Tag: Tunisia

Next-Gen Leader

With the passing of Mandela, the world raises a legit question: will there be another one in the horizon of equal moral stature!

Yes and No.

This is why. Gen Next grows up digitally.

Search at their fingertips.

Conversation has long tail.

Everyone is well-informed by those tweets (Welcome Pres George H.W. Bush to Twitter). Tweet not Twist!

They invent services, fix things and carry none of the analog legacy. Instead, they identify more with sports and entertainment figures than WW II heroes like Churchill.

Attention is their new currency (Ashton and the hash tag). Wardrobe malfunction is the norm. Instead of avoiding disruption, they build it into the planning and implementing process.

Everyone thinks different including rival Samsung who opens factories in Vietnam instead of China. The older generation is looked at as having dementia (shut down the government?)

Morgan, Madoff and not Mandela? Rather, their hero is one who cooks his own meal and takes the bus to work. The new Pope (who just spoke up against CEO salaries which used to double-digit higher than workers, now triple-digit).

Next-gen leader is currently backpacking in Nepal and Napoly. picking up on the nuances of a globalized and inter-connected world while building and rebuilding homes torn by tornadoes. They play by the rules, but not rewarded for points just yet.

Burden with school debt, they decide to get our of the box altogether, postponing their parent’s white-shoe

career for a chance to experience the many shades of grey.

I hope they connect the dots, and not just cross the t’s.

My daughter dances with the number one hip-hop team in the US. Her group is composed of multi-ethnic LA (she was a few years old when the LA Riot broke).

To her, the conversation about race is just as passe as AOL ‘s “you’ve got mail”.

Kids in the Ukraine and Turkey, Tunisia and Egypt are all aspiring for real change, and not just a phone upgrade

To them, bigger is not better.

And the Beatles are still cool.

If a seventeen-year-old whose cancer death “Clouds”  can rally 5,000 people at the Mall of America for a choir, than we still have hope.

This time, it’s not going to be a towering figure as we had hoped for. It will be multi-tasking multi-racial and multi-platform leaders.

Every kid knows how to self-invent, self-promote and seek self-correction (at least the spell check). The Internet with its power growing by the minute will raise the bar.

Tech language will bind everyone together better than the Queen’s language.

And the new frontier is out there, in space and under the ocean. New leader looks for role models in influencers and thought leaders whom they trust, digitally.

You cannot hide but be the truth, the transparency  and the trust they are looking for.

Their votes will be crowd-sourced and cross-checked, not a replay of Florida in 2000

Next-Gen leader has emerged on this side of the digital screen. We just don’t know it, or refuse to recognize him, or more likely, her.

It’s that fast and furious, or common like our Inaugural poet. It’s staring in our faces, from the screen. Next-gen leader has to play both sides of digital divide, virtuality and reality, not both sides of the aisle.

Ladies and gentlemen, may we welcome our new leader, via podcast and broadcast, via tweets and texts and via whatever platform they will and surely will invent. We just did not know we would someday ride in EV and get stuff delivered by drones.

Stay healthy and stay tuned (because we are going to live very long life) to be witnesses to change.

New world requires new leader. Just that they will come in packages we might not like or are comfortable with. In MN, they voted for wrestler and SNL comedian. Someday, our leader might come with tattoos and ear rings in non-traditional places. You might wish it otherwise, but it’s the new reality brought to us by the virtual world we had created in our own image. For now, the Pope will do.

Burning flesh, jasmine scent

I used to live just a few blocks from where it happened on that fateful day in 1963.

As an active kid, I joined the throng to witness history in the making: monk’s self-immolation as a peaceful act of protest against the Diem’s dictatorship.

The city had been permeated with the smell of tear gas on days leading up to this event http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2043123,00.html

We rubbed lime to soothe our eyes’ sore.

When I read about Tunisians tweet and text to recommend Coke for eye relief, it brought back memories .

The jasmine revolution got its start from those similar flames. Flames of conscience objectors who preferred death to drift and dignity to dumb-down.

We have watched with incredulity how a Zippo flip from Tunisia could inflame the streets of Cairo.

And how quickly the scent of jasmine spread in carosene region .

People pray and people pay the price (thanks to the doctors who bandaged the wounded) to bring down Pharaoh. Instead of casting votes, they cast stones. As I can recall, it was serene and surreal at the intersection of Le Van Duyet and Phan Dinh Phung street . Young monks chanted quietly to send their master to Nirvana. There were a few hundred present at the event (including an award-winning NYT war correspondent).

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Peaceful and principled.

Every body knew what it was all about: the Diem’s family ruled the country: big brother was president, younger brother – head of internal security, and his wife, unelected spoke person for the regime. Madame Nhu was quoted in a press conference (perhaps on her shopping trip abroad, though not for as many shoes as counterpart  Imelda Marcos) “they are welcome to barbecue themselves ….”

History recorded that her husband and brother-in-law, dictators of former Vietnam, were assassinated on their way to the Chinese District. Their deaths weren’t honored and their departures not as peaceful as the monk’s. “What good for a man to gain the world and lose his own soul”.

If you were to witness that sudden burst of flame, and the resolute stillness of the monk, you, like I, would never forget. It will be the same years from now about that jasmine scent that floats from Tunisia to Egypt and onto Libya.

Use lime, it’s better than Coke.