You-Want's Life

In so many ways, I think this poetry collection was born from a different space. In the past, my poems had always been written at the exact points in time when certain feelings were experienced the most intensely. Fresh and timely were all the words that came within the curiosity, anxiety, and excitement that danced in my head. I would scribble away on packed trains, wake up in the middle of the night and drop everything at work to have my words or ideas recorded, as soon as a wave of emotions hit me. Over the past year, my approach to writing poetry has evolved to be more inquisitive in a retrospective lens. All past moments or events that were ever replayed in my head get sieved through my current perspectives. To my surprise, I was then able to better decipher the root causes of concern, evaluate the outcomes, and assess my reactions and feelings towards them. Perhaps, I simply had had more time in the wee hours to think about my life, or maybe I had grown to manage my emotions bett...

A late afternoon craving for feline interaction brought us to Cat at Palace House, a cat café in Malacca where the company of furry friends would take away our week-long stress from work. Cat at Palace House is relatively newly established. Since it started operations close to two years ago, it has grown to house more than 40 friendly cats which customers can interact with over food and beverages.   Pet cafes have mushroomed over the past two years. While a handful of business owners chose Malacca for its potential in international tourism and lower property prices, pet cafes featuring different themes and animals have also become popular across Kuala Lumpur, Selangor, Penang and Johor Bahru. Pet cafes first started as an avenue for pet owners to bring along pets on their coffee fixes, given typical cafes or restaurants have strict rules against animals being brought into their premises. However, they started trending as more pet owners ventured into the business, as not only does ...

My secondary school, Maktab Sultan Abu Bakar, better known as English College, had a special education unit that catered to visually impaired students. I used to watch them carry their individual Braille typewriters around and wondered how they used them in classes. Back then, my study life was filled with back-to-back extracurricular activities. I never had the chance to properly sit down and learn about Braille and appreciate its importance in supplementing visually impaired individuals with the opportunities to understand the world. Fortunately, that ended today. My team and I got off the Monorail at Jalan Tun Sambanthan, to arrive at the headquarters of Pertubuhan Pembangunan Orang Buta Malaysia (PPOBM, or Society for the Advancement of the Blind) for a ceremony officiating their new Braille library. The organisation was established to support the socio-economic development of visually impaired communities, regardless of race and class. This is made possible through the provision o...

Waking up to grey, drizzling sweater weather on the last day of Charisma Movement's Journalism Study Visit was worrying. The finale of our trip was Bako National Park, which is just north of Kuching, where some of the richest variety of Bornean vegetation and key region-unique wildlife could be found.  Our CM Journalists arrived at Bako National Park. Established in 1957, Bako National Park spread across an area of 27 square kilometres. Seven distinct ecosystems could be found, including Beach Vegetation, Cliff Vegetation, Kerangas (Heath Forest), Mangrove Forest, Mixed Dipterocarp Forest, Padang (Grasslands) Vegetation and Peat Swamp Forest. Our mission was to observe the rare, diverse wildlife that thrives in this strictly protected area, as well as to study the parks’ role in sustaining the local biodiversity and safe habitat for native creatures. This included catching sights of the proboscis monkeys, a strange-looking primate with a large nose and swollen belly endemic to Born...

The first stop of Charisma Movement’s inaugural Journalism Study Visit was the Semenggoh Wildlife Centre, which was a 30-minute drive from Kuching city centre. It was drizzling when our team arrived at the site and we decided to purchase a raincoat which cost us RM5 each. Charisma Movement Journalists at Semenggoh Wildlife Centre, Kuching, Sarawak Located within the 1612-acre Semenggoh Nature Reserve, the wildlife centre is known for its conservation work for orangutans. It was first established in 1975 to rehabilitate orangutans found orphaned or injured, including those confiscated or rescued from the public. Did you know? Orangutans that were newly surrendered or brought to the centre would be placed in a 90-day quarantine and undergo stages of training before they could be released back to the wild. These steps were taken to ensure they could fend for themselves in the wild.  Orangutans were not originally found in Semeggoh. However, thanks to successful rehabilitation programm...

Read our introduction on e-Waste here . Read the first part of our conversation with ERTH here . e-Waste is a growing pain in today’s world. We enjoy the convenience of electronic devices, but are we managing them when their use life is due?  Our journalists at Charisma Movement made a visit to Electronic Recycling Through Heroes (ERTH) ’s warehouse in Cyberjaya to meet its founder, Mohamed Tarek El-Fatatry, for a conversation on the importance of managing e-Waste the right way, and how ERTH plays a part in pushing for the environmental agenda.  CM: For most of us, our lives are highly dependent on electronic devices, much more than our parents and grandparents when they were growing up. The rate of e-Waste production only increases, but our rate of e-Waste recycling does not quite keep up. What do you think contributes to this problem?    Tarek : For the past five years, the problem in Malaysia is the lack of infrastructure. If you have a lot of e-Waste, say on...