• OPINION

  Bangkok's long wait to appreciate the arts

  Life, Kaona Pongpipat, Published on 18/06/2015

  » Last week, I had a chance to visit a few museums in Paris. On the first Sunday of every month, admission to most museums in the city — The Louvre, Musée d'Orsay, Centre Pompidou, Musée Picasso, etc — is free. What struck me most was not Monet's water lily paintings rooms in Musée de l'Orangerie, Matisse's paper cut-outs room at Centre Pompidou, nor Mona Lisa's smile in that suffocatingly-touristy room in the Louvre. It was the long lines of crowds gathered in front of these places, from early in the morning, as if they were at pilgrimage sites or department stores offering 50% discounts.

• OPINION

  The joke that isn't funny anymore

  Life, Kaona Pongpipat, Published on 08/07/2015

  » For quite a while I had managed to completely wipe Gen Prayut out of my mind. By turning off the familiar tune Return Happiness To Thailand as soon as it comes on, by ignoring the latest absurdities shared on Facebook and by not engaging in a conversation criticising our dear leader and the NCPO, it was a state of blissful apathy. Without news consumption, anger was starved and eventually died. As the state of calm ignorance shifted in, life was OK again.

• OPINION

  Let's get ready to bike for mum

  Life, Kaona Pongpipat, Published on 11/08/2015

  » It all started with a short, reluctant, just-off-the-soi bike trip to buy some eggs for my mum, last month. It was the smile with which she received me at our doorstep as I cycled up to 12mph, some 250m down the soi without cracking a single egg that gave me the idea that I, albeit among the most under-exercised of Bangkokians, might be up for the Bike for Mom event on Sunday.

• OPINION

  A road map to nowhere

  Life, Kaona Pongpipat, Published on 15/09/2015

  » Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha recently admitted that when he wrote the line "We are asking for a little more time" in the song Returning Happiness To The People, he didn't think it through. Obviously, he didn't.

• OPINION

  A play with democracy

  Life, Kaona Pongpipat, Published on 29/10/2015

  » A theatre workshop by Indonesian performance collective Teater Garasi took place for five days in Hong Kong last week as part of West Kowloon Cultural District's International Workshop Festival of Theatre. As a participant, the experience for me was both an inspiration and the source of a lingering sense of embarrassment.

• OPINION

  Seeing the world through another's eyes

  Life, Kaona Pongpipat, Published on 13/11/2015

  » As much as Facebook is a virtual space of borderless interaction, it has, for many, undeniably become our most immediate and primary news source. It's a personalised pool of information, which though we have chosen consciously, can transform who we are and the way we think without our even realising it. And I have often wondered what it would be like to live, maybe for a day, in the social media world of other people's Facebook accounts.

• OPINION

  The surreal world we live in

  Life, Kaona Pongpipat, Published on 18/12/2015

  » As the festive time draws near, with Christmas and the New Year, it's not only a time for celebrating and looking ahead, but looking at where we have been and where we are right now. But while the future is all imagination -- all your New Year's resolutions are possibly delusional and bogus -- what's real and inarguable is the past and the now, as we breathe and try to get through the day. Let's not get personal about this as there are plenty of other occasions to talk about your plans to do yoga more regularly, cut down on cigarettes or be nicer to other people.  

• OPINION

  A calendar for the 99.3%

  Life, Kaona Pongpipat, Published on 08/01/2016

  » New year is for new beginnings. This is as much a cliché as it is true. While it is just a new day, we carry the illusion that comes with Jan 1. The past is suddenly forgiven and forgotten, a clean slate: new hobbies, new goals, new habits, new lives, and, of course, new calendars. Now, the first week of January is already over, and if you are still in search for the right calendar to guide you through the year, there's never a more fun place to search for one than our beloved country, Thailand.

• OPINION

  Premier must fulfil promises of his ballads

  News, Kaona Pongpipat, Published on 28/01/2016

  » A video clip which has gone viral recently features Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha as he pays a visit to Ratharat-anusorn School in Nakhon Sawan province last week. It shows students lining up to welcome him by singing Because You Are Thailand, a song penned by the prime minister himself as a New Year gift last year.

• OPINION

  Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

  News, Kaona Pongpipat, Published on 25/02/2016

  » I wonder if People's Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC) protesters must, in one way or another, take responsibility for where we are now as a country, nearly two years under the military regime. This is if you care to look at the situation, out of curiosity and an attempt at straightforward reasoning, rather than vengefulness.

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