New Mandala

In the past six months, there’s been a surge of local interest in the trend of brain drain in Malaysia. Out of a population of 27 million, there are an estimated 1.5 million Malaysians living abroad. Many of these Malaysians are skilled workers who emigrated to Singapore and OECD countries such as Australia, UK, and [...]

[Read more →]

Google has a funky new tool that allows comparative key-word searches of its enormous repository of scanned books. Crudely, this means it is possible to do long-term trends analysis around word usage. A bunch of interesting thoughts on the application of this technology are available here and here. And just to illustrate the obvious potential [...]

[Read more →]

David Streckfuss, Truth on Trial in Thailand: Defamation, Treason and Lèse-Majesté. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Pp. xvii, 488; figs., tables, appendices, bib., index. Reviewed by Patrick Jory … All that bowing and kow-towing To remind you of your royalty, I find a most disgusting exhibition. I wouldn’t ask a Siamese cat To demonstrate [...]

[Read more →]

Here are some images of yesterday’s Red Shirt protest at Ratchaprasong taken by an anonymous New Mandala reader. Several paintings were exhibited there including a very large homage to Guernica, with some Thai symbolism.  A large white piece of plastic was placed in front of the paintings, and protesters were encouraged to write down their [...]

[Read more →]

As the title suggests, the Malaysian police (Royal Malaysian Police/RMP or Polis DiRaja Malaysia/PDRM)  are accorded Royal treatment in Malaysia. They get away with something only Malaysia’s Royals (and powerful people connected to the ruling party) can do (Read here). The data released from P. Uthayakumar’s ongoing sedition trial (Read here) provides some interesting facts. [...]

[Read more →]