It has been a year or so since I started my web­site and it has been evolv­ing into a place where I want to be track­ing my thoughts, resources and inspi­ra­tion on var­i­ous top­ics. So, I’ve updated my theme to reflect this progress. Some of the fea­tures are:

1) A hor­i­zon­tal top nav­i­ga­tion bar

2) An Inspi­ra­tion and Resume tab which cov­ers a selected book list and pos­si­bly other types of lists ( which will be grow­ing over time) and my most recent resume

3) A brief “About Me” sec­tion on the top RHS and an updated About section.

Enjoy and also please feel free to sug­gest great books to me! I’m an avid reader and am always on the hunt for more!

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wis­dom, it was the age of fool­ish­ness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the sea­son of Light, it was the sea­son of Dark­ness, it was the spring of hope, it was the win­ter of despair, we had every­thing before us, we had noth­ing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its nois­i­est author­i­ties insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superla­tive degree of com­par­i­son only.

- Charles Dick­ens, A Tale of Two Cities

I recently attended a round­table hosted by the Asia Pacific Foun­da­tion of Canada for a 25@25 dis­cus­sion. The dis­cus­sion emerged from the 25@25 video com­pe­ti­tion as a forum for par­tic­i­pants and part­ners to share their expe­ri­ences and exam­ine future ways to engage youth in pro­mot­ing Canada-Asia relations.

The video com­pe­ti­tion was a huge suc­cess and what I thought to be a really cre­ative way of engag­ing youth to think about issues about Canada-relations. The issues that came out of the con­test, har­ness the col­lec­tive capa­bil­ity and genius that would spur growth and research direc­tion of the foun­da­tion. Some of the themes that emerged included: Peo­ple as a resource, rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the media, self-identity and green tech­nol­ogy exchanges.

“Capa­bil­i­ties to develop new kinds of rela­tion­ships, sense impor­tant devel­op­ments, add value and turn nascent net­worked knowl­edge into com­pelling value are becom­ing the bread and but­ter of wealth cre­ation and success.”

- Wiki­nomics, Don Tapscott

On a another level, it was a great learn­ing oppor­tu­nity for me to step into an area and net­work of which I was not really con­nected to, all because I stepped out of my net­work cir­cle. It reminded me a great TED video by Ethan Zuck­er­man on Lis­ten­ing to Global Voices. He spoke about how even though the web con­nects the whole world, we really end up being stuck in our own web bub­ble rather than lis­ten­ing to what the world has to share.

So in the spirit of col­lab­o­ra­tion, here are my favourite sites on lis­ten­ing to global voices:

1) OpenIDEO: An online plat­form where peo­ple col­lab­o­rate to design bet­ter for social good. It’s a won­der­ful dynamic resource on tack­ling global resources and I’m going to sub­mit a solu­tion to one of their prob­lems soon!

2) World Pulse: A global net­work that broad­casts and unites women’s voices from all over to cre­ate a pow­er­ful voice for change. What I love about this is not only is it a print and web mag­a­zine but it’s also an inter­ac­tive com­mu­nity newswire, PulseWire, where women can col­lab­o­rate and con­nect to solve global problems.

3) Global Voices: An inter­na­tional com­mu­nity of blog­gers who report on dif­fer­ent global issues with top­ics rang­ing from arts to pol­i­tics. It’s an amaz­ing resource and my fav fea­ture is the dif­fer­ent lan­guages that you can read the web­site in. (I occa­sion­ally flip the switch over to Indone­sian, just cause! And it’s so inter­est­ing to read the same arti­cle both in Eng­lish and in another language!)

4) paper.li: This is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent than the above three plat­forms as it really is more a snap­shot of the things/links that you tweet about, but I love the cre­ative for­mat and I find it super inter­est­ing the way it picks up on the dif­fer­ent things I’m browse through online. Below is a snap­shot of what it looks like and I thought I’ll share this one just for fun!

So..what global voices have you been lis­ten­ing to?

So here I am, one night away from my last day of classes as an under­grad­u­ate, with piles of work to fin­ish up…but I really really want to share one thing…before the end of of an era: A beau­ti­ful pas­sage on expe­ri­ence and the human condition.

The truth of expe­ri­ence always con­tains an ori­en­ta­tion towards new expe­ri­ence. That is why a per­son who is called ‘expe­ri­enced’ has become such not only through expe­ri­ences, but is also open to new expe­ri­ences. The per­fec­tion of his expe­ri­ence, the per­fect form of what we call ‘expe­ri­enced’, does not con­sist in the fact that some­one already knows every­thing and knows bet­ter than any­one else. Rather, the expe­ri­enced per­son proves to be, on the con­trary, some­one who is rad­i­cally undog­matic; who, because of the many expe­ri­ences he has had and the knowl­edge he has drawn from them is par­tic­u­larly well equipped to have new expe­ri­ences and to learn from them.

The dialec­tic of expe­ri­ence has its own ful­fill­ment not in defin­i­tive knowl­edge, but in that open­ness to expe­ri­ence that is encour­aged by expe­ri­ence itself. But then this gives the con­cept of expe­ri­ence that we are con­cerned with here a qual­i­ta­tively new ele­ment. It refers not only to expe­ri­ence in the sense of the infor­ma­tion that this or that thing gives us. It is that expe­ri­ence which must con­stantly be acquired and from which none can be exempt. Expe­ri­ence here is some­thing that is part of the his­tor­i­cal nature of man. Although in bring­ing up chil­dren, for exam­ple, par­ents may try to spare them cer­tain expe­ri­ences, expe­ri­ence as a whole is not a thing that any­one can be spared. Rather, expe­ri­ence in this sense involves inevitably many dis­ap­point­ments of one’s expec­ta­tions and only thus is expe­ri­ence acquired. That expe­ri­ence refers chiefly to painful and dis­agree­able expe­ri­ences does not mean that we are being espe­cially pes­simistic, but can be seen directly from its nature. Only through neg­a­tive instances do we acquire new expe­ri­ences, as Bacon saw.

Every expe­ri­ence wor­thy of the name runs counter to our expec­ta­tion. Thus the his­tor­i­cal nature of man con­tains as an essen­tial ele­ment a fun­da­men­tal neg­a­tiv­ity that emerges in the rela­tion between expe­ri­ence and insight. Insight is more than the knowl­edge of this or that sit­u­a­tion. It always involves an escape from some­thing that had deceived us and held us cap­tive. Thus insight always involves an ele­ment of self-knowledge and con­sti­tutes a nec­es­sary side of what we call expe­ri­ence in the proper sense. Insight is some­thing to which we come. It too is ulti­mately part of the nature of a man, ie to be dis­cern­ing and insightful.

- Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (Chap­ter: Analy­sis of effective-historical con­scious­ness, ‘The Con­cept of Expe­ri­ence and the Essence of Hermeneu­ti­cal Experience’)

Com­plex. Intrigu­ing. Rad­i­cally undog­matic. Expe­ri­ence with purpose.

Here’s to — not the end — but the con­tin­u­a­tion of some­thing purposeful.