About

The reason I named this blog ‘The Singaporean Maldivian”…
I was born in Singapore on the 6th of November 1982. My parents are Maldivian and when I was born, they were allowed to choose for me to be Singaporean or Maldivian. My dad was stationed here in Singapore for work at the time but had no idea for how long so he decided for me to be a Maldivian to make things easier should we ever have had to go back to the Maldives. But fate had other ideas and I’ve been living in Singapore ever since. And ironically, being a Maldivian in Singapore has made things tougher. But I’m happy here because my whole life has been lived here. All my friends and family who I love dearly are here.

Whenever I go back to the Maldives (the last time was about 10 years ago), I feel like a foreigner. A foreigner in my own country! So I feel like I’m more a Singaporean than a Maldivian. A Singaporean at heart, a Maldivian by nationality.

Most people when they see me will think I’m an average Singaporean Indian guy, and I don’t blame them because for some reason, I do look like an average Singaporean. My closest friends are Malay. I studied Malay in school. However, I also flunked Malay in school. Somehow, by some miracle or by some teacher’s generosity, I managed to pass Malay as a second language from Primary one all the way up to Secondary Four. Then came the dreaded O-levels and this was the result:
O-level Malay - F9
O-level Malay oral - Ungraded

Funny story about my Malay oral exam. The exam was being held in our school hall and my class is sitting at one end of the hall waiting our turn to go to the reading desk, and then up to the examiner’s desk. Each student before me seemed to take about 5-10 minutes or so which is understandable since you have to read a passage, describe a scene from a picture and carry a decent conversation with the examiner about it. When my turn came up, I was with the examiner for a grand total of 2 minutes. Reading the short passage was easy enough, but after that, I just gave up and spoke in English. The examiner was kind enough not to torture me and just asked (in English) if I could speak any Malay at all. I replied no and apologised. He sighed and said there’s no reason for me to wait and just let me go.

Well, I can understand a bit of conversational Malay, but for some reason have difficulty speaking. I’m just hesitant because I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing and well, I have had no real need to use it yet. Everyone I meet is usually able to speak English.

But there are a few of my closer friends who say I don’t look Singaporean at all and that it’s pretty obvious that I’m a foreigner. They say when I speak English, I seem to have a strange accent of some kind which makes no sense whatsoever seeing as how I’ve never been in any another country longer than two weeks. Where the hell could this accent have come from!? Some even say it’s the way I dress. Not Singaporean at all. It’s interesting to hear these to say the least.

I’m not a funny person on this blog. My friends say I’m funnier in person. But I’m not the joke-funny type, I’m more the sarcasm-and-wit-funny type. I can also induce laughter for no apparent reason. None that I can think of at least. Actually no, I think it’s my mannerisms or something. It affects girls especially. I once went for an IRC meetup with a few friends whom I already know but there was this one girl we were meeting for the first time. We were sitting down at the Subway at Suntec City (I can’t believe I remember this much detail). We were just breaking the ice and chatting about generic stuff and then we ran out of stuff to talk about. I don’t know what I did but I’m just looking around the place and when I glance back to the table and see the new girl looking at me, she bursts out laughing. Like what the hell? There were a lot more times this has happened and with lots of my other girl friends but this particular occasion was the most apparent.

About This Blog…
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