The ends justify the means

After an uneventful first day in Cairo, we got to live the experience of residents here courtesy of EgyptAir and the Cairo Airport. First we were checked in by a friendly agent who complimented D on her slimness (saying she wouldn't weigh more than 30kgs). So taken were we by this cheery manner, we didn't realise that the flight he checked us into was MS162 instead of MS062. The former departs 20mins later and MS062 itself was retimed a week ago to depart at 7:40am instead of 7:15am. To add to this confusion as we approach the MS062 gate to check, we had to descend two floors to the boarding gate and to get back up we needed to take two lifts... each going up only one floor. 

There are places which are lawless and there places with clear rule of law... and then there's Egypt where the law exist merely as a destination but not the path to get things done. F was sharing last night how his team would file bogus police reports to undertake repairs even when there was no grounds for police involvement. They did so because it was the only way to get the job done officially. In a way, there is no better manifestation of "the end justifies the means" as it is practised here. 

Well, right now, D and I are still waiting at the gate an hour after our originally scheduled flight was to have taken off and we are completely unsure what has happened to our flight. All passenger queries are greeted with an ambivalent shrug of the shoulders despite there being from 1 to 5 ground staff sitting/walking around at all times for the one hour plus that we have been sitting here. 

I think of Singapore's efficiency and how it wenr from a colonised island to the paragon of success it is now and try to imagine if this outcome could have been achieved in Egypt. This culture of bending the law (without actually breaking it) is not easily eradicated. It was how these people's have survived over millenia, ruled as they are by mortals who governed like Gods and the population were noting but a workforce for their megalomania. One example today is the "No Helmet" rule for motorcyclist. This head protection gear was disallowed on grounds of it being something terrorists would don when going about their activities. Talk about prioritising needs of the state over the citizens. 

An hour after the departure time of this flight, we were finally boarded and onto an Airbus 320 NEO instead of a Boeing 737 800... which is better I guess, being a bigger plane. We finally left two hours after originally scheduled flight - all done without notice - and got into Luxor safely with time to spare on a city tour in a horse carriage before we boarded our ship, Movenpick's MS Hamees to cruise up the Nile to Aswan for the next 4 days. As I said, the ends justify the means. 

 

Cairo to Capetown... the journey begins

Nearly 40 years ago, aided by a well-thumbed yellow covered backpackers' bible (ie Tony Wheeler's Southeast Asia on a shoestring, before it became the Lonely Planet empire it is now), I travelled from Singapore where I had just concluded my first year of university to my hometown in Malacca and all the way up Peninsular Malaysia to Hatyai, Phuket, Bangkok, Kanchanaburi, Chiangmai and beyond. 

Believing the "bible", I had faith in my shoestring budget - all of a thousand ringgit (earned from giving tuition) - would be enough for an entire month of travel. It was, barely. 

I met other travelers, shared resources with them on common routes, ate and drank simply or not at all, figured out how to keep my unlaundered clothes fresh, survived dehydration and somehow stayed safe throughout. 

Though I don't travel like this anymore, am glad I did it all those decades ago. The main barrier to such trips is the lack of time. I did do another month long journey, across Indonesia, the year after. And I started work and had only 20 working days of leave for the year. So trips got shorter, no more than a couple of weeks each time, like the one across Europe with D and her friends who were on their post university getaway. 

It wasn't until I was in BCG where as a partner, one earns a 2-month sabbatical every 5 years, that I could contemplate such travel. I missed my first window, then back in 2009. In 2014, I did the wanderlust nirvana notion of going Round The World and in our case, we chose the Latin world... so from Singapore we flew via Barcelona to Sao Paolo, then Rio de Janeiro, and over to Lima and Cuzco and then into Miami, Los Angeles and back via Tokyo (yes this doesn't count as Latin but was a much needed sanitiser after the sights and sounds on Ipanema beach and the mountains and sacred valleys at Macchu Picchu. 5 years after that, with the young ones in tow, we took the fabled Silk Road and travelled east to west from Beijing to Xian and through old stations like Dun Huang, Turpan, Kashgar and continued overland into Krygzstan, Tajikistan and finally Uzebkistan. It was mosques, mausoleum, museums all the way. That was just before COVID19 shut down borders across the world and we were lucky we got the big trip out of our system.

This year our plan is to go from Cairo to Capetown. In this journey from the top to the bottom of the continent, we are expecting less sights and more mess. It's the continent that humans first started and fanned out to populate the rest of the world. Yet, till today, it's infrastructure remains poor. There was no direct flight to Cairo from Singapore for example. And from a distance, Africans seemed poorer, less educated, more pessimistic and in some countries you can't tell its political leaders from village shamans. It's done to them by people with bad as well as good intents, sadly: manipulated by their governments, befooled by foreign experts, kept needy by foreign charities. 

This is our first morning on the continent and we're awaken at 7am sharp by the church bell ringing. It was next to our apartment. I was expecting a muezzin call to prayer for the mosque given this is a Muslim majority country but churches have a long history here. Perhaps you heard even the Holy Family lived here. 

Then the renovation started in the building. The dull thumping on the walls somewhere in the vicinity. Welcome to Africa. We are up and ready!

tour de france stage 19 - when the race was won (perhaps overly so?)

Another well written oiece by Jeremy Whittle based this time at Isola 2000, yes 2km up above sea level. He writes about the champion that Pogacar still is despite losing his TDF crown the past two years and wonders if his fight back is overdone. Sportsmen are competitive. Champions even more so. It's the only reason why they go through all the pain and sacrifices training. They compete to win and Pogaar won so comprehensively, he has now almostbcertainly won the competition with still 2 stages to go. Jeremy's article below.

Photograph: Marco Bertorello/AFP/Getty Images

There is no stopping Tadej Pogacar. The Giro d’Italia winner took a definitive and conclusive grip on the yellow jersey with just two stages of the Tour de France remaining after another solo win, on stage 19 to Isola 2000.

It was too much for the defending champion, Jonas Vingegaard, who finally conceded defeat after crossing the line at the high-altitude ski station. “Now it’s over,” the Dane said.

In yet another display of daunting strength, Pogacar, of the UAE Emirates team, crushed his closest rivals Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel in the high passes of the Mercantour Alps. It was the Slovenian’s 10th Grand Tour stage win of 2024.

This was payback for Pogacar, for the humiliations he has endured at the hands of Vingegaard and his team. Dropped in the Alps by Vingegaard in 2022 and 2023, the 25-year-old exacted brutal revenge, increasing his lead on his rival to just over five minutes with two days left to race.

Just to rub salt in the wound, Pogacar also denied the Dane’s Visma Lease-a-bike teammate, Matteo Jorgenson, a debut Tour stage win, catching the American rider almost within sight of the finish line.

Much had been made of Pogacar’s supposed vulnerability at high altitude, but not only did the 2020 and 2021 Tour champion survive the thin air of the race’s highest peak, the Cime de la Bonette, he cruised further ahead in the overall standings and again emphasised his superiority over the peloton.

On the final climb to Isola 2000 a faltering Vingegaard morphed from champion to limpet, sticking doggedly to Evenepoel’s back wheel, but unable to assist in the pursuit of Pogacar, after the race leader had attacked nine kilometres from the finish.

“Maybe something is catching up now,” Vingegaard, whose Tour buildup was derailed by a serious crash that hospitalised him in April, said after the stage. “I think it’s normal with only one and a half months of preparation. I said, from the start, it would be crazy if I could fight with one and a half months [of preparation], but I did it for two and a half weeks.”

For Vingegaard, the walnut whip of the towering 2,802m Cime de la Bonette, the high point of the Tour and what was expected to provide the platform for a fightback, became a road to nowhere. What had been expected to be a high-altitude “death zone”, a platform to test Pogacar’s capabilities, with a fiery attack from the reigning champion, did not materialise.

With two of his teammates, Jorgenson and Wilco Kelderman, in the six-man breakaway, the scene was set for the Dane to make his move, but nothing transpired. Instead, his legs were simply not strong enough.

On the hoof, his team played a second card, that of a Jorgenson stage win. But showing an insatiable appetite for success, Pogacar thwarted that plan too. “I wasn’t on a good day,” Vingegaard told the media after the stage. “I had to switch my mindset from trying to go for the win.”

Even with a summit finish and time trial still to race, the Tour is now won. But Pogacar has been also been warned by two former Grand Tour champions, one stripped of his accolades, the other with his public image still intact, over displaying arrogance.

In the aftermath of the Slovenian’s surprise attack on the Col du Noyer on Wednesday, Pogacar was reprimanded by none other than Lance Armstrong.

“It was really unnecessary to attack like that,” Armstrong said on his podcast. “This will only draw more attention to Pogacar. If there’s already speculation about his performance, this certainly doesn’t help.”

That view was supported by former Giro d’Italia champion, Tom Dumoulin, speaking to the Dutch broadcaster NOS.

“Pogacar didn’t need to do this at all. He did it solely to unsettle Vingegaard,” Dumoulin said, latching on to other growing suggestions of arrogance in the French media.

“There’s definitely an element of arrogance. The rivalry between Vingegaard and Pogacar has spanned three years, and Pogacar can’t accept being beaten two years in a row. Now that he’s back in control and has the strength to challenge Vingegaard again, he’s thinking, ‘Now, I’ll get you back.’”

Belief... to overcome the odds

I was not a fan of cycling: the activity nor the sport. Like many, I have heard of Lance Armstrong who brought the sport into disrepute. 

There is however one marquee event: the Tour De France and like all pinnacle events, it transcends the sport.

Then there is the story of Mark Cavendish. Not the beat sprinter, nor climber, nor GC all rounder, he is talented and more importantly hungry enough to win 34 stages over 15 TDFs equalling the all time great Eddy Merckx. 

And then today, he stood alone, a story of overcoming all odds - physical and mental: just last year he crashed and dislocated his shoulder, he also had to battle Epstein-Barr disease and suffered depression but he never lost belief. At 39 years of age - older than nearly all other riders, he rode again, this time to win his 35th TDF stage. 

The Guardian journalist, Jeremy Whittle chronicled it at the finish line in Saint Vulbas below:

Mark Cavendish became the most prolific stage winner in the history of the Tour de France, taking his 35th victory with a typically instinctive victory in a chaotic sprint finish in Saint-Vulbas.

It may not have been the Champs-Élysées, but when the moment came on the Avenue des Bergeries, in a suburban town in south-eastern France better known for its boulodromes than for its sprint finishes, the 39-year-old from the Isle of Man kept his date with destiny.

Cavendish, who struggled through the Tour’s opening stage when he was seen being ill on the bike, somehow recovered to take an exuberant victory, a year after he had quit his planned final Tour after breaking his collarbone.

Cavendish comebacks have become legendary, but this was perhaps the greatest triumph over adversity of all, given how hard he had to battle to get through Saturday’s opening stage, from Florence to Rimini.

Mark Cavendish celebrates with his Astana teammate AlexWith 24km to go and the roads drying out after an earlier downpour, Cavendish and his Astana team stubbornly hugged the right-hand side of the road and maintained the steady pace that had characterised most of an uneventful stage.

With 5km to go, things got messy as the Lotto Dstny team took over the pacemaking. Suddenly Cavendish had a fight on his hands to regain a good position. But as he has shown in the past, he sprints as successfully using guile, nous and experience, as he does relying on his team. Fittingly, for his record-breaking win, this was a classic example of those instincts.ey Lutsenko.

Mark Cavendish celebrates with his Astana teammate Alexey Lutsenko. Photograph: Getty Images

Once again, as the Tour exited the mountains and headed towards the flatter roads of the Rhone valley, expectations built around his bid to overhaul Eddy Merckx’s 34 stage wins. He was caught out by the crash on stage three into Turin but this time the stars aligned for Cavendish, with both the peloton and the weather playing ball.

With 24km to go and the roads drying out after an earlier downpour, Cavendish and his Astana team stubbornly hugged the right-hand side of the road and maintained the steady pace that had characterised most of an uneventful stage.

With 5km to go, things got messy as the Lotto Dstny team took over the pacemaking. Suddenly Cavendish had a fight on his hands to regain a good position. But as he has shown in the past, he sprints as successfully using guile, nous and experience, as he does relying on his team. Fittingly, for his record-breaking win, this was a classic example of those instincts.

Among his many achievements, Cavendish has also won two green Tour de France points jerseys, a Rio 2016 Olympic silver omnium medal and the 2011 road world championship rainbow jersey. The 39-year-old will be hoping for more before retiring from the sport at the end of the season, something he confirmed would be the case during last month’s Giro d’Italia.

Among his many achievements, Cavendish has also won two green Tour de France points jerseys, a Rio 2016 Olympic silver omnium medal and the 2011 road world championship rainbow jersey. The 39-year-old will be hoping for more before retiring from the sport at the end of the season, something he confirmed would be the case during last month’s Giro d’Italia.

Charting the future

Peter Drucker once said that the best way to predict the future is to just get out there to create it. Yesterday, we had a chance to lunch with J to talk about his future. Moments like what we had today at lunch are getting fewer and far between. And that is only right because he has greater responsibilities now. It makes the time we had today all the more precious.

As his parents, we have lived through enough and while we had nearly two decades to share our experiences with him, some learnings are best imparted at the right juncture. If we had shared our marriage philosophies with a teenage boy then, I doubt he would have understood it then, even as smart as he is.

He listened well and so did we. I am particularly pleased to hear that his "combined" household income is  4 times what D and I had when we were contemplating marriage and with another difference: then the ratio of contribution was reversed. D was the main breadwinner then. :-). So in the 80:20 game, they are already the 80%! So, are starting from a good place. 

He has always heard me say that life is a marathon. There are many stages: school, career, marriage, parenthood, empty nest, retirement and then the final rest stop. No one wins all the stages. Sticking to the analogy, even a champion marathoner doesn’t lead the race all the way to the finish. Some stages matter more than others. Doing well in school is important because it lays the strong foundation and opens many doors. A right partner to spend a lifetime of with is the key to happiness. Raising children to be happy and comfortable in their own skin is joy untold. In the end, we all go back to our maker and hope to have left the world a little better than we have found it. So there really is no point comparing where one is in the race of life at this early stage. By many accounts, he has already won stage 1 and should be confident that the foundation is strong, the doors are open and he can take his time to choose the right path.

What is the right path then? Few would argue that it would be the one that leads to wisdom, leads to blessings, leads to wealth and leads to peace. Again, using the 80:20 rule: wisdom comes from on 20% theoretical intelligence and 80% learned application. Blessings come from less from wishing and more from being grateful. Wealth is more rewarding when it is earned rather than granted. Peace comes from listening vs talking. 

As he reaches the third and fourth stages of life’s marathon, the above principles will serve him well. Like the parable of teaching a man to fish instead of giving him one, as parents, we have endowed our children with sufficient fishing knowledge and skills that they can hopefully now do so for life. Once in a while though, because we love them, we have given you a fish or two. The two fishes we give now are of two kinds: the spiritual and the material.

We do so in the hope that they will both be united in love and faith for life is full of joys pains and mystery and what better way for their journey together to be in the company of God as they experience these together. This spiritual gift we will pray that you be grateful and hence receive the divine blessings.

For the material gift, we want to do this right, ie we don’t wish for this to be misunderstood esp. as other financial arrangements are also being put in place with other family members. So, we would like for this not to be a financial arrangement but rather a matrimonial gift on the day when they solemnise theirr marriage and can then use this to procure their matrimonial asset together. It’s a gift of our love from the both of us to the the both of them.

PS: the seek and strive trait is strong and so is the planning one. I mentioned before that I do the vision thing. Imagine a future 5-10 years out and work backwards to what I need to do now to get there. J himself pointed out that he appreciated such long term perspectives. I did that while posted alone in Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City, and picturing a future with D with kids in a house. I did that also in my career that actually eased my decision to take one step back knowing it will propel me two steps forward. And so it thrilled me (and I mentioned it to D last night) that J too is looking 3-5 years out and working backwards to what he should do now. He may be in the military now and I had thought the apple fell far from the tree but events the last few weeks suggest he is much closer to me than I had thought :-)

That SSDD gene

In the long planned but as yet unwritten book/screenplay, I intended to start with these lines: "all of us in this family have it - that streak of divine discontent. Always searching and striving for greater heights".

Our grandparents did that... Sailing the southern sea to a better life in the "glorious south" away from a China that was imploding into a civil war. Our parents did it, lifting themselves from poverty to a better station in life. And we did it too: working all over the world and in my case, actually being sponsible to grow a business with a global footprint.

In the draft of my book, I pointed out that I am responsible for passing on that gene to my children. And I don't mean a literal DNA mutation but rather a metaphorical one. J and M spent their years being nurtured to see the world as their oyster. They had their under- and post-graduate studies at hallowed institutions on both sides of the Atlantic in the UK and US. 

Yesterday, J returned from an "adult" vacation (and he means just sitting, chatting, meeting people, learning about the places he visited rather than just seeing the sights), he penned his reflections in a letter to me titled "Stockholm thoughts".

"This is it. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the direction that I didn't know was missing from my life but answered questions I didn't even know my soul was asking, like some strange teleological tractor beam".

Well, he may not realise it but its that seek & strive divine discontent gene at work. He is my SSPP and M my DDPP. What I also didn't realise is they are both commonly endowed with SSDD.

Grandparents escaped war. Parents escaped poverty. I scaled the societal pyramid - to as close to the top I possibly can.  Each generation were discontent with something in the present and sought out a new realm. 

Our children too will have their destinations. Singapore's newly minted Prime Minister Lawrence Wong said this at his swearing-in: "young Singaporeans want to have a good life that is measured not only by the narrow metrics of material success but also by meaning and purpose". 

So, as J contemplates his Stockholm thoughts more deeply and M hers too, my one wish is that they are able to do so from a position of strength and stability unlike the grandparents. They need not escape a bad situation. They are however looking for a better situation... beyond materiality to a higher purpose. 

In OOHH, we had installed fountains for our pool. It's nice to listen to sound of water as nature intended. There are eight spouts in all and I thought they stood for the eight attributes the apostle Peter set forth to the world. Seven successive graces to humanity. He said "giving all DILIGENCE, add to your FAITH, VIRTUE; to virtue, KNOWLEDGE; to knowledge, TEMPERANCE; to temperance, PATIENCE; to patience, GODLINESS; to godliness, KINDNESS; to kindness, LOVE."

M & J, taking after their mom are preternaturally diligent beings. The rest they have shown increasingly as they grew up. And as they seek forward, may they always have these eight attributes on hand to draw on and employ. It will make the path forward easier. 

Puppy Days

We just added a sweet little thing called Miso, a Cavapoo from two purebred parents, to the family. We were all excited to have her with us. Caramel was too, initially, until she realised she had to share her bed, food and toys. However, we know that deep inside, she is a kindly sweet natured dog and in no time at all, she got used to Miso and they are sleeping, eating and playing together. 

Just like how Caramel was to Summer, Miso follows big sister everywhere and attempts to kiss and hug her. There is, however, one area that Miso has not yet picked up from Caramel... which is proper toilet habits. A week and a bit since bringing her home, we still find puddles of pee and pieces of poo around the house.

Yesterday morning was no different. M would look after them before heading out to work and found some of Miso's. That piece of poop was easy to dispose of and thereafter the floor is as clean as before; if not cleaner because some arduous soaping and scrubbing had been performed on the spot. Miso, though, remains as yet not fully trained and it will take a few more days (weeks maybe) before she knows that the toilet is outside on the lawn and not inside the house.

I guess that sets us humans apart from the other living creatures no matter how adorable and smart they are. We learn easily and especially when we have a growth mindset. 

M's 'shitty' start to the day continued at work. She had been working hard at preparing the itinerary for a business trip to Indonesia for her bosses and was updating what she had planned for them. Its the very first time she is doing so and she relied on previous materials to prepare hers. 

She did some things well but the format and some analytical basis could have been better. Her supervisor was direct and expressed her views in a manner akin to scolding. Its a little like how I would rebuke Miso when I see her about to have an 'accident'. 

As it turned out, the supervisor appreciated M's spirit, especially her picking up the task willingly and worked hard on it. More importantly, M (fully endowed with the growth mindset) had calmly reflected on things she could indeed do better. Am so pleased that she is so open to learning. Woe be us all if young people came into the workforce as know-it-alls impervious to picking up new things.

I hark back to my days when I first started work and the mistakes I made and how I had no one to talk to except JT (whom I was staying with). We two novices would hem and haw into the night about the small mindedness of corporate leaders without realising that we were the ones being small- and worse, close-minded.

My heart is happy knowing M is not as dumb as her old bean's. No doubt, there will be other moments of learning she will encounter, probably even right now on her business trip. And then there will come a time when she would have mastered her trade and she in turn would supervise a fellow young colleague. Then, there will also come a time when things at work would become boring and unchallenging. I trust her employer would then move her onwards and upwards to greater heights with more responsibilities and challenges 

All that is in the future. For now, she is learning.... just as Miso would too. And as for Caramel, she is just a good big sister allowing the little one to kiss and hug her.

PS: this entry marks a decade of blogging... my first one on this account being on the 21st of January 2014