Yes, I made it into the newspaper again, less than a month after the MyTake article. I hope no one is sick of me yet. A friend of mine, a certain Mr. M, jokingly said,

You know in any other country if you have your picture in the country’s major newspaper twice in a fortnight you’d be called a celebrity.

Whoa. Watch out people! Celebrity walking by here! Hehe.

All jokes aside, by now, most of you would’ve seen the half-page article. Yes? No? Sort of? (LSM has a scan of it if you are interested). A round of applause to the photographer, Rudolph Portillo, for accepting the challenging (and almost impossible) task of making me look sharp and somewhat un-overweight. And definitely kudos to Dewi Mohd Sofri for writing an excellent piece!

A place for the irrepressible Maurina who shares her thoughts on the improvements that should be made to Brunei, her blog also has little snapshots of her life. The self-professed blog junkie updates her blog regularly.

Aside from the “updating regularly” bit, which some of my readers might disagree on :P, I am rather pleased with that description. In fact, I am pleased with the whole article. So good job Brunei Times!

Following that, if I may extract one quote from Dewi’s article,

In fact, she was even invited to post some of her articles on Global Voices Online website.

The little sentence brought to mind that huge website I write for. That huge international blogging website, my first big break, which I accidentally failed to mention in the interview. Sometimes I just forget the enormity of the fact that I am actually writing for them. For those new to Turquoise and Roses,

Global Voices Online is a non-profit global citizens’ media project, sponsored by and launched from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School.

The GVO has recently won an award from the Knight-Batten Foundation for Innovations in Journalism. At GVO they believe that at a time when the international English-language media ignores many things that are important to large numbers of the world’s citizens, their aim is to redress some of the inequities in media attention by leveraging the power of citizens’ media.

For us underreported and borderline irrelevant Bruneians, this is the only international site which recognises the power of our independent media. It is the only international website, with a global audience, not written by some Orang Puteh thinking that Bruneians are a nation of oil-rich, repressed people who are all subjected to arranged marriages and broken English.

It publishes truth as we Bruneians see it, through our eyes, and I love that. There are too many untruths and sensationalisations about Brunei on the Internet haphazardly thrown about by ignorant and uninformed writers. My articles there are not just me, it is every single Bruneian blogger who dared to speak up, who dared to stand up out here in the open.