Floating on a Malayan Breeze by Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh

no Star in Singapore and no The Straits Times in Malaysia. To this day, we cannot buy each other’s newspapers in our countries, e.g. There is very little dialogue at a grassroots level. For most of our histories, everything we hear about our countries and each other comes from our governments. The main reason for the trip is that we wanted to find out more about Malaysia from the ground up. My best friend Sumana Rajarethnam was with me, and he ultimately served as contributing editor for the book. There were actually two of us on the bicycle trip. When did you decide to travel around Malaysia, and why a month-long trip on a bicycle? He recently released his second book, Hard Choices: Challenging the Singapore Consensus, which is co-authored with Donald Low, and with contributions by Linda Lim and PJ Thum. The author, Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh, spent a month in 2004 travelling around Malaysia on a bicycle and on a daily budget of about US$3. Considering how rarely I underline books that I read for leisure (probably only English majors would get this), this book has something special.įloating on a Malayan Breeze: Travels in Malaysia and Singapore is a travelogue that also discusses serious topics such as politics, economics and social issues. If you haven’t, then perhaps the interview will intrigue you enough to get a copy of his book. If you have read the book, this interview would give it more dimension. And so, I approached Sudhir and he kindly agreed to be interviewed. It was such an interesting and insightful read, I found myself wanting to know more about the author and his perspective when I had finished the book. The book cover caught my eye because it was something I could relate to-durians (I shun them), rambutans and mangosteens-and the blurb piqued my interest, so I eventually bought a copy.

A few months ago, while browsing through Kinokuniya’s Travel Literature section, I chanced upon Floating on a Malayan Breeze, a travelogue that offers insights into the lives of Singaporeans and Malaysians.

Floating on a Malayan Breeze by Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh