Sunday Posts

I am currently in Manila. It is good to be back here after almost four years, and meet old friends and new people. Most of the people I meet here, I met them first time for business reasons (I met others through them, so that was business too). However, now that I have no obvious business proposition to meet them, I still feel like seeing them - and they do too. I would like to believe this is a very Asian thing, but perhaps not, because the same thing happens to me in England too: I meet people without business reasons, or at least, without ones that are apparent. While this may sound incredibly pointless to some of my more business-minded associates, I have come to realise that this is my style. I don't meet people to do business, I meet people and then may end up doing business with them. For those who may wonder why I am not very successful in my business career, this should be an easy explanation: That I don't begin with an end in mind. If I appear to lack a sense of...

I just read about Galerianki , the Polish documentary on the phenomenon of mall girls, on today's International Herald Tribune . For the uninitiated, the mall girls are those teenagers, often in school, who hang around in shopping malls and try to spot wealthy individuals, draw their attention and perform sex acts in return to gifts, often in the form of expensive branded clothing, mobile phones and other accessories. Deviod of parental attention, as their parents struggle to keep pace with the demands of post-socialist Poland, these girls do not think they are prostitutes, and call their clients 'sponsors' or 'boyfriends', and sometimes 'frajer' ['loser]. This story attracts my interest because of a coincidence. I spotted the story on IHT only after having a discussion with someone in the Philippines about those girls in Philippines, young and full of girlie charm, who perform sex acts for money to pay for their exams. Yes, it is as...