Today we had Tony Fernandes of Air Asia and human rights lawyer Malik Imtiaz speaking at the Kuala Lumpur’s side of the Malaysia Forum.
Tony is a really, really nice and fun guy. And he said that he likes Malaysia Forum: a low-cost conference to match Air Asia! LOL!
When he found out that we were using Skype, he laughed out loud. He was no doubt amused and impressed at simplicity of the tools we were using to connect Kuala Lumpur to Harvard. Yang Jerng is the wizz that made it all possible while Zarina managed to coordinate the operation under the supervision of God Nick. Heh.
Along the way, Tony made some funny remarks. One was something to the effect of “list of disasters Air Asia had to go through: SARS, 9/11, Singapore government…”
And Tony is pro-free market! All the more reason to support Air Asia.
And yeah, Charis sounds like a French agent: “Hi, I’m Charis and I’m a physicist. I work for the French government.”
Chen Chow had his cap signed once Tony was done with his talking arrangement.
The official blog for the 2008 Malaysia Forum has paraphrased the whole session for others to read. But Chen Chow again did a superb job at transcribing the talk as well as a short Q&A session that followed.
After Tony, it was Malik Imtiaz’s turn. He shared his thought about human rights in this country and he inevitably touched on the topic related to Islam and the Constitution in Malaysia. For summary, go to MF; for an almost full transcript, go to Chen Chow’s.
That is it folks. More pictures will be up later. I may also write a fuller account of the weekends once I had a work-related paper done later this week.
As a refresher, we had Premesh Chandran, Mark Chang, Colin Nicholas and Karim Raslan in Kuala Lumpur for yesterday.
