I am local. I am multi-local. My childhood is a collection of short stories that flit between Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Australia...
Read MoreMy floor-to-ceiling glass windows overlooking the city street doesn't stop me boogie-ing alone in my underpants at home. Melbourne's ideals about acceptance, love and normalisation of a woman's body have helped me shrug off nakedness as no big deal...
Read MoreDespite the media’s scrutiny of migrants and TCK’s, a number of people are refusing to let their opinion be swayed by the negative rhetoric and instead are choosing to form their own opinions untainted by unconscious bias...
Read MoreI am or have been a local of London, Lahore, Dacca, New Delhi, Kuwait City, Dhahran, Manila, Bangkok, Pattaya, Tokyo, Salt Lake City, Evanston (Wyoming), Istanbul, Saigon, Hong Kong, Toronto, Freetown, Addis Ababa, Singapore. It seems like a lot but it's kind of a blur.
Read MoreI can choose how Japanese I am: I never leave my chopsticks standing up in a bowl of rice because that is a funeral practice here and I avoid the number 4 like the plague in food service...
Read MorePakistan has been flagged by the Australian government as a "terrorist country" and yet I consider it home...
Read MoreI am a reverse brain-drain story. Pakistan exported me for the sake of knowledge creation - however, I came back empty-handed. They still had the generosity to take me back in, but I feel they are having second thoughts...
Read MoreMy passports have always been issued from abroad. In the 1980s my passports were changed to blue "Z" instead of the standard blue. I was treated like a second class citizen each time I “returned” to the US and travelling in my 20's through Europe with it in the Cold War was sheer hell on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain...
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