Maybe delete, here are my guiding thoughts for myself as I introduce myself again: I can’t possibly expect to say everything about myself in a single post, but I want to be thinking about the audience that I want to be building.
My name is Visakan Veerasamy. I was born in Singapore in 1990, and I’ve been here all my life. I’m ethnically Tamil. I’m left-handed. I’m over 1.9m tall, or about 6’4. I loved books a lot as a child, and video games (Red Alert, Simcity 3000, Metal Slug).
I got into music as a teenager – pop, rock, metal, blues. Avril Lavigne’s Let Go was my first album, Disturbed’s Believe was my second. I watched quite a lot of TV. Animes like Samurai X (aka Rurouni Kenshin), lots of MTV. Tamil movies with my family. Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. I had a bit of a basketball phase.
I met my first girlfriend when we were 10. We started dating at 14, broke up when we were 17, got back together at 19, and married at 22. Dec 2022 was our 10th wedding anniversary.
Every Singaporean man has to do National Service, which is 2 years
Singapore is an island-city-state in Southeast Asia with 5.6 million people. Singapore is small, dense, multiracial, multi-religious. Singapore has always been along a global shipping route from India to China. It’s valuable real estate. We became independent in 1965, but before that we were a part of Malaysia, before that a British colony
What’s funny for me is that being Singaporean is a very uncommon thing to be. Most people in the world do not live in island-city-states. Most people are not personally obliged to personally defend the sovereignty of their country. Most of the time, anyway.
I used to blog about local politics. I don’t think I really particularly set out to, but I got kinda radicalized by the news one day. I thought they were being deceitful with statistics.
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When I go on podcasts, a common thing that hosts tend to point out is “you’re a really unusual guy with an unusual point of view / way of being”. It’s always slightly funny to talk about, because if you’re me then being me is the most normal thing imaginable. I am usually me. Still, it’s an interesting question, and I appreciate being asked it because it has helped me clarify my own life experience in a way that maybe is more understandable to people who don’t have the same experience. So, a quick list/thread of defining… attributes?
1. I’m Singaporean, born & raised. It’s a tiny island-city-state. I don’t know what it’s like to be part of a big country like India or China or the US. I’m used to thinking like a technocrat. I did 2 years of mandatory military service. “Local” & “federal” Govt are the same
2. I’m ethnically Tamil. Within Singapore, this makes me a minority (about 9%). So I’ve always known what it’s like to be the weird guy with the weird skin color and the weird name and so on. I think Trevor Noah and Barack both share this experience. You have to charm your way
3. My dad ran his own business (industrial waste disposal, full stack 😂) This isn’t very common in Singapore, I think. Business owners I think are psychologically more feral and independent. It also gives me a very irreverent attitude re: social classes and money
4. I was a book nerd as a child. Real book nerds know what’s up. We have an irreverent attitude towards time and space and meaning (read history, physics, mythology, sci-fi, everything), we nerd out on the scale of centuries and have swole imaginations
5. I have friends across the entire socioeconomic spectrum. Some of my primary school classmates are wealthy blue-blooded Ivy League grads who might be future ministers and high-flyers. My army buddies include gravediggers, ex-convicts and other derelict motherfuckers
6. The local rock music scene was a big part of my life for many years. It taught me passion, vulnerability, emotional expression, showmanship, cameraderie. I learned to organise events, bring people together to make things happen
7. I met my wife when we were 10. We started dating at 14 and got married at 22. So I’m 30 and I’ve been a married homeowner for 7+ years, which is uncommon in our circles and I’m guessing probably in yours too, with some exceptions. I get older friends asking for marriage advice
8. While I ~guess~ I’m a sort of artsy humanities type (childhood aspirations: astronaut, inventor, game designer, lawyer, journalist), I spent 5.5 years doing marketing in a software company with a very strong engineering culture. Taught me to be precise, measured, systematic
9. When this book nerd encountered the internet, it was obviously the place for me to participate: make my own website, promote my band on MySpace, make friends, etc. I’ve written over a million words over 20+ years of publishing online. I wrote elaborate game FAQs when I was 12
That captures most of it I think! I realize midway that I actually have pre-existing threads about practically every single one of these things… maybe I’ll piece that together in a blogpost or on my public roam or something if anybody’s curious to get into the details
Oh, 10. ~2009-2013, I used to blog about local political issues, and got quite a bit of recognition for it. I experienced 1st-hand what it’s like to be swept up in that sort of energy as a writer. I got disgusted with it and walked away from a high-traffic blog to introspect…