singapore II: the interview

And then media briefing ran. There was only one speaker named Ashok Vaswani. He talked much about the citibank growth and expansion in the pacific asia.

I felt like being lectured for a subject I don’t interested at all. But the lecture went unstopable. Yeah… they paid for the “student’s” accommodation, what can I say? But what made everything worse was that there were no news in his speech. I mean.. He talked too global that has nothing to do with Indonesian reader.

Beside, they talked no number. It is like you are listening to a man who share his idea, but you don’t know him and his problem.

And I wasn’t the only one who think that way. Another journalist getting annoyed, but we were still listening the host. There were sixteen journalist there. And when the question and answer session began, then the excitement situation started.

Each journalist asked topic that connected to the citibank operation in their own country. I meant, each of us being “selfish”. What made us in common was that we asked something that actually not directly connected to Viswanath’s speech. And that’s funny..

And what I learnt more from those senior journalist (I’m the youngest journalist there, and the less-experienced one), is that they were so aggressive to ask in a smart way. They looked like having a dialogue with Viswanath. I mean.. they could drag him to give information in a smooth way and not interrogating.

Yes.. they’ re so aggressive that gave me no chance to ask in the forum. Half of other journalist decided to keep their question, as I did. When the forum ended, then I got close to Viswanath and did the job.

Well, It’s not my first time to interview someone in english, so it didn’t really matter anyway. I thought I have given my best shot in giving the questions. Mostly they were leading question such ask asking about the decreasing of citibank’s card credit business in Indonesia caused by the inflation, the expansion plan to require local bank… as Rabobank has done, or the single presence policy (the single ownership of foreign bank).

But the problem was the answer… he could avoid my answer so good that made me think he was graduated from a university that taught how to avoid journalist’s question. And if he was, I bet he got cumlaude rating. Hehe..

And so I reported only one news. I planned to write an article too, but hehe… I couldn’t resist the desire to cruise on the city… so I quickly wrote the news, sent it via wireless fidelity (wifi) from my girls’s notebook (for mine is damaged from water splash), closed the lid, and went out from the hotel.

By the way, I knew that Singapore is a jungle of wifi. When I opened the wi-fi connection, there were about eleven wi-fi that I could connect to, and they were open acces. Would you believe it???

Singapore here I comes…


(While writing this, suddenly I feel so.. lonely and blue. I sit right on the bench, when she was beside me, held my hand, and run for almost missing the plane. It was about three months ago. But now, it’s 09.00 o’clock already.. I have to catch my plane for Denpasar, so I don’t have to miss the plane too. I bring this lonely feeling.. all the way.. all day.. as usual. Damn!)