Someone posed this question mid-session, almost casually: if the cost of raising children was no longer a factor, removed entirely from the equation, would Singapore’s chronically low birth rate reverse itself? The room went quiet for a beat. Then the answers came. “No.” “Nah.” “Probably not.” The sentiments were clear, yet these weren’t the answers anyone expected. Not from a group of parents who had just spent the better part of an hour cataloguing every financial indigni

I freelanced like my life depended on it—because it did.

This Hari Raya, I’m thinking about how grief and I got properly acquainted. Not just the kind that arrives in tears (though there were those moments), but the quiet one that sticks around like pulut in your teeth.