What captures your attention?

What am I thinking about?

The uniqueness of being Malaysian!

I was asked by a potential EMEA client recently on how I would cope with working with their APAC employees whose second language is English. Implying less fluency.

Without hesitation, I said – ‘that’s in my DNA’.

I replied, and I quote, ‘I don’t talk like this (zoom call with the UK client) when I work with APAC clients. I change the way I talk depending on my audience’.

I am Malaysian and I grew trilingual. Yup, that is the beauty of being Malaysian. Most people speak at least 2 languages and a great number speak 3. I speak 4 but my fourth language (Hindi) is fading from the lack of use.

English is our second language. The medium of education is Bahasa Malaysia. But English is the unofficial business language in Malaysia making it the first language for many.

But putting aside the language skills, growing up multi-racial, and multilingual has its advantages both physical and social.

Physically, the brain is known to develop differently when we speak different languages. People who speak more than one language have more grey matter compared to people who speak only one language.

Socially, we are more agile and adapting. It helps us be more culturally aware. And sometimes we use more than one language in one sentence to get the message across. Non-Malaysians (and non-Singaporeans) find this bizarre.

But this is what makes us, Malaysians, unique.

Did you know…..?

With the development of denser grey matter, it improves other skills such as communication, creativity, recall, and concentration according to Cambridge University Press.

Here are some things that speaking another language impacts:

1.      Better performance

2.      Improved concentration

3.      A more powerful memory

4.      Stronger communication skills

5.      More creativity

There is a difference, in brain development, between growing up multilingual versus learning a new language in later life. For more details on this and the above impacts click this link. The article is skewed towards students but the findings apply to all of us.

What, experience or observation, captures your attention?

Our wildlife family is growing. We have birds nesting in our garden often. We have a few trees that birds find conducive for building their nests. Typically, in the higher part of the tree.

This time, however, one of them has built their nest low, at eye level. I was in the garden 2 weeks ago and was stopped by the site of this nest on our jackfruit tree. To be honest, I thought it was abandoned as it seemed partially finished and too low by my observation!

The nest

But a few days later as I went to harvest a jackfruit from the tree, I had an oriental magpie flying around me. It struck me then that the nest was not abandoned, and it had a proud owner. And I realised it was Mario. I name all the birds that live with us. We have a few species and I name them all. 😉

I became mindful of not getting too close to the nest after I retrieved the jackfruit. I began to observe the nest and Mario was fortifying the nest daily. It looked like hard work, and its diligence was admirable.

This week I noticed something different. Mario was sitting in the nest. Intuition told me that there must be eggs in the nest and that was Mrs. Mario (aka Maria) keeping watch.

Maria in the nest

Yesterday, whilst Markus, my husband, was mowing the lawn I dashed over with my camera when Maria flew off to see if my intuition was right. I was. There were 2 eggs. I did a quick capture with my phone camera and left. I showed Markus and we both cheered with pride. Our garden family was growing.

Two eggs! & the details of nest

I am in awe of nature and all that goes into creating life on Earth. The nest stopped in my tracks. The intricacy of weaving the right ‘material’ together to make a nest is just incredible.

I shall keep you posted on their progress. We have several predatory birds in the garden that may make life difficult for Mario and Maria. I wish them well. We have a raptor in our area and have seen it capture birds in our garden in the past.

Over to you, what observation or experience captures your attention?

As always, you can reach me at yoga@yoganesadurai.com