Removal of this blog

This blog is in the process of being moved to two different blogs on two different blogging platforms.

I decided to make this change because I am experiencing some problem with this blog. 

I will be moving all posts related to writing to www.journeyofanidea.wordpress.com and all other posts to www.lovelifeandnews.blogspot.com

Do feel free to look around these two blogs, as I will be posting daily in those blogs alongside shifting the posts from this blog. 

Thanks for visiting and hope to see you at my new blogs :)

Foreigners and Singapore in 2013

Today, at 3:30PM, one of our family friends invited my husband over for an interview. My husband was told to be there by 4:30PM.

I accompanied my husband to the interview, since I'm a freelancer and I can work from anywhere as long as I have my laptop or iPad with me. We rushed over to the company - took taxi and all - and managed to reach there exactly at 4:30PM.

He went in for the interview. I waited for him.

After about an hour, he came out of the interview room, and said it wasn't successful because they didn't have the quota for hiring foreigners.

This is a very real predicament that many foreigners are facing in Singapore right now. I am a Singapore citizen. Even then, it is difficult for my husband who is a foreigner to get some kind of benefit.

Why? Because in Singapore, if you do not contribute to your provident fund (PF) maintained by the government, then you are a nobody, and nobody related to a "nobody" gets any benefit of any sort. It's like the government decides that you have no money, and no savings, and are incapable of supporting yourself or your family or anyone at all, if you do not contribute to the provident fund.

Then there is, of course, the crunching of foreign workers in Singapore. New policies actually work against foreigners who are looking for jobs here, unless you are rich and you can contribute a whole chunk of money to the economy.

It's because of this crunching that companies are having problems with quotas. Companies need to hire a certain number of Singaporean workers in order to be eligible to hire ONE foreigner. There are different types of work passes for foreigners with different qualifications. From the way I see it (because I went to the different ministries here to try and get help for my husband), there are too many different types of passes. Companies are unsure of who is eligible for which pass. Some HR personnel do not even know about the existence of some passes. It has become more difficult to find information online as well. It has just become very confusing to hire foreigners.

After the interview, on our way back, we met a couple of family friends. We were having coffee together at a coffee shop, when one of them shared his experience with us. He owns a logistics company which was doing pretty well, until recently.

The business consisted of freight forwarding and door to door delivery, etc. These kind of companies mostly hire foreign workers - Indians, Bangladeshi, Thai, Filipino, etc - to do the hard labour, like packing and moving heavy boxes and furniture.

With the restrictions on hiring foreign workers now, the company was unable to hire foreigners and was forced to hire local people, whom he said was very lazy to do hard labour.

He said he's finding it very difficult to maintain local people, because the pay is high and the work is bad. BUT, the irony is that he can hire foreigners to do office work. This is the same office work that locals here are dying for, because they claim all the decent-paying office jobs are going to foreigners. Well, the current restrictions don't seem to be helping with that.

The priorities just seem to be all lopsided. SMEs and foreign business entities are having difficulties coping with the new restrictions on foreign labour. The government is trying hard to help the people, and help companies as well, but I think the new policies are just making things very complicated.

I know this is a very vague post, but I would like to hear from others what they think of the current situation in Singapore, or even other countries, so please feel free to drop a comment or even suggest a possible solution for this problem. 

Happy Diwali!!

Wishing all who read my blog a very happy Diwali!! 

Here's a beautiful photo of beautiful Krishna to mark the festivities.

HOORAY! for my Hubby

I recently convinced my hubby to try doing freelance work and he has just landed his 1st job on O-desk.

In our usual inseparable lovebirds style, we're working on it together.

Unfortunately it's a ghost writing job so I can't write more about it.

Both of us have signed up at various freelance websites, and have been applying for jobs frequently. Thus far, O-desk has proven to be one of the best websites for freelancers.

There are plenty of other websites for freelancers. All kinds of jobs are available online these days, as more and more small business owners turn to freelancers to save employment costs.

How do freelancers cut cost, you may ask. Well, let me break it down for you.

When companies hire employees on a full-time basis, the company needs to pay the employee their market rate every month. Or at least something close to their market rate. This market rate varies depending on the employee's qualification, field of work, and work experience.

But, if you only need a person to do a certain job that does not require a whole day, then imagine hiring a person on a full time basis, on a full time salary just to get the person to do this certain work for say 5 hours a week. That's just about 1 hour a day from Monday to Friday, but you need to pay him a salary for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 22 days a month.

If you hire a freelancer instead, you can just hire that person for a specific amount of time and pay him/her on an hourly basis, or hire him/her on a fixed amount basis until the work is done.

If you are in Singapore, you won't have to contribute to the provident fund of the freelancer, like you have to in the case of a full time employee.

Freelancers are considered self-employed on a sole proprietorship basis and filing of taxes etc are completely their responsibility.

This is how freelancers help cut cost.

More and more business owners - some even large profitable businesses - are discovering this cost saving opportunity and looking to outsource their work to freelancers.

IT professionals are reaping the most benefit from freelance work, but writers are not too far off.

A lot of information is online. At the same time, there is a lot of scam online as well. So you just have to be careful and do your research before signing up at any website, if you are interested to try your luck with freelance jobs. 

Writing in Malayalam

Though I'm a Malayalee, I do not know how to write in Malayalam since I was brought up in Singapore.  I can read it though, like how a 5 year old child reads English.

But ever since I got married, I have been making an effort to learn how to write and read in Malayalam.

Speaking and writing Malayalam are totally different, since there are many different slangs when speaking. I shall take this chance to let you know that I didn't even know about this fact till a couple of years ago.

Yes, that was how ignorant I was towards my mother tongue, culture and traditions. But, I believe I can make up for the years of ignorance with my newfound interest towards my heritage.

This interest was what led me to research, write and publish an article in Yahoo!.

And now, it has led me to try writing and publishing an article in MALAYALAM!! And guess what, my editor was sweet enough to publish it.

It is a very short article about this year's National Day Song and how it managed to disappoint the people of Singapore. It has received a lot of criticism, and honestly, I didn't like it either.

If you not from around here and would like to listen to the song, here you go:


It is sort of like a tradition for a song to be released about the National Day (Singapore's Independence Day) by different artists each year. It aims to foster patriotism and is usually about Singapore's culture and back in the 1990s, there were some really awesome songs that still live on in many Singaporean's hearts. But the last few years have been disappointing.

Seemed like an easy topic to write about so I wrote about it. Nothing too great. Just a very simple one.

If you are a Malayalee and would like to read my humble article, here's the link: http://www.pravasiexpress.com/index.php?article=605

I am open to constructive feedback and criticism so do feel free to drop a comment here.