You can ask for directions..

PERLU is an acronym which I devised for Professionals and Entrepreneurs graduates of Local University. I want to propose a forum for it; a network of socially motivated people with a desire for value creation and capacity building.

The reasons? A fresh graduate who just entered the job market would want to know how to look for prospective employers and to make the approach. The executive need to know where to improve his skills or how to go about setting his own business and what are the options available. The entrepreneur who is always on the lookout for somebody to share his ideas with and where he can go to get assistance for his ventures. And more..

The forum is where they can get all the information they need. A place where they can get the representation and a leverage. A place where they can meet people having the same aspirations and to share information. Not only it could save them a lot of time, it would be a morale booster for them as well.

The Forum provides the incentive for learning and mentoring. Participants will call on one another's strength. The atmosphere is set for entrepreneurship to thrive and prosper. It will enabled the transition of a graduate to become a professional and an entrepreneur to be coordinated and cushioned.

The creation of PERLU Forum will facitate in achieving the objectives for the development of human capital which is an important component for the successful economic activity and distribution.

Firstly, the Forum provide the critical mass; a pool of people with the knowledge, skills and abilities. They come from varied background and nationalities but having a common goal. The Forum brought them together under a self-help realisation; always wanting to be creative, innovative and inventive.

Secondly, the Forum will create more small medium enterprises which is the backbone of any nation economy. Businesses built here are at the grass-root level due to the diversity of participants thus ensuring that development is broad based.

Ultimately, the Forum is the answer to the question of how to foster the climate of cooperation and goodwill amongst professionals and entrepreneurs cutting across boundaries.

P.S. Please provide your details: name[which you want to use], email/website address, graduate/professional/entrepreneur, industry[for professional],business[for entrepreneur], academic field & country.

Let's do it...

I'll let you on a little secret: Hatch isn't my real name and neither is Foster my surname. Hatch Foster is actually the energy. Within us. It's the power to come up[hatch] with ideas and to nurture[foster] them. The capacity is inherent in us all. No good comes of it if it remained inert. Perhaps, a platform like this blog can help in it's own little way. A common one where we can share our stories and realisations indirectly spurring one another in the process making the capacity comes alive...


The reality we perceive is a tiny fraction of the Universe as it really exists. At an invisible level, everything and everyone is interconnected in a most profound way, not only as human beings but as energy, mind and matter.

David Bohm

Quantum Theory

The ties that bind us...

The forest is like a bank like a supermarket for us. Everything is here. In the mainstream society, poverty is measured in monetary terms. But that doesn't apply to us. We are poor only if you take away our forest because that's where all our resources are.

A Native Voice

Four years ago, we read about freak incidents where crustaceans, fish and other marine animals landed in abundance in the shores of Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.

To most these signalled some sort of blessing from heaven. Little did they know that they were actually signs of impending disaster. In this case, it was the tsunami of December 2004, which hit not only Aceh, Indonesia, but a dozen other countries.

There had also been reports of animals behaving strangely just before the tsunami. But humans, the so-called paragons of the animal kingdom, were not alert to these signals.

Elephants in Thailand moved to higher ground, animals on Andaman island escaped being overwhelmed by the deadly waves; so too those in the open flatlands of Sri Lanka.

All these were in contrast to the hundreds of thousands of humans who perished because they were caught unawares by the disaster. We either misread the signs or ignored them as being irrelevant and carried on business as usual. For this, we paid a high price.

It was not surprising then to read yet again about similar occurrences and responses, this time in Sichuan, China. A few days before the massive earthquake, frogs appeared in large numbers close to the tragic spot.

Some in fact interpreted this as a good omen for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

The warning signs of nature were again ignored and thousands of human lives have been lost and many more have become victims of the situation, whereas virtually all the animals are said to be unharmed.

We seem to have lost our capacity to survive in this world, losing our connection with our immediate surroundings.

We are overwhelmed by marvels of connectivity, electronic or otherwise, causing our world to shrink to a global village, but we have failed to establish any meaningful connection with signals being emitted by Mother Nature.

We seem to have lost the ability to fathom why Mother Nature is reacting the way she does. For example, the frequent floods nowadays, or why there are longer and nastier periods of drought.

We have taken for granted that everything can be solved by advances in technology without fundamentally changing our lifestyle. In fact, we are increasingly dependent on "smart" technology to comfort and save us.

Thus, we talk of an artificial early warning system as though these are fool-proof. Millions of dollars are invested on such systems when nature has already "perfected" such a system for us.

But we refuse to acknowledge these, condemning them as "primitive" and "unsophiscated", unfit for this brave new world of unrivalled science and technology.

We refuse to acknowledge that nature and also it's inherent wisdom have long been the source of inspiration for humankind since time immemorial.

That the survival of the human species today is due to the fact that we have been inspired by nature is ignored.

That we took lessons from it, and symbiotically adapted our ways with it is quickly forgotten while the new sciences and emerging technologies are about conquering and exploitation.

As the human species grows more arrogant, they continue to negate the role of nature to their detriment.

This will mark the beginning of the human race as we know it.Homo sapiens [meaning the "wise ones"] have yet to wise up and re-learn what they have inadvertently lost, perhaps with the help of science and technology.

For now, however, the lesson is that the sophiscation and wisdom afforded by Mother Nature is something that no science and technology can match.

And when that happens, there will be no human-made counter force that can cope with it.

It is best that we be humble and relearn the ways of our forebears and re-connect with Mother Nature, if we are humble enough.

Beauty as we know it... [A tribute to The Magus by John Fowles]

I realised that I was living in a world where the beauty of the written word was lost. Images were redefining the world I lived in. Literature is being pushed to the periphery. I longed for the genius of creativity as evident in literary works. I had lost my bearings in a convoluted world of heightened anxieties and information overload.

Perhaps the splendour of letters will keep us sane in a world full of conflict and uncertainty. And we need more than just time for that, we need passion as well. David Denby* wrote about how he found himself in an immense system of representation and simulacra, yet, "I possesed information without knowledge, opinions without principles, instincts without beliefs".

Perhaps, like T.S. Elliot's poem "the Hollow Men", we are all the hollow men of the modern era - ourheadpieces stuffed with straw. We are best represented in his famous lines, "shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion.

*Author of Great Books: My adventure with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World

Bliss.. I'll take you there