against Singapore ceasing to be majority Chinese is that – Sudhir is an Indian. What's going to happen if the Malays became the majority in Singapore? I don't think it'd be a great thing for Indians. Does Malaysia or Singapore treat Indians better? Chinese Singaporeans are already committed to (or at least there's lip service, but lip service is important) balancing a majority Chinese Singapore against a multi-cultural Singapore. There is no official privilege for Chinese in Singapore, unlike in Malaysia, where there are legal protections for bumiputra. He knows and I know that there is Chinese privilege, but it's covert. How much better is he going to have it?

To sum up, the three arguments against the continuity of Chinese majority: 1. To change it would unleash dangerous social unrest, probably not by the liberal elite, but by the rank and file who are always calling you keleng kia. Those people will always exist and will not go away, ever. 2. The special , essential role that Singapore plays in the broader SE Asia context. 3. A Chinese majority Singapore is perhaps the best hope to achieve genuine multi-culturalism in Singapore.

So there's the key to understand the statements that LKY made about Singapore. It is a deeply nuanced, even conflicted position. Yes, we are committed to multi-culturalism. No, we'd prefer it if Chinese people were the ones running the show, at least in Singapore. The years of peace and prosperity that followed the Separation showed that this worked. Malaysia doesn't even seem that unhappy about lagging behind Singapore, in terms of economic progress. Of course, there is some bitching and unhappiness on their part, but there's been no discussion about another merger. Both sides are happy that Malaysia is majority Malay, that Singapore is majority Chinese. And this should give you pause about whether or not you want to change the formula.

Yes, it is highly problematic that Tharman did not get to be the prime minister. I'm all for having an Indian prime minister, but I would not want the sorts of problems that anxiety over the Chinese Singaporeans' loss of their majority status would have.

His other criticism are more valid. Racism against the minorities in Singapore is a problem, and should be condemned more harshly. It should have been some kind of a bargain, that in exchange for Singapore staunchly maintaining its Chinese majority status, minorities should be treated better. Unfortunately, we have a lot to learn as a society.

Multiculturalism is difficult. The experiences of the US should tell you that much. In certain more progressive pockets of the US, minorities have attained the kind of clout and stature that should represent progress anywhere. Asian Americans form an important component of the US's knowledge industry. Some of the top leaders of big tech firms are not white. Black people have contributed greatly to the musical heritage of Americans. But yet the discomfort at acknowledging the contributions to society of non-white people still remains and will not go away. The civil rights movement, which basically guarantees black people the right to vote, is slowly being eroded in certain pockets of the USA. Unlike what MLK and Obama think, the arc of history does not bend towards justice. It seems to be more like a pendulum, and when some kind of apex in progressiveness is reached, some kind of backlash happens.

The most insidious dynamic is this: multi-culturalism exacts some kind of an unseen toll. White America is never more divided amongst itself than when arguing about how they're going to treat people who are not white. It seems that some kind of divisiveness will always exist in society, and when America becomes less racist, the white people will start arguing amongst themselves about racism. They will argue about what's considered racist, what's considered not racist. Up till today, people can't even decide whether politically correctness is racist, they can't decide whether when you dress up as a member of another race, whether that's a form of reaching out, or a form of appropriation / minstrelism.

The road towards true multi-culturalism in Singapore, or anywhere else, is long and harsh. There will be plenty of setbacks. Martin Luther King said that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, but dude – when are we going to see injustice everywhere magically disappearing?

Computers, Mathematics and Me

The first story about mathematics that I know, it'll have to go all the way back to when my father was a kid, growing up – well Singapore has never been a truly poor country, but it was bad enough. His family was living in a hovel, and he had that Dickensian childhood, even though he's an old man now and we hardly ever talk about it.

His mother – my grandmother, who ended up living with us and helping to bring my sister and I up, well she did the best she could to bring him up under really difficult circumstances. It was a harsh childhood, but she was determined to get out of the poverty trap. She would say to him – beating the crap out of him occasionally – that there was gold buried inside those books. You just studied the crap out of them, and lift us up and out of here.

My grandmother never went to school, but she somehow managed to end up reading the classics. She never “amounted” to anything more than a homemaker, but the idea that anybody and everybody could be educated was a very powerful message.

As for my father, he did well in school and became some head boy, went on to get a professional degree, and did well in his career and dragged us into the middle class. He was also blessed with 4 equally intelligent and determined siblings who did well for themselves.

The second story of mathematics took place when I was six. By that time, my parents somehow instinctively knew that it was just a good thing for me to do well in school. My mother was always somehow inclined to find out what it was that I was good at, and once she worked out that I was good at mathematics, somehow she just wanted to push me in that direction. I remember that when she was driving me to school, she was so pleased that she had a six year old kid who knew how to multiply 2 digit numbers in his head. She kept on peppering me with those quizzes on my way to preschool. It felt normal at that time but when you think back on it, it's not really normal. She was raising me to be some kind of a freak show, and it kinda irked me later on in life to think back at it.

By the end of primary school, I was one of the best in mathematics. But after I got into secondary school, a lot of other people, who hadn't been pushed so hard by their parents, caught up with me. And by the end, I had acquired the reputation of being a guy who was gifted in mathematics but who didn't care that much.

In truth, what makes you care about mathematics is a lot of things. It could be your own innate competitiveness. It could be your love for numbers. It could be a sense of belonging in some kind of a community. But for me, though, it was something a little darker and sinister: it just simply was the one thing that I had always been good at. So I just had to push ahead with it, regardless of whether I liked it or not.

I still did well in school for mathematics. I never got to the elite mathlete level, but I was always 1 or 2 rungs below there. I supposed I never opened up about why I had hit the wall for mathematics, why, at a fairly crucial moment, I diverted my attention from mathematics to other endeavours, like drama and music. I needed those other challenges. I had to have something else to hold on to, other than being good at mathematics. I wasn't going to get far in mathematics because the other motivations I had for doing well (competitiveness, love for it) didn't exist. The only thing I had was talent.

The third story in mathematics was that I won a scholarship to go study at Snowy Hill University. That gave some little kick to me. Suddenly doing mathematics was cool again, sorda. I managed to push myself to do mathematics for a while. Then after that, the struggle set in again: the dreariness of doing it, not being able to turn up for classes regularly, being in an alien environment, being bored. Yes, I pushed myself to the finishing line, which was good. I managed to land engineering work, which was good. But perhaps I knew that in order to pursue work in pure mathematics, I had to love it unconditionally, and that's why I ultimately turned away from it.

What my mathematics training gave me was a quite powerful mental framework to work with. I could formulate and construct arguments that layed layers of logic upon each other. Writing proofs was of very little practical purpose, but the exercise of doing those things somehow helped my writing. A good logical argument went from A to B to C to D to E. In a way, it was easy to see what A and E was, but the real trick was to find B, C and D. Mathematics was good because it gave me plenty of practice. It helped me in other fields – history, economics, maybe even songwriting.

The fourth story in mathematics was that Snowy Hill was also a good engineering school, and it helped me to pivot towards coding. The good and the bad news is that what attracted me towards coding was the similarity to mathematics. On the surface, this sounds like a great thing. It's not necessarily so, but in the beginning it was. During my first year I took intro to computing and unfortunately allowed my partner to do most of the work because for whatever reason java wouldn't install on my computer. (Back in the day we mostly used desktops). In my second semester, there was a course that was based on the famous textbook, structure and interpretation of computer programs.

As an aside, that's the problem with me: I had to have somebody package something in a hipster package in order to make it attractive and interesting for me, otherwise I wouldn't really bother with it. I'm not a cool person, but I'm a sucker for cool. For example, REM was my gateway drug into Southern Rock, which I may not have been interested in if not for their image as hip progressives. I may not care for country but No Alternative was hip and I dug Uncle Tupelo / Son Volt / Wilco. And the hipness of Quentin Tarantino / Wu Tang Clan would make me go back and re-examine old Shaw films / HK kung fu flicks.

Maybe there was the Monty Python theme in some of the homework assignments. There was the notion that imperative programming was deeply uncool. I'll still remember the excitement that rippled through when I was introduced, for the first time, to ideas like recursion, O notation, functions as first class objects, induction in computer science. Although I have to admit that I wasn't really great at turning up for 9am lectures.

So basically when I was at Snowy Hill, I was mainly into pure mathematics, even if I did occasionally do some applied mathematics like statistics or chaos theory or numerical optimization. As time went on, I started to get a little disillusioned with pure mathematics. Probably that was the time when the hip factor started to wear off, and I started wondering what the point of it was, and that was when my thoughts shifted towards doing something that was more applied, because at least you could make a living that way. My thoughts drifted towards maybe acquiring a second degree, this time in computer science. It started to look cool.

And that was how it was like, during my last semester at Snowy Hill. It had been a lot of trudging through nasty probability integral equations, and finally I was sick of it. Instead I looked at what the computer science people were doing, and for a while it looked like fun. Pushdown automata. Compilers. Operating systems. In my last year, I studied microprocessors and neural networks, little realising that those were bets on the future that – well they didn't exactly pay off handsomely, but they were correct bets to make. When I went back to school later, I would find that the cloud and neural networks were developed to the extent that they helped to pave the future.

The fifth story would be my first encounter with computers. I went to my grandmother's place on Sundays, and there was an Apple II there. My parents used to trade stocks, and they got – well I don't know if it was a bloomberg terminal, but it looked like a computer and it had a modem. When I was 10, we got the first personal computer. It was used for typing school projects, and there were endless arguments about how much time I got to play computer games. It was an argument that was complicated by my mother being some sort of a computer game addict, and in a way she still is. Also, this was Singapore in the 1980s, and everybody shamelessly pirated anything they could get their hands on.

I still remember visiting Centerpoint often in the 1980s, and in Times the bookshop, there were plenty of computer game magazines which always showed you reviews of games. You were always trying to find out what the best games were. But anyway, I'll cut to the chase here: all too often, having fun and whiling away time was synonymous with playing computer games, and computers were synonymous with computer games. It was a 3 way relationship that I eventually decided was toxic. Eventually I didn't see the point of it. I'm a person who's pretty curious, but my curiousness lies on the side of philosophising. I wanted to know what human society was like, and I liked bookish knowledge. Time spent wandering around in some artificial garden that was built for you by some game designer was just distracting from this purpose. And in a way this was a source of my antipathy towards computers.

However, I would realise, this was yet another form of addiction. Later on, blogging and reading articles on the internet, be they news articles about a subject I already knew a lot about, or some movie or music review – all that stuff would be just another endlessly fruitless endeavour, albeit a more respectable one.

The sixth story was my working in the Factory. In the beginning, I was eager to bring my nerdy knowledge into the workplace. Gradually I was disabused of the notion that anything I learnt that had to do with longform integrals and differential equations would have any place in work process improvement. The only thing would be that they gave me a little bit of intuition about queues, but then again not that much.

This would be my first real engineering job. And for the first few years, I floundered at it. Engineering is very different from science and mathematics, because that's when executive functions come in, that's when being practical and having some common sense comes in. That's when having a little bit of organisational skills counts for a lot more than having pages and pages of equations. It was difficult to adjust.

Eventually, I picked up things little by little. The more interesting features of MS Excel, of MS Access. Coding in VB for applications. Using Perl for text processing. Using these tools to produce reports. And later on, there would be work on simulation modelling, and that would be my first big project in C. All this laid the foundation for grad school in computer science.

The seventh story was my escape from the Factory. It was a place that had a lot of cordial friendships that last till this day. But the churn rate was high, the turnover was high, and that's because a lot of the work was highly Sisyphean in nature. It just wasn't easy to make that boulder budge. There wasn't a lot of organisational buy in. You had to struggle your boss, and you had to struggle against your internal clients, sometimes both at the same time.

Getting into the University of Mexico was a bit of a coup for me. It was a 50-50 thing, and I had that bit of luck to get my foot in. It probably should have been a step up. Sadly it wasn't. I might tell you a lot about why not.

It was a great eye-opener. It may not be a big name school, but I think by now its reputation should be greatly enhanced. Unlike Snowy Hill, which tended to be very wonky, very nerdy, very science-y and a heavily theoretical bent, the culture in University of Mexico was very applied. And you could say that I struggled to adjust. It should have been the best time of my life.

I had to get up to speed quickly. What I remember learning was that there was this thing called the cloud, it enabled high powered computing to take place. This high powered computing, in turn, allowed great advances in machine learning to take place. It was the dawn of a new era of Big Data. I still remember thinking, every where you went, you saw that the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. Something big was about to happen.

In the years following my graduation, the tasks started falling down. Speech recognition, facial recognition, machine translation, and playing Go. Artificial Intelligence was basically science fiction when I started grad school, and within 5 years, it became the buzzword. It's just a shame that I never capitalised on it. I did do some project on supercomputing and Hadoop. But that's pretty rudimentary. Maybe there's just so much to learn that you can spend a whole life time learning.

If things had stopped there, it would have ended on a great note. But there's the eighth story.

In the eighth story, I found work. IT was a nice place, what you'd expect from a tech workplace. Flexi hours, and I had colleagues who were pretty competent. It seemed like my dreams had come true. I could drink all the coffee I want, sit in a brick lined converted warehouse all day. Earn a nice paycheck.

The catch? IT wasn't actually something that I was that interested in. People were dealing with UX / user experience. Remember me developing an antipathy towards computer games because it took me away from my nerdier philosophical inclinations? I should have split and ran for the hills after the first few years. During the first few years, you pick up the basics, and there's every reason to be working for anybody who's willing to pay you. But after that....

There were things that I found endlessly exhausting. Making things literally pixel perfect. As in, aligning a line so that it fell on the edge of the pixel, so that you don't have that smudgy thing going on when you have a whole row of pixels with the intermediate color (this is called “aliasing”). There were times when there was some little HTML image element for every little thing in a web page, and you just had to make sure that everything fell into place, whether it was rotated or whatever. You had to make the flowcharts looking perfect.

I went into the job thinking that I had triumphed, that I had gone into a foreign land and done good, and landed on my feet. And it was a very gradual process, that my antipathy for what I had to do for a living had grown from a minor irritation to something that started to make me scream. At least when I was working for the factory, I had this natural curiosity about how to build a schema that would adequately represent physical objects moving around in the real world. That was fun. User experience was a bit like the colouring work that I didn't like to do as a kindergartener. Eventually my antipathy went up to the level that we just had to part ways.

During my last year there, there was some kind of a desperate lunge to salvage whatever I could from my years there. I tried to persuade myself that there was something interesting to learn. I could learn the computer systems that undergirded the application, which was some kind of a funky editor. I tried to make myself interested in the endless reams of code: we had a product that ran on two platforms, and there was a whole chunk of code which described behaviour, and two chunks that interfaced with the Mac and the PC. I tried to get familiar with them. I struggled to stay awake at work. Eventually I had to get out of there.

As I tell my story, I'm out here, in between things, alone in the wilderness. With every stage, it seems that I'm further and further away from what mathematics seemed to be at first, some kind of a game that I happened to be good at, some kind of pleasant dreamworld where I could just beat my classmates at, as though I were swatting flies away, some kind of nice garden of abstractions. It became more and more like some ugly, messy, but in some other ways, vital construction site, built on blood and sweat. And goodness knows how many more years I still have before me to carry on in coding and engineering.