Of Indians, percussions and a whole lot of dancer-drummers...
Dear TomHa,
Sometimes, I just hate saturdays as Saturdays mean 7 full hours of tutoring for me. Oh my Oh my, this is like the toughest day to go by, especially when you have to take on an uphill task of teaching brats whom I am teaching. They just make hell a heavenly place to live in. And, to make matters worse, I have an even steeper task of having to teach an Indian chinese today. Not that I am a racist or anything, but this is seriously too challenging a task for me to complete. First, she is not a mixed-blood, and she does not take chinese in school. Thus, that makes her as pure as carbon ore and I am expected to pressure her into a shiny piece of diamond. How hard is that and I believe anyone who had taken any elementary chemistry should know. However, all that I can say that whatever the little indian girl lacks in, she made it up with her enthusiasm to learn. Great to teach, despite all her apparent ineptitude today. Afterall, can you imagine yourself learning Tamil? I bet it would be 10000 times harder and the tamil teachers would be laughing at all your ineptitude. Attitude, as I always say, it is all that counts, as long as you don't have insolent brats to go along and disturb the class. Sigh.. Headaches aplenty from now on... It is like teaching a baby to speak?? Let's see what the lessons from now on will have to offer.

I was just so glad when the clock strikes 5 and I am able to leave the tuition centre. Somehow, it felt like the burden of imparting knowledge had gone off your shoulders and you feel 100 kg lighter. So, I proceed to locate some of my long-time-no-see friends to go and watch an open-air concert which was held in conjunction with the Singapore Arts Festival. However, plenty of disappointments followed. Some of them had PMS, citing reasons like I hate all the drummers in the world, some, when I ask if they want to hang out, just replied I wanna hang myself, some had prior engagements, some say they had no appreciation for arts and some say they want to go home to sleep. So, no long-time-no-see gathering and I turned to my trusty section for companionship and about half of them oblige. How nice. But, I only have this to say in the end, after this debacle of finding people for gathering. I suppose that when people invite you to an outing which even he or she does not know to be interesting or not, and does not care if you will derile him/her should the event turn out to be rather disinteresting, this person is seriously treating you like a friend. Afterall, would you ask someone whom you have little acquaintance with to an event which you can't ensure to keep him/her entertained? I am not one of this kind of people. I belong to the former.

So the event is named "drumming explosion" and as the name suggests,it is a concert of percussion ensemble. More than that. It also involved sightings and hearings of very special instruments, of people imitating percussion music in Arab/Indian manner Da-to-na, da-to-na, ka-badom-ka-ba-doo, of a goofy Josh Groban look-alike who can play the chinese flute instead of singing "You Raise Me UPPPPP..." in opera tenor like voice, of visually stunning dance cum percussion ensembles on those kind of lion dance drums, and well, I would give it 5 popcorns out of 5. Highly arty and entertaining as well and I think it is just like those that you are willing to pay for to watch in the esplanade. Nice, open air some more and with an irritating MC who is out to be sarcastic to everybody and thus provide more laughs, it is really ermm a good concert to be at.

Cheers!