You-Want's Life

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...