This is a conversation I had with a friend not long ago.

Me: WOOOHOOOO !!! Got a great concert coming up. I can’t wait to go for it!

Friend: YEAH!!! TIESTO ROCKS!!!

Me: No no.. not Tiesto. Celine Dion.

Friend: WTF?!?!? GAYBOY!!!

Note to self: It is not “cool” or “hip” to like Celine Dion.

But I lup her anyway… WOOHOO… going for her concert now.. bye guys!

On a rainy Saturday afternoon last weekend, I made my way to a quiet house in PJ which housed homeless kids under the Shelter Organization.How I ended up there that afternoon is a whole other story.

One of my friends gave me a call one day and met up to tell me all about the Shelter Organization and the work they were doing. He wanted to see if we could use blogs as a medium to help spread the word about what Shelter really is about and I was open to the idea.

So I paid a visit to the Shelter home to meet one of the people behind Shelter. His name is James Nagayam.In the afternoon that I was there, James shared with me many things that were alien to me until I set foot in that home.

Lots of people think that Shelter homes are for kids that have lost their parents at a young age. While that is true… that is only half the story. Many of the kids that need help today are migrants who are unable to study or work in this country, kids who have no birth certificates meaning they technically don’t exist and aren’t allowed to live a normal life and most importantly abused and sexually abused children.

I’m going to start with the migrant population.

Migrant Population

The registered migrant population in Malaysia currently is at 2.6 million. Now there are NO refugee camps in Malaysia, that means refugees in Malaysia are scattered all over the country with most of them in Klang Valley sharing spaces in groups of up to 20 people near construction sites or low cost apartments. Now here’s the question…. what’s gonna happen to these people if they can’t go to school or work. Sooner or later… the only other means of finding a living is… through crime right?

Abused and Sexually Abused Children

Many children are not as lucky as many of us when we were growing up. Sure my Dad beat the hell out of me when I was growing up as a kid, but after he knew he had taught me my lesson he would come back and give me all the compassion I needed as a kid.

These parents who beat their children beat them till kingdom come and leave them on their own to lick their wounds.

That doesn’t even bring up the sexually abused children problem!

James told me that when you talk to any of the sexually abused children who were 3-5 years old and show them a doll asking them where their father had touched them, they would point at the right places.
Kids in Prison

Then there are the kids in our prison.

Currently there are about 2,700 young prisoners in prison all over Malaysia, about 700 of them along are in Kajang Prison.

In Malaysia, a child can go to prison as long as he’s 10 years old.

10 YEARS OLD!!! How could they have known any better!!

Missing Girls

About 8 girls go missing a day. That means 240 a month and 2,880 a year! Now 2,880 is the student population of my entire secondary school.

Where do all these girls go? Many to child prostitution rings. How sick is that!

While many of us grow up with ice-cream, toys and barbie dolls for the girls, these girls grow up in brothels.

Heck I met one child there who was left at the home by his parents because his parents owed Ah Long’s a great deal of money and wanted to give him protection.

Another child had lost both his parents at a very young age and now only relies on the volunteers at Shelter for compassion and love.

The people at Shelter have taken in all these unfortunate kids and done their very well in putting them in comfortable homes.

These are kids that have as much promise as all of us had when we were their age.

Kids that are smart and creative. Just look at what they did here.

They built a house with just plastic forks, combs and sponges.

And just like me when I was young, they had little comic stickers all over their cupboards.
and enjoyed putting on bunny ears on their elders when they were having pictures taken.

When I hear all these stories.

I want to be able to help and sure I don’t have millions now to donate so I’m gonna do whatever I can with the readership my thousands of readers have blessed me with and shed some light on these issues.

In this entry, I am hoping to educate, not solicit eventhough Shelter’s funds are audited. If any of you want to help out whether in terms of monetary means or volunteer work you can pay a visit to Shelter’s website here.
For the rest of you, just think about these issues over this weekend. Issues that we can’t ignore because it’s happening in our own backyard.

And issues that one day will affect our way of life.

I was talking to one of my friends a week ago.

He is in the midst of chasing the girl of his dreams and doing all sorts of really sweet things for her and he was extremely nice, did everything for her… would even drive to her home and pick up her mobile phone and drop it off at her office when she forgot to bring it to work one day.

That’s from SS2 all the way to the Petronas Twin Towers ok?

One day out of the blue I told him
“Hey I know it’s hard when you’re so into the girl, but careful to not be too nice to her ok? She might take you for granted”.

The genius went back to tell the girl that “Timothy Tiah said that I should not be too nice to you but you see I am still nice to you” (the sausageless sonofabitch used my name to score brownie points with this girl he’s chasing).

Someone needs to get him one of these.
No wait.. he doesn’t deserve such a long one.

Get him one of these short ones.
The girl then rang me up and gave me a damn scolding and she’s not talking to me ever again. FARKING HELL DUDE.. YOU DON’T SELL OUT A BROTHER LIKE THAT!

I didn’t mean to mess things up for her but I have learned albeit the easy way that nice guys DO finish last.

Take for example a friend of mine named Charlie.

Charlie comes from a really really wealthy background. The wealth he inherited made sure that he and his children will never need to work a day in his life. To add to that, Charlie is an extremely humble and nice guy.

He drives a damn Mercedes SL55 all around KL and pretty much lives the life of a socialite. He doesn’t work much, though he does say he’s involved in some ‘side business’. Anyway, Charlie has everything going for him… except the love life part.

Maybe his physical looks affect that and I don’t know how to say this but to be as polite as possible I’m going to say that he ain’t exactly Dr. McDreamy.
He’s also really really nice to girls. Nice as in he would do anything for them.

Spend all his time and money on any of them that would give him enough attention.

Problem is that because he’s so nice, pretty girls hang out with him all the time and while he doesn’t always admit it, more often that not, he’s with them because he wants to be more than friends.

And when I say more than friends, I mean like this.
Now it has been pretty unfair for Charlie.

Every time he brings a new pretty girl out with his friends… the girl, whoever she is sooner or later falls for one of his friends and gets attached. When the girl gets attached, she disappears and Charlie is left to find another girl.

There was one girl that Charlie really liked that really took him for a ride.

Let’s call her Vivian.

I met Vivian for the first time about 6 months ago at DELIcious in Bangsar Village.

It was a joke!

When I saw them in the distance walking towards me, Charlie was walking in front, carrying a hell load of shopping bags like this
and a few steps behind him was Vivian walking slowly as if the world was watching.

Naturally the first thing I said to Charlie was
“WAH!! WHAT THE HELL YOU BUY?!? SO MANY THINGS!”

And his reply to me was
“No lah.. not mine.. I bought for Vivian”.

So there was Charlie, carrying more bags than his two hands could carry and Vivian just strolling around not even lifting anything but her LV bag.

After dinner I had a chat with Charlie on MSN. I said “DUDE…. Why are you acting like the girl’s butler? I know you like her but seriously… you ain’t gonna get to do anything more than carry her bags if you act like you ain’t got no balls strapped on”.

Charlie didn’t say much. He just went “okay… okay”.

3 months after that (or 3 months ago), I learned that Vivian found someone else leaving Charlie alone. Charlie had not only been bringing her shopping, driving her around KL in his sports car like a chauffer but even taking her to all the expensive restaurants to eat expensive stuff like abalone

but in the end, he got nothing out of it. Yes nothing… no hug, no kiss, no holding hands, no handjob, no…. nothing.

This revelation made me think of another friend I have who is quite a player. Lets call him Jake.

One day I was hanging out with him at his place, doing nothing but talking cock like guys sometimes do. Suddenly his phone rang. He picked it up, looked at the number and showed it to me while shaking his phone from left to write with his thumb and his index finger.

Jake said,
“Eh Tim… check this out… hot chick hot chick!”

On the screen was the name
“Cheryl”.

I smiled at him but my smile disappeared in the next 3 seconds when he threw his phone back on the table and said
“I’m BUSY”.

She called another two times that night, but he ignored the call eventhough he had nothing better to do.
He said he’ll call her back the next morning. And he told me.
“You must never be always available for the girl”.

Of course this applies only when you’re chasing a girl. If you have a girlfriend… please treat her nice. You should be done with all the games by then.

Today Charlie admits that there’s a downside for being too nice with the women he hung out with and he’s trying to change.

Good luck Charlie!

And to the sausageless brother who sold me out… I hope you she buys you a ball and chain for Christmas because you really ought to have one.

You guys… ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO WATCH THIS VIDEO.

It’ll brighten up your day.

Hahahaha damn cute seriously… the expression on the boy’s face… PRICELESS.

Oh here’s something I’ve just happened to notice.

Okay… do a little experiment.

Look at your MSN contact list now.

Now think of all the people you know in your list, then think of their age.

Sort them all by age.

What you will notice, or at least what I notice on my own side is that all the people Above 25 in my list have their MSN nicks as their own names… e.g. Sarah, Andrew Lim, Mehlin etc etc.
But the people BELOW 25 have nicks like
“*B@bY_CRUSH85” or “ARCHillies” or “Sl@yer” or something really complicated made up of MSN emoticons.

Similarly, my MSN nick is “Stewie“, after “Boss Stewie” which isn’t my real name.

So since I spend a lot of my MSN time talking to clients, I decided to adopt a more grown-up MSN nick… “TIMOTHY TIAH”.

Yes… that’s as grown up as an MSN Nick gets… well unless I had “Mr. Timothy Tiah” which would then give people the impression that I’m 75.

Now I waited to see if anyone took notice or if there was any change in the way people talked to me.

With my colleagues like Michelle here… no difference. She just referred to me as “Boss” so I wasn’t gonna get anything exciting out of that.
But you know to the outside people it might matter.

Like before if people msged me on MSN they would say
“OI dude… you there?”

Maybe this time when they see an ‘older’ MSN nick they might go
“Hello Timothy! Are you there?”

I waited and waited for someone to message me… and I was disappointed with the result. The message I got was
“WOI STEWIE!!!”

Anyway while pursuing my little experiment I came across a very different result just tonight.

This dude messaged me.

*unicef melvin says: (8:51:09 PM) ehhh
*unicef melvin says: (8:51:14 PM) ur timothy tiah??
Now Melvin here is someone I’ve never met before but known from the UK. We used to be in the small Malaysian community of Counter-strike players there and we used to play friendly matches on the same team.

That’s how stupid online relationships can be. I mean here’s a guy who I used to shout at online
“WOI MAHAII GO DEFUSE THE DAMN BOMB LAR YOU CAMP THERE FOR FUX AR?!?”
And he doesn’t even know my name.

So anyway I replied him.

Timothy Tiah says: (8:51:54 PM) yes

*unicef melvin says: (8:52:04 PM) ehhh din know man haha

Timothy Tiah says: (8:52:37 PM) then who did u think i was

*unicef melvin says: (8:52:46 PM) the guy who taught me how to CS source
*unicef melvin says: (8:52:48 PM) hahaha

Timothy Tiah says: (8:52:58 PM) ishhh
Timothy Tiah says: (8:53:03 PM) then u know who is timothy tiah?

*unicef melvin says: (8:53:28 PM) ehhh my frens were talking bout ur blog lar
*unicef melvin says: (8:53:34 PM) din know ur timothy tiah
*unicef melvin says: (8:53:41 PM) then u put timothy tiah on ur nick then i know haha

Timothy Tiah says: (8:55:10 PM) hahaha
Timothy Tiah says: (8:55:25 PM) so u never knew all this while that i’m timothy tiah Timothy Tiah says: (8:55:28 PM) even during the uk days

*unicef melvin says: (8:55:36 PM) yeah lar only know by CS nicks mah
*unicef melvin says: (8:55:39 PM) ur stewie

Timothy Tiah says: (8:55:41 PM) ohh
Timothy Tiah says: (8:55:42 PM) haha

*unicef melvin says: (8:55:42 PM) that’s all i know

Timothy Tiah says: (8:55:45 PM) so ur friends read my blog ar

*unicef melvin says: (8:55:57 PM) but then again i’m quite detached from the KL population so can’t blame me
*unicef melvin says: (8:56:05 PM) aiyah they told me ur big timer in kl lar

Timothy Tiah says: (8:56:24 PM) waht?
Timothy Tiah says: (8:56:24 PM) who say
Timothy Tiah says: (8:56:25 PM) where got

*unicef melvin says: (8:56:49 PM) hahaha quite lar, ur blog so many hits
*unicef melvin says: (8:57:02 PM) aha anyways gotta go out now
*unicef melvin says: (8:57:09 PM) good to know ur name finally ahha
*unicef melvin says: (8:57:10 PM) take care dude

Timothy Tiah says: (8:58:41 PM) okok see u

I wonder how many people I have on my list who don’t know me by name.

Okay okay time to do my 20 questions I got from you guys.

Some questions… kinda really weird and not really about much and some questions… repeated by people over and over and over and over again. ISH!

Okay I’m gonna start answering some of the questions now, the first 10 at least.

1) “As a popular & famous blogger & rich & also a CEO, how do u feel with all the attraction u get from hot chick??? Do u have any POKEING session with any of this hot chick???”
Well dude, I hate to lead you on so I’m gonna break it to you okay? My blog ain’t very popular or famous and I ain’t rich. Believe me when I say that I’m one of the lowest paid in Nuffnang.

I’m also not quite the CEO of Nuffnang, I’m the Executive Director though I do run the Malaysian side of Nuffnang.

So with all that in place… I can’t say that I get plenty of so called ‘attraction’ from hot chicks. Haha

2) “I know this question is going to be a bit formal but I am going to study Economics in UCL in September and I was wondering whether u can tell me more about your experience there.”UCL and more specifically Economics at UCL is very very tough. At least I felt it was that way. Think about it this way, the minimum offer for you to get into UCL is at least 3 As for your A-levels which is pretty much straight A’s.

Yet from the first year to the second year that I was there, 5% of the straight A students in my course didn’t make it to the second year. From second to third year, 15% of the course didn’t make it.That being said, uni is fun though I did get very bored of studying really quickly when I was there. I was impatient and wanted to do something of my own that could mean something which was why I jumped at the opportunity even before I graduated.

So have fun at UCL. And when you go to Four Seasons Roast Duck at Bayswater, please ask for “Ah Fei”.3) “Where did you get your Mr. Happy shirt? Cos i wanna find and get the couple’s for myself.”

NICE LEEHHHH MR HAPPY!!! HAHA

I actually bought it when I was in Sydney. It’s quite common there. There was this brand doing all these shirts but I think you can find some of them in the flea market at The Curve on the weekends.I’ve seen some Little Miss shirts there.

4) “Ever thought of making it into CLEO’s 50 most eligible bachelor like kennysia?”

Kenny Sia is on a wholeee different league from where I am. He’s someone who has already made it in life and truly is eligible.

To begin with, I don’t think I have the looks to make it for CLEO’s listing. Besides, under the pressure of my parents, I’ve been trying to slow down on the media attention unless it’s absolutely necessary or about Nuffnang.

Just yesterday I was in an article about blogging celebrities for Nuffnang in the Sunday Times.
Some businessmen tell me that all the media attention we’ve been ever so fortunate to get is good for Nuffnang.

I agree to a certain extent but in the past year, Nuffnang has been lucky enough to be in so many newspapers, magazines and TV slots sooo many times that I think before we set the expectations higher any further with all this hype, we all need to get down to pushing Nuffnang to the next level.

5) Why are girls so fascinated by guys’ leg hair?

Uhhh… I didn’t realize that happened.

6) Who do you want a blowjob from,brad pitt or an ugly transvestite?

Brad Pitt please. I’d rather have an elephant shit on me that let an ugly transvestite blow me.

7) What is the best pickup line/cheeziest line you ever said to a girl?

The best pickup line for me… “Hi!!!”

The cheesiest/worst pickup line for me…. “Heeeeeyyyyy…. you’re actually quiteee prettyyyy”… (In my defence, it sounded a lot better with some tequila shots in my blood).

8) “Why are you called Boss Stewie and not Boss Timmy since Timothy is your name?”

Well Boss Stewie came from my Leng Mou days. Back then I was crazy (and still am actually) about this character in Family guy named Stewie.My MSN nick was Stewie and I was looking for an anonymous nick to blog under. At first it was just Boss Lepton and Stewie.

I asked Boss Lepton why he had “Boss” to his nick and he said it was because we called each other Boss all the time in real life.
So I thought I’d go along with it anyway… since hey… Leng Mou was supposed to be just for me and him. Didn’t think anyone would ever hear about Boss Stewie.

9) “If you were a hangbag what kind of hangbag will you be? What colour, material, special features and price range.”

Dammit! How do you expect a guy who knows nothing about handbags to answer a question like this.

10) “Who is the model you shagged before?”

Wah this one I cannot say cuz she reads my blog and she’ll come after me 😛

I’ve been a little frustrated with my iPhone lately, so much that I wish I did more research before buying it and I’m actually considering going back to my old trust Sony Ericsson.

Anyway here’s 5 reasons why you don’t want one.

1) You can’t search for a name in your phone book to call.

That’s right.

You can’t. You really really can’t.

To call someone, you have to open up a list of ALL your contacts, then scroll through them one by one.

You can of course jump to names starting under a certain alphabet, but the list of alphabets on the side of the screen are so small and so close together than when you try to press T you might end up pressing S instead.

There is a 3rd party application you can download for your iPhone to help you to search for your contact but every time you use it a pop-up will appear asking you to donate. WTF?!?! I HAVE TO SPEND MONEY JUST TO HAVE THE ABILITY TO SEARCH FOR MY CONTACTS IN MY PHONE?!?!

2) It takes 9 seconds just to want to read or write an SMS.

That’s right. To read or write an SMS you open up an SMS application.

That application literally takes 9 seconds to load up before you can do anything. LITERALLY.

3) You can’t send a contact

Say Nicholas asks me to send a contact to him from my phone book. Bad enough that I have to manually search through the whole phone book, there’s no option for me to send the contact. So what I eventually have to do is memorize that phone number, and then type it out in an SMS to him.

To add to the work it takes to send a contact, remember it takes 9 seconds for my SMS page to load up?

That’s 9 seconds of me saying a number to myself over and over again so that I won’t forget.

4) You can’t MASS DELETE YOUR SMS.

That’s right… to clear your mailbox, you have to manually delete each SMS one by one. ISN’T THAT JOLLY!!!!

5) Getting SCREWED by EDGE

I just found this out yesterday.

You see the iPhone allows you to hook up to Wi-Fi to check your mail. But when the Wi-Fi is disconnected for any reason, it goes to use EDGE to download all your mail automatically.

Now I get a ton load of mail in my Nuffnang work mail all the time.

So I just checked and realized that since I got an iPhone, I downloaded what was 150MB of MAIL… and I DIDN’T HAVE A DATA PLAN BECAUSE I DIDN’T THINK I’LL BE USING EDGE AT ALL.

The only mail downloading I wanted to do was on Wi-Fi! Heck I’m not using a Blackberry here!

I looked online to find if there was a way to turn off EDGE on my iPhone and realized that there were many other people who had fallen victim to the same trap as I had. All being slapped with huge data charges.

So I called my friend up at Maxis and asked him how much this 150MB is gonna cost me and he said
“Oh only 1 sen per 1kb”.

Now do the math, 1 sen for every 1 KB is RM10 for every 1 MB.

150 MB = RM1,500.

I JUST SPENT RM1,500 ON DOWNLOADING E-MAILS!!!

FARRKK!!!! I AM SO BROKE NOWW…. I think I need a second job.

Anyone hiring?

I will work hard hard for you wan!

Okay so I was looking through all the questions I was getting for the 20 Questions entry I was about to do when I saw this reader of mine write this e-mail to me.

hey TT.. 🙂

so my question is, is it wrong for a guy who is in a relationship to watch porno? i feel unappreciated and degraded by the fact that, eventhough a guy who has a gf, the guy will still watch porn when the gf is not around.
Is this normal? do i need to be angry? and when i question him, he doesnt wanna talk about it… he’ll get annoyed and say that its normal for all guys.. is this true? I’m hoping that u can answer my question… thanks so much for your time !!”

I felt compelled to answer her first!!!

So here goes.

Dear XXX (I’m gonna not disclose her name here),

I’m not going to answer your question and try to help you understand this. Instead I’m going to tell you how you can go about getting your way as to make your bf stay so far away from porn you’re gonna think he’s a priest.

You know the saying that goes that if you tell people NOT to do something, they’ll do it even more? Well that in my opinion has some truth in it.

Back when I was still in school, there used to be grass patches with signs that said “DO NOT WALK ON GRASS”, those signs really made me want to walk on the grass even more.Now I actually applied this theory to a co-worker of mine.

When he first joined Nuffnang, he was a chain-smoker. He had been smoking for many many years so nothing was gonna stop him now. Everyone in the team wanted him to stop, and tried to help by discouraging him in all sorts of ways but it didn’t work.

One day I decided to try the reverse.

Instead of telling him to stop smoking, I kept asking him to go take a cigarette break and get some ‘oxygen’ into his lungs. When my other colleagues nagged him to stop smoking I defended him and said
“HEY!!! Don’t nag! He hates cigarettes!!! That’s why he smokes them… to help destroy them”.Then Christmas came.

Christmas was a nice time for us at Nuffnang. The whole team got together for a big dinner at San Francisco Steakhouse.

Before the dinner we all had a little Secret Santa kind of thing so we each had to buy presents for each other (with a maximum limit of RM50 each).
I was supposed to buy for this particular colleague of mine so I bought him an ashtray and a packet of high-end cigarettes to encourage him to smoke more.

I think that was the last straw.

Barely a week after I had given him the ashtray and cigarettes for his Christmas present, he announced that he was quitting smoking. Cold turkey style!

So you see? When you want something, sometimes you gotta do things the other way round.

Now apply this to your bf who likes to watch porn.

Now whether it’s normal or not, and why he does it… is not important!!

Because like I said, this entry is about how to get him to stop.

So what you gotta do, is overload him with porn so much that he never ever wants to see a porn video again in his life.

Once a day e-mail him a “Nude Hottie of the Day”.

Every night ask him
“EH JOM.. LETS WATCH PORN!!!”

Even when he’s done watching porn you should urge him
“Watch some more lah!!! just a bit more!!!”

And if his birthday is nearing, buy him a 1-Terabyte (1,000 GB) Hard Disk and fill it up with porn. Then wrap it up and give it to him with a label that says
“My Lucah Stuff”.

Keep at this mood for a few months and I guarantee you that at the end of it, your bf will stop watching porn.

Problem solved right?

You can thank me later 😛

PS: The co-worker I was talking about has stopped smoking for 3 months now… and he’s still going strong! :P… am I right dude? You’re not fagging behind my back are you?

I notice I’ve constantly been getting countless questions from you guys via comments and especially via e-mail.

So okay here’s what I’m gonna do!

For my next blog entry, I’m not going to be the one writing the content (well not entirely at least). You guys are going to help me do it!

Send me an e-mail at lengmoublogs@yahoo.com.

By tomorrow night or Friday morning I’m going to compile all the questions, pick 20 out of the lot… and answer those questions here on the blog.

Ok so e-mail me!

Bah back to work for me!

When I first got to know of Terence, he was at the peak of his life. Soon to be the heir of a very large public listed company in Malaysia, he had his life cut out for him.

Whether he was going to work or not, he was going to live a comfortable life.

He drove the flashiest BMWs, frequented the VIP areas of the coolest clubs and being a guy, spent money on every gadget his heart desired. Terence knew how to enjoy money.Guys like that appear on the radar quite quickly for some of the hottest girls in the night life circuit.

One girl took notice, her name was Amanda and she was by any means one of the hottest girls that any guy would ever lay their eyes on.

She could walk from the South Court to the North Court of MidValley and at least 10 guys to turn their heads and look at her… she was as hot as this.
Amanda was ambitious.

She knew exactly what she wanted in life and it wasn’t a flourishing career up the corporate ladder, it was security… financial security to be exact and she saw that in Terence.

Terence wasn’t perfect and as a person had his own set of flaws like any other man, but it didn’t matter… the bank account that his family came with was enough to make up for it and to be fair… there’s no cry no foul for Amanda liking that part of him.

Donald Trump’s beautiful wife was one asked if she would have fallen for Donald Trump if he wasn’t rich.

She replied
“Do you think Donald would fall for me if I weren’t beautiful?”Which hit the point exactly.

Amanda whether with her beauty or charm or personality managed to eventually hook Terence.

Months into the relationship, Amanda got pregnant.

Terence’s high profile family struggled to deal with the problem.

They at one point considered having an abortion but Amanda would refuse anything less than a marriage so that the baby had a proper home to stay with.

Tied with Terence’s mistake, Terence decided to go ahead with the marriage and eventually got the support of his parents. Some people wonder whether it was Amanda’s plan all along to get Terence to marry her to tie him down…. but that is a question nobody but Amanda will know how to answer.

A few years later into the marriage, a crisis hit Terence’s family business…. the 1997 financial crisis to be exact. Just before 1997, many Malaysian companies were on an expansion path with the KLSE being one of the highest traded markets in the world in terms of volume.

To expand, you need money and when you’re a huge public listed company, getting banks to lend you money isn’t too much of a problem.Now once you’ve decided that you want to borrow money to grow your business, the next question lies on the Cost of Borrowing or simply… the interest rate.

The interest rate in Malaysia is relatively higher than the interest rate from the many developed countries overseas so many local companies borrowed in USD from overseas banks, Terence’s family business was no different.

When the financial crisis hit, the ringgit depreciated from RM2.5 to USD1.00 to something like RM5-6 to USD1.00.

That means if you borrowed RM100,000,000 before the crisis, that figure inflated to RM200,000,000 after the crisis. Terence’s family business tanked overnight and his father was declared a bankrupt.Terence’s life was quick to change. He no longer spent as much as he did and he went out to find a job. Amanda too had to find one.

Fortunately for Terence, he was smart and he went to a good university so finding a job wasn’t too much of a problem for him. Amanda too had graduated with a degree but working wasn’t really quite her thing, she found herself in a bit of a fix.

Just two years later, Terence caught Amanda cheating on him with an older man. He was dumbfounded and depressed.

What the hell was going on that this woman he had a baby boy with had to be cheating on him with an older man.

Some say… it was because of the financial security that wealthier older man had… some say… love is blind.

They eventually filed for divorce. Terence kept the only child they had and Amanda went on to marry the older man to live the life of a socialite.

The story of Terence and Amanda got me thinking about one thing… about the ups and downs of life.

It is inevitable that in anyone’s life, especially where business is involved, there will be ups, there will be downs. Richard Branson’s successful Virgin Atlantic airlines had almost failed once but today stands tall with a fleet of aircraft and a brand name to die for.

Closer to home, I have met many rich businessmen with wealth in the millions. Many of which have told me how they had succeeded, then failed… then picked themselves up to succeed again.

People will always have their ups and downs (and don’t get me wrong.. ups and downs need not be measured simply with dollar signs).

I feel that right now I may perhaps on a small scale be experiencing my ‘UP’ or at least on the way “UP”. One day… I may very well face my down. Things can and will go wrong.

Hence, the girl I will eventually end up with need not be really pretty.

She need not be cute. She need not be hot. She need not be sexy.

The one thing she needs to be though is strong and committed.

Strong enough to give me her strength when I am down… and committed enough to sit with me through the storm.