Yesterday’s lunch was with the Wong sisters, Virginia and Valerie.
We had our lunch at Pulsii bistro at Tras Street. The food was decent and the set lunch was well priced.
I have known the sisters for a very long time. I first met Virginia sometime in 1998, I think. Later I got to know her twin sister. I have also met their mother who is, at least to me, a very happy and cheerful person.
Two wonderful hardworking sisters, one in finance and the other in property, who have been very good friends over the years. Both are very kind and helpful but they can, at the same time, be firm and will not tolerate any nonsense. I have been to Japan and Phuket with them years ago. They have over the years also introduced me to their friends, though I have lost touch with most of them.
We make it a point to catch up regularly and it is always an enjoyable two hours mealtime with them, talking about everything and nothing!
I had the opportunity to speak to his wife for quite some time when I was there. That was meaningful for me because I found out how it happened so fast and suddenly.
Pat had given me his initial medical reports when he was first diagnosed. He had a high Gleason score of 5+4. That is a very aggressive form of prostate cancer. He responded well to the initial treatment and perhaps that lulled everyone into a sense of complacency because, as I found out yesterday, he was only being monitored every 6 months. My doctor friends in private practice say that with a Gleason score like this, they would have monitored him every month.
Unfortunately the cancer spread silently and because he wasn’t being monitored, it was only picked up after he felt unwell and tired, by which time it had spread all over. All treatments they tried at that stage were not having any effect. They then tried radiation and that made the cancer markers shoot skyhigh. Finally they gave him blood transfusion to boost his platelet levels and then did a half dose of chemotherapy. That sent him into hospital and eventually I think because of the low platelet count, he suffered a stroke and became unconscious.
A life, albeit short, has to be lived well and meaningfully. And Patrick did that. His wife told me they went on 10 holidays in the last 12 months and they were in fact supposed to be on holiday in France when did this happened.
I am glad he enjoyed his time with his wife and children in the last few months.
Yesterday morning I went to view this development.
I saw this development in a property supplement on Friday and called them up to arrange a viewing.
It was a 50 minutes drive from KLCC. But the place was nice. Some places just impact you positively and this was one such place. Quiet, serene, good air, fairly cool and from everything on paper a no brainier. It is very low density development and if all works out well, should be a beautiful one.
I gave them my budget and they showed me a a few lots. I settled on lot 153. Each lot is an acre and you can build your own house on it.
The designs and pricing provided by the architects for the houses also looked good. Good facilities provided. The clincher was the durian deal!!
Anyway put in a deposit this morning. Fingers crossed!
I saw a review of this book in the Economist. It looked interesting and I decided to start reading this.
This is actually an autobiography about Xi Zhongxun, the father of the current Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jing Pin, and the early days of the Chinese Communist Party, written by Joseph Torigian.
I am still in the very early stages in the book but just some initial thoughts. The father was himself a high ranking CCP member. He staunchly believed in communism and started his activities very early on. By 14, he was already in prison for an attempted murder. It struck me how family ties mean very little to them. His father died of a broken heart when his son was sent to prison at such a young age. Yet that seems to have made no impact on him.
Friendship also means nothing to these party members as they are constantly plotting against each other and ratting each one out to gain influence and position for themselves. In fact friendship is discouraged as the party was worried that when they were together as friends, they will speak bad things about the party.
China seems to have been in a state of total chaos in the 1930s and 1940s. Each different region was governed by warlords, bandits, the Nationalistic Party and the Communist Party and each group was killing off the other, including innocent people. No wonder the Japanese went into China so easily. China at that time appears to have been a lawless country with many people having no food most of the time.
As for the Communist Party, there was constant infighting amongst the members, each one trying to outdo the other in proving how pure they are in their thoughts. There are constant purges and the leaders were forcing members to spend a minimum of 2 hours a day studying thoughts and principles to purify their thoughts and minds. There was a constant fear of spies and traitors in their ranks although they were themselves constantly sending their members out to be spies for them. The senior party members were often accusing people of being spies or not being pure in their thoughts and were then forcing them to reflect, repent and confess. So many innocent people confessed to false facts to just get out of this exercise of reflection and repentance. The party leaders were the ones to decide if your confessions are sufficiently sincere for this torture of reflection and repentance to end.
So strange. I wonder how much things have changed since then?
Tonight was the MPO performance of the movie The Godfather-live.
It’s been quite sometime that I last saw and heard a movie soundtrack conducted live whilst the movie was screened. That last time must have been in the early 2000s and it was the performance of the black and white Charlie Chaplin movie, The Kid. That was also a MPO performance.
The hall was packed tonight and I think they have a full house for this performance. And the people coming for the concerts here are all well dressed.
It is a different experience watching the movie and having the music played live. The movie features a wonderful score by Nino Rota. The love theme that plays only in the second half of the movie is divine. The orchestra played well. And of course the movie is one of the all time greats! The playing during the end credits was exceptional.
I was having dinner at Culina in KL yesterday evening. I was talking to the manager while waiting for my food to be served and out of the blue he told me that before he started working in restaurants, he was a MH flight crew member. He was flying for 25 years before he quit. He stopped flying after the MH 370 incident.
He was rostered to be on that flight but his wife was uncomfortable with him going on that flight. He had just done another MH 370 a week before and she found it weird that he got that same flight within a week. Call it intuition. So he reported sick and is alive today as a result. He quit immediately after that flight went missing. About 1000 crew members quit after that incident.
He had a good friend who also reported sick that day and was therefore also saved. But that friend carried on flying whilst telling people how grateful he was that his life had been saved because he missed that flight. Six months later he was on MH 17 and he died that day.
He was a colleague from the very early days, later our Managing Partner for 6 years and a good friend.
Yesterday evening I had a call from Kim Beng and I was informed that Pat was in ICU. His cancer had spread and he had collapsed during chemotherapy. He was on a ventilator.
I was shocked. I thought his cancer was under control. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a year ago but everytime we met, he seemed fine and he told me it was under control. We would talk and drink coffee whenever we bumped into each other at the courtyard. He only complained that he had to be on medication his whole life. He was still traveling, meeting people and attending events.
But according to a friend, when he saw Pat on Sunday he was weak but still in good spirits and was in fact planning a trip to Bali with this friend. But that was not to be.
The downturn was so sudden.
Pat joined the firm in 1994, just when I did. We were part of a dinner group that met once a month since the early days till about 2010. But I only got to know him much better when he became Managing Partner. We used to discuss the firm, projects and people. We talked about politics a lot. He was always responsive and helpful and always there to lend a listening ear.
One topic we discussed a lot was how we can effectively reach out and help people in a meaningful way via our Foundation. But Pat had so many things that needed his attention and it was a pity we never firmed this up.
After he was diagnosed with cancer, we spoke a lot. He sent me his reports for a second opinion and the prognosis was good. Just not sure how it went downhill so fast. He stepped down as Managing Partner only April this year.
A friend we had lunch with last year just reminded me that during the lunch, Pat was talking about slowing down and retirement. That never happened.
He was just 61. So many things he would have wanted to do in retirement but never got to do.
Strangely I am reminded that this was the same age my good friend Noris Ong was when he passed away from cancer some 15 years ago.
Rest in Peace Pat. You have done well with your family, friends and colleagues.
What a tragedy. About 270 people dead when the plane crashed just upon take off from Ahmedabad in Gujarat. It is clear from the videos the plane had lost power and couldn’t rise. After a mayday call it crashed and killed even more on the ground. So many lives lost. What could have led to a catastrophic loss of power in both engines?
And it is amazing that a single passenger survived almost unscathed when every other person on board perished.
It was just announced that Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys has died aged 82.
He had started this band with his brothers and friends in the late 50s. I know only some of their songs. I don’t know the band well but by all accounts, he was a musical genius and the Beach Boys were big in the US. When I was reading the book, The Wrecking Crew, all the top session musicians of that era were in awe of him. His musical creativity, arrangements and song writing skills were top class. The Beach Boys were big before the Beatles were known in America.
He was so mesmerized by Be My Baby and the Phil Spector wall of sound technique that he wanted to create a masterpiece. And that album Pet Sounds, was so admired for its creativity that the Beatles modelled Sgt Pepper’s after that album.
Of course in later years drug use destroyed him and the band. They completely disappeared from the scene except for one hit Kokomo in the 80s. Such a pity.
This is something we all learn in primary school. Green plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and with water they absorb from the soil via their roots, they use sunlight to convert these 3 items into sugars and release oxygen. We need both the oxygen and the sugars to live. It is something we all take for granted because it is so ubiquitous.
But last night I was reading a book on the origins of life and there was a chapter on photosynthesis. Then I realized how complex this process actually is. It has baffled scientists over the years who have been trying to understand this process and work out the exact manner by which this is done. Even today, the detailed process by which sugars are created from sunlight, water and carbon dioxide with the release of oxygen is not understood. Much work has been done in this field because if this process can be relicated, then we can set up factories to make sugars and do the conversion ourselves without having to rely on living plants and trees to sustain humans.
But photosynthesis was essential for the creation of life as we know it because without sufficient oxygen we may not exist. Without sugars we will also die, albeit a bit later. And if all the carbon dioxide we exhale is not converted into oxygen, we will also die.
We rely on the sugars created by photosynthesis as our nutrition to live. All the plants, fruits and animals we eat all have consumed the sugars from photosynthesis. These eventually become food for us.
It is incredible to imagine how these green chlorophyll organisms somehow were created early on in the history of earth which led to the oxygenation of our planet and to give rise to life as we know it on land. And the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere has to be just right because too much oxygen is poisonous and will kill us off. Green plants and trees maintain that balance for us to be able to live.
The more I read I begin to wonder if the creation of humans was purely fortuitous or by some divine stroke. The number of things that had to be there in the right time, place and proportions for life to exist is just mind boggling!
daily musings 