NOV 15 — I’ve become rather a fan of Canada’s new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau.

NOVEMBER 8 — Not everyone has noticed but Singaporeans are living through a revolution right now. An old and arbitrary tyranny is falling around us for a new, better order driven by technology.

NOVEMBER 1 — I have a confession. Every Friday, after I hit send on my email to get this very column to my editor, I have a moment (sometimes several depending on that week’s topic of choice) of panic.

OCTOBER 25 — A few months ago, Singaporeans watched as the rather surprising results of general election 2015 were announced.  The final tallies may have defied the pundits’ expectations but one thing was emphatically not a surprise — far fewer women than men were elected to Parliament.

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OCTOBER 18 — Every year on the eve of Deepavali, I go to Little India with my family. This has long been a family tradition — where we take in the sights, sounds and songs of a joyful, boisterous people celebrating their biggest festival.

Here’s a confession: At the entrance to some of Sri Lanka’s tourist attractions, I have been known to stand a little closer to my Sri Lankan husband and hope fervently that my dusky complexion will allow me to slide through as a local and skip paying the exorbitant entrance fee for foreigners. The fee for foreigners is sometimes more than 70 times the price that locals pay—entrance into the ancient Sigiriya fortress, for example, is 3,600 Sri Lankan rupees (about $27) for foreigners and 50 rupees (38 cents) for locals.

I struggle to tell apart Bordeaux from Burgundy so to me the latest trend of fine-dining establishments boasting wine cellars to rival the South of France can be overwhelming. You can’t blame them – these days it means if you’re a restaurant and your wines aren’t sitting in a perfectly climate controlled simulation of a hole in the ground in … well you’re dead to every high-living sophisticate in this city.

As the year comes to an end – I can hardly count the number of times I heard someone exclaim “Wow. Singapore is so rich.”