FIRST BLU-RAY REPLICATION LINE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA Interview with Dow Jones Curtain-raiser Interview with Local Media I remember Dr Ong Chit Chung Farewell, Chit Chung Red Cliff Review I love movies. In an outing with my Malaysian investors, I took them to the famous THAT CD SHOP at Great World City. We saw rows and rows of DVD movies and  I told them I have watched 80-90% of the movies and every mega blockbuster. It was not the wisest thing to say to your main investor as he probably thought WHAT THE HECK is my chief executive doing when i am not around? Not to mention I love value investing, gyming, golfing (driving range only as a real game is too time wasting), astronomy, robotics, painting and partying at Double O retro nights... Well, my excuse is I sleep 4 hours a day and spend 20 hours a day thinking about our business, optimizing shareholder's returns although i may be doing other things. So far he has not removed me and we still continue to talk about audiophile music, I guess I am still in the zone. A corporate warrior can be skilled in the fine arts but he can be as lethal at Sun Tzu in the battlefield. Or that's what we like to believe. That is what John Woo's move "Red Cliff" is about. The battle strategists, Zhou Yu and Zhu Ge Liang, from two different kingdoms joined forces to fight a common enemy Cao Cao (hence you have three kingdoms), were learned men who appreciated the fine arts and yet would use every trick in the book to remove life at the battlefield. The scene in which the entire training army stopped to appreciate the flute music of a farm boy was unforgettable. And when the two strategists negotiated - they played the musical instrument (Gu Zhen?) in a duet and after the stunning performance, both men walked off the meeting knowing exactly what the other had in mind. Boy, it was better than email! Maybe all Foreign Ministers should pick up playing musical instruments - it would have solved lots of diplomatic misunderstandings and disputes! :-) I loved the "Red Cliff". Here is one Asian movie that is akin to Lord of the Rings or Star Wars in terms of grandness and epic style and yet there is time to focus on the characters. It is one movie you can walk out and finally say Asian Cinema has arrived unlike the sorry flicks like The Forbidden Kingdom featuring Jackie Chan being pee on by Jet Li in a comedic scene (seriously.. think Indiana Jones peeing on James Bond). I love Red Cliff more because it is part of China's history and it is based on the classic "Three Kingdoms" although John Woo has taken some artistic deviations to make the movie interesting. After all, he is making a blockbuster movie and not some historical drama. In any case, there had to be some imagination and myth-making in the original text itself. So i am not going to split atoms there. When I was young, my grandma (who will be celebrating her birthday (Chinese Lunar date) with my birthday (Western date) on Wed) used to tell me all the heroes and zeroes in China history. Without her and my dad's amazing data download, I would have gone thru my adult life not knowing history and my roots. I would not have known the myth that Hwa Duo, the Great Doctor, has figured a way to do open brain surgery. I would not have known Guan Yu, (who is worshiped as a Chinese God, Guan Gong) could read a book while a poisoned weapon was being removed from his arm. I would not have known Zhu Ge Liang, the classic scammer and chief strategist in today's context, could set up plans within plans to trap the enemy. I am grateful to have such a family and I resolve to do the same for my daughter Natalie. She must have stories to grow up with.  I hope it will be fun for her - Sun Tzu and the Prince, Battlestar Galaticca and Red Cliff, Admiral Zheng He and Captain Luc Piccard of Starship Enterprise, Apollo and Na Zhai, Benjamin Franklin and Zhou Enlai, Charlie Chaplain and Stephen Chow, George Orwell, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan and of course Warren Buffett.. she will have her heroes. As Minister pointed out in the previous post, I remembered the China trip with Minister Yeo traveling down the river via the slow boat. I was one of the youngest members in the Young PAP contingent. Now I think I can merely qualify as young. No wonder some of the marching scenes in the movie look so familiar! Oh one minor compliant about the movie - every other scene, you see some white doves. John Woo loves his trademark birds. Don't miss it! Harold Fock Red Cliff George Yeo on Facebook Wheel, Walk or Jog Hwa Chong Lecture 2008 Part 1: who am I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG4_mXuNdIY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN2CuqOX9GU Part 2: why am I here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7hJdr92Clw Part 3: what do I want to be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz45Tctl0Lc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW4z-7EdlzY Part 4: Q&A http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJe7DG2qTk8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey1PioFxpZc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmOOEZOlZP0 Apart from stopping bullets, what can Kevlar do? We know Kevlar is used in body armour. We have seen too many heroes riddled with bullets and thankfully, they wore Kevlar (by DuPont) and lived to fight another day. I just got this pair of amazing British-designed Bowers & Wilkins (B&W) 685 speakers and they are sitting prettily in my office. While I am writing this and doing my year-end closing and corporate exercise (it is 11pm now on a Friday night and yes, entrepreneurs works long hours), the speakers are playing Pet Shop Boys, my all time favourite Euro-techno band. If you look at the yellow cone, audiophile calls it "cone bass/midrange" and I suspect it means the normal range of frequency -not so high (that's for the tweeters) and not so low (that's for the bass flowport), it is made of Kevlar. Since Kevlar is a high tech synthetic fabric that possesses high tensile strength, it is perfect for making the vibrating part of the speaker's cone. Dont ask me about the science but intuitively it makes sense. Check out Wikipedia on Kevlar and i was surprised to learn it was invented as early as 1965. It is used in so many applications - body anti-ballistic armour, ropes, car brakes, buildng material, optic fibre cables, sports equipment and drum heads. Yes, drum heads. I don't need a body armour (yet) but it is nice to have two pieces of Kelvar blasting the sweetest music I have ever heard on my B&W. As they always say in those science programmes, what will they think of next? After Pet Shop Boys, I will play Susan Wong (queen of Super Audio CD recording with her perfect vocal), Tsai Chin (she sang the memorable song in the movie Infernal Affairs - both Andy Lau and Tony Leung were staring at the vacuum tube amplifier), Diana Krall and a chamber group playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Kevlar makes my long lonely nights in the office fun. Harold Fock The amazing B&W 685. The robot is not part of the speaker but a gift from my daughter Natalie What you can learn from Hollywood and Bollywood? 1. If you are old enough, you will vaguely remember the old Hollywood musical movies featuring hundreds of extras and dancers, doing some fantastic military precise choreography. The person responsible for this was a producer and dance choreographer named Busby Berkeley. He was in the military in World War One so getting a hundred showgirls to dance in line was a walk in the park or should I say a dance in the park for him. In the mid 1930s to 1950s, almost every movie is a musical. It is not unlike the Bollywood musical movies we love to mock. 2. Busby was an obsessive producer and he wanted to top each musical with bigger and larger budget and a larger troop of dancers. But in the late 50s, audience taste has changed. They wanted non-singing movies. They wanted to see violence, gangster and damsels in distress. But Busby refused to evolve and change. He kept on making those movies until the American studios killed off his projects. Today, nobody knows who is Busby. He became a note in the history of cinema trivial. (Accoding to Wikipedia, he had a bit of a career revival in his older age as directors sought him out to film complex sections of the movies.) Military precision Berkeley's classic 3.Interestingly, even a traditional society like India is evolving. For the last decade, Indian directors have tried to make larger and more expensive musicals but each one of them was a box office disaster. The larger the movie, the bigger the losses. Now they have their own non-singing movie classics like the rest of the world. 4. When you run a business, what works in the past may not be a success in the future. A businessman must accept the Darwinian nature of commerce. If the business parameter changes, one has to change with the times. Your one hit wonder may be an accidental hit in the past but to use the same strategy and tactic in every scenario is courting disaster. My Zen-centric dad always reminded me that one has to be introspective. It is like possessing a pair of eyes that grow outside your socket and look at yourself from an “outside” perspective. If you do not possess this reflective ability, to question oneself, to willing to learn new tricks, skills and technologies, to unlearn and discard what is obsolete, then you will end up like Busby. 5. The best businessmen and fund managers are often introspective people. Sure, they often make mistake and get burnt but they are fast to adapt. Hardly I see them making the same mistake twice. There is a famous saying, “Fool me once, shame on him. Fool me twice, shame on me.” For those who think they are always right and see the world with a happy cookie cutter, they often end up in the museum. The best businessmen sees themselves as cookie cutter mould maker. They make and perfect a mould. Make a thousand copies and milk everything they could out of that mould and they exit (or better still, sell it to the next wannabe sucker). And then make another new mould and repeat extraction process. 6. How do you fight this Busby Disease? I won’t use the oft-quoted “The only constant in life is change.” This is a consultant wannabe’ favourite quote. I had one male ex-colleague, who has Snoopy pictures all over his cubicle, who quotes this line all the time. I want to say this to him, “So your mother is a man.” There are some things in this universe I do not want to change. For example, my parents’ sex. But I can think of a few ways to fight this disease. 7. Be humble. Do not take one’s age (“I eat salt more than you eat rice”), title and position for granted. You have not arrived. In fact, we never really “arrived” in life until we depart from this life. Nope, buying a few luxurious watches and collecting a few vintage wives, I mean wine, is not the end point of life’s amazing journey. We can learn and unlearn. We continue to be curious of the world and look for megatrends. We read and scan for data. We can say “sorry I am wrong.” We can admire Tiger Woods’ feats but we must not forget a young staff’s “surprise” contribution. I am often amazed that bosses pay homage to Tiger or Federer as if they were born in the same village but not a word of appreciation to his own team mates who keep him alive or/and keep him fed. We must surround ourselves with people with backbone and not weathervanes. Our best friends are not those who ape “Wang Shang Ying Ming” (Oh, Great Emperor, You are so brilliant!) and not always those who share the same buddy-buddy hobbies with us. We must surround ourselves with diversity and independent minds so that at the crucial juncture, they can save our sorry asses and tell us where we have gone wrong and then we promise never to make the same mistake.. ever. Don’t be a Busby. 8. I am forever paranoid. This is worse than the “naked” nightmare in which you find yourself walking into the exam hall wearing nothing. This is my ultimate nightmare. You walk on stage wearing the Elvis unbuttoned shirt gyrating to your own Bollywood hit. And your opponent walks purposefully towards you in a red-gold Iron Man suit and the audience is shouting “Tony Stark! Tony Stark! Tony Stark!” and you have no idea what is that all about. That, to me, would be a blockbuster tragedy.   Harold Fock Conservation International The New Eurasian TRANSCRIPT OF DOORSTOP INTERVIEW WITH FOREIGN MINISTER GEORGE YEO AND DEPUTY GOVERNOR OF HADRAMOUT AHMED JANNED AL JANNED AT TEPAK SIREH RESTAURANT ON 11 JUNE 2008 The Marriage of Old and New Technologies The Energy Crisis Obama Obama's Victory Opening Remarks by the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Singapore, Mr George Yeo, at the ASEAN-UN International Pledging Conference on Sunday 25 May 2008 in Yangon, Myanmar TRANSCRIPT OF MINISTER FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS GEORGE YEO PRELIMINARY REMARKS AT THE CLOSING OF THE ASEAN-UN INTERNATIONAL PLEDGING CONFERENCE ON CYCLONE NARGIS IN YANGON, MYANMAR, 25 MAY 2008 TRANSCRIPT OF DOORSTOP INTERVIEW BY MINISTER FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS GEORGE YEO WITH THE SINGAPORE MEDIA DELEGATION AT TWAN TE TOWNSHIP, YANGON, 24 MAY 2008 TRANSCRIPT OF MEDIA WRAP-UP BY MINISTER FOR FOREIGN AFFAIRS GEORGE YEO WITH THE SINGAPORE MEDIA DELEGATION, YANGON, 25 MAY 2008 TRANSCRIPT OF JOINT PRESS CONFERENCE ON THE ASEAN-UN INTERNATIONAL PLEDGING CONFERENCE ON CYCLONE NARGIS, MINDON ROOM, SEDONA HOTEL, YANGON, 25 MAY 2008 Hope for Myanmar 1 Sunday's International Pledging Conference for the cyclone victims of Myanmar raised hopes that the Myanmar Government would be more flexible in allowing in international aid. Last week, following the Special ASEAN Meeting in Singapore, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon had a long meeting with Senior General Than Shwe who agreed to accept civilian aid from all countries. On the ground, aid is beginning to get through. 2. There is no time to lose. Over a million people are desperately in need of help. Reports of the situation in the Irrawaddy Delta make for depressing reading. The long stand-off between the international community and the Myanmar Government caused a delay of more than two weeks. Without external pressure, the Myanmar Government might have been slower to open up. Too much external pressure, however, might have caused a paranoid reaction. Rumours of warships forcing their way into Myanmar territorial waters were accompanied by rumours of the Myanmar Army deploying personnel and resources to defensive preparations instead of using them to help cyclone victims. 3. At the Pledging Conference, many countries made clear that more aid would be forthcoming if the government provided more information and let in foreign aid workers. But all agreed that humanitarian aid should not be politicized which indeed was ASEAN's position all along. 4. ASEAN's role was critical. While the ASEAN countries are contributing money, supplies and medical teams, our biggest contribution is in bridging the lack of trust between the Myanmar Government and the outside world. At the Special Ministerial Meeting in Singapore, the Myanmar Government agreed that we should establish an ASEAN-led mechanism which would work with the Myanmar Government on one side and with the UN and other international agencies on the other. That was a breakthrough. But the road ahead is still long. 5. Sitting next to PM Thein Sein at lunch, he told me that he and his Cabinet ministers spent most of their time in Yangon now. He told me how many survivors clung on to coconut trees for dear life. Unlike a tsunami which comes in and recedes, the tidal surge which swept the delta kept the waters high for hours. Many of the victims had blistered backs because the rain hit them at speeds of 150 to 200 km an hour, like water cannons. It was a disaster of biblical proportions. George Yeo Youtube.com Link: ASEAN and Mynamar Sichuan Earthquake Relationship with North Korea Cry for Myanmar Minister Yeo's Interview with Indian Express' Editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta "Walk The Talk"