After 14 hours by plane and 5 hours by train for me to reach the red wooden house on the top of the Niinikumpu hill is always a special moment. We always arrive by car from the railway station which is about 10 km away. We enter the garden through two very old and high pine trees and see the house front door of the house. It more than 10 years now that I come […]
Mi sento un po’ come uno dei personaggi di un racconto di Haruki Murakami. Sono le 5:44 del mattino. Mi giro e rigiro da un po’ nel letto senza successo: il sonno se ne e’ andato. Il fuso orario che non si e’ ancora adeguato all’Europa. I pensieri. Non so. Mi alzo. Metto l’orologio al polso. Cammino sulla punta dei piedi per evitare che il pavimento di legno scricchioli troppo e svegli Venla. Scendo in […]
‘Bingo!’, said the custom police woman at Singapore airport while looking my passport. She then looked at me and said, ‘So you are happy birthday boy’. ‘Yes, I am’. The place was quite empty. The few border police looked bored and were probably thinking about the end of the night shift. She called three other colleagues to look at my passport: born on 10.8.1967 and I pass entering Singapore on 10.08.2009. 42 years later. They […]
‘ I can’t imagine doing any other kind of work. Your work should be an act of love, not a marriage of covenience’ The Kideny-shaped Stone, Murakami Haruki
Arnaldo just published a short article on the role of Buddhist pagodas in dealing with poverty in Cambodia in the development magazine Just Change published in New Zealand. Buddhist aid: Pagodas reducing poverty in Cambodia This article tells the story of the Pagoda Association of Botum, a pagoda that has survived a devastating totalitarian regime to become a source of real poverty reduction in the community. Available in .pdf here (2.3Mb)
Here is the introduction and link to an article I just wrote with Eddie Borup on Management and change in Vietnam. Available at Projects and Profits Transition Management: The Key towards Achieving Results Nothing in this world is as certain as change. At the same time, the search for a definition of `change’ has been taking place for a long time and is still unresolved. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, has said, “change is the […]
I remember collecting sign books for some years. One day I got hold of one of the Italian publishing house Adelphi. Pink color, with just one sentence on it by, Gayus Plinius Secundus also known as Plinius the “Old”, born in 24 B.C. in Como. The rough English translation of Plinius sentence could be: ‘there is not such thing as a bad book where you cannot learn at least one thing’. After that i bought […]
Only once in a while, while zapping an endless number of TV cable channels you come across a movie which is a little gem. Just once in a while. That is when time passes, you know that is getting late, that tomorrow morning will be an early wake up, but you do not care. It has happen tonight, here in Ha Noi, coming across ‘Once’ by Glen Carney. Had the same feelings I had when […]
There are two Zanzibar. One is the idea of Zanzibar. The second is Zanzibar itself. This is often the case with travelling destinations but it is still interesting, I think, to compare the idea of a place with the place itself. Thus when I was on the ferry on Saturday morning from Dar es Salaam I was thinking about the books and stories I red in the past which told of kind of magical places: […]
In the playground in Dumaguete from Katja Pellini on Vimeo.