• News & article

  Will gentrification respect city's people?

  Oped, Kong Rithdee, Published on 28/06/2023

  » We've lived for over a century in the shadow of grandeur: near the Customs House, known to Thais as rongpasi. "We" means my maternal family and the community of Haroon Mosque. Each day before sunrise, the muezzin's sing-song call rings through the neighbourhood, carried on the river wind towards the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, the French Embassy and Assumption Cathedral.

• News & article

  A nation of millions can't hold them back

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 29/10/2018

  » Rhymes and misdemeanours. Yo, yo. Rappers are threatened to be thrown in a slammer.

• News & article

  PM's plan to end gridlock is pie in sky

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 18/08/2018

  » In three months, the angels will return to the clogged thoroughfares of Lost-Angel-ist. Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha, one who's never shy of making the impossible still impossible, has set his sights on, gasp, fixing Bangkok traffic, which is like untangling the Mobius strip or finding the end of Ariadne's thread. The soundbite-ready part of the PM's order is that he wants to see "tangible results in three months", which promptly sent related authorities scurrying in all directions to make it real.

• News & article

  Section 112 the elephant in the room

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 14/10/2017

  » The elephant isn't simply in the room; it is in the room and charging tusk-first at an old man with a walking stick.

• News & article

  First they came for those who 'twerk'

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 17/06/2017

  » The police this week visited several cultural spaces, to appreciate the art and to mete out censorship. Next they'll give out art prizes -- to those who toe the line and serve the official ideology -- like the propagandistic communist states did in the last century.

• News & article

  'Pre-truth' far scarier than 'post-truth'

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 19/11/2016

  » 'Post-truth" -- that's Oxford Dictionaries' word of 2016. Trump-inspired and aided by Facebook algorithms, it clicks. What happens isn't as important as what you think happens, and if you think something is true, then what is true is simply what you think. But truth be told, post-truth still suggests an involvement of truth, how truth is there and yet is blithely bypassed by emotion and prejudice, and thus there's a more dangerous term that fits better in some places: "pre-truth".

• News & article

  For a ghost of a chance, use your talisman

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 01/10/2016

  » On Wednesday Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha talked for 135 minutes at the Bangkok Post Forum, more than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton on Monday combined. And this isn't even an election campaign. A good soldier, he's unfazed by the presence of enemies and microphone. From the podium, arms outstretched, the PM touched on a lot of topics: Thai education, the economy, Section 44, Thailand as a "developed" country, the 20-year prophecy, etc. But what struck me like a hammer was when the general mentioned ghosts.

• News & article

  A tower of our glory, except the foreign bit

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 03/09/2016

  » I happened to be there at the opening of the sparkling corn-cob skyscraper, the trophy of high-capitalism and symbol of wealth. No fireworks at the launch of the MahaNakhon Tower, that would have been tacky, but we had the beam-me-up light dance and iridescent sky painting, cued to booming music. Jose Carreras sang arias.

• News & article

  Fed up to our eyeballs of the aqua-calypse

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 25/06/2016

  » When storm clouds loom and thunder strikes, we think of one person. When the monsoon hits and water falls from Bangkok skies, his face appears in our dreams: Lord Mayor of Bangkok, wading the knee-deep floods of Ratchadaphisek Road like a horseman of the aqua-calypse, having come straight from his 16-million-baht office which, until recently, overlooked a 39-million-baht lighting décor.

• News & article

  Superficiality takes aim at Scala

  News, Kong Rithdee, Published on 04/06/2016

  » There is a mix of rage, gloom and longing as, once again, the fate of the Scala theatre in Siam Square is questioned. To wreck is easy, to save is hard. The jackhammer screeches louder than nostalgia. Will the Scala, that quaint majesty stuck in a prime retail area, that solemn granddaddy in the flashy, messy, heavily commercialised quarter, be next to fall?

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