You may have come across Shrek while watching cartoons on TV or DVD with your children or childlike friends, but I had never heard of Shrek or any of the adorable characters created with him in the scripts, not until I met him in Universal Studios Hollywood this week, that is. This was one of…
It was four years ago when Typhoon York struck. I spent the unexpected holiday trying to get on top my Rotary work and among other things wrote a letter. Since then, I always feel the urge to write when a typhoon strikes. We had a few already this summer, but they were nothing compared with…
Francis must have been sufficiently troubled if not upset that I had apparently not written anything for two months publicly, either in this series or through Kingspark News, to have sent me two emails some ten days ago, demanding a coffee session. We did sit down for coffee at the Café in Chater House, but…
John Naisbitt is probably amongst the first pioneers if not the first in social forecasting and trend analyses. He published his Megatrends nearly 20 years ago. Much of what he said therein had become facts while the rest can hardly be disputed. Little wonder why he has been a much sought after speaker at international…
It was an eventful week for me, to put it mildly. I began my pre-retirement leave on Monday, the day I reached the official retirement age as defined in the terms of appointment at the time I joined the Hong Kong Government, nearly 33 years ago. The week before, I was in between lunches, dinners…
If you were there – the day before Rotary began – you would be at least 98 now. Most of us would be a small kid in a previous reincarnation, doing some good deeds one hopes. That was what John Thorne alluded to this morning when he spoke to participants at the District Team Training…
It was some ten weeks since I last wrote to you in this series. I thank the friends and readers who took the trouble of asking me what had been happening, what I had been doing or why I had seemingly stopped writing. Well, I did not write for the sake of writing. I thought…
I remember a past governor in the District told me once – when I had no idea that I would be a governor one day – that the District’s Ball season normally began with the anniversary celebration of the Rotary Club of Shatin. It could have been, but now some clubs have got into the…
Somehow, I have been receiving a lot of junk mail, many virus infected, and more and more friends have found it necessary to send me large files through the Internet, which take forever to download. So when a reputable service provider called up Rosita with a seemingly attractive package to install broadband at our home…
President Bhichai Rattakul told Rotarians at the beginning of his term that he is a firm believer in working from bottom up, rather than the top down. He said that Rotarians themselves are in the best position to know what is important to their clubs and communities, adding that in the past, too many new…
