People and Their Passions

“I was a dreamer in my childhood years. I was inspired to become a trial lawyer after watching my father win his client’s capital case. Hearing the judgement, the poor man broke down in tears and hugged me tightly. I knew right there and then I wanted to follow in my father’s footsteps and help save lives. You cannot fight for someone’s life and liberty if you do not have the heart for it. You have to fight as if the client is your son.

For me, to do this job, a modern day lawyer needs to have that extra about them. To be more than the traditional mould that requires lawyers to have a clean cut image and only focus on their legal career. To solely do that for twenty-four seven would drive me mad! Anyone really! There’s got to be a balance. That’s what I bring into my practice, HEART. And being a certified Bar Council Advocacy Trainer, I’ve told all of my students just that. You cannot be plain. That extra comes from your outlook in life, your interests that drives you. Your passions essentially.

Which brings me to my other childhood dream, to be a rockstar. Back when I was 12, the only guitar I played was air guitar on my old tennis racket! But I knew I wanted to perform. So I taught myself how to play and went from there. Fast forward to today I’m doing just that. Away from my legal work, I’m a guitarist for a band called Vintage Rising. My band members are professionals too, for example our keyboardist is a cardiologist! But we’re not in it for the money, that’s for our full-time musician friends. We’re just professionals with a passion to play. Our forte is music you’ve definitely heard when you were growing up but not exactly the chart toppers like Hotel California. More like David Bowie’s Heroes.

As a band, we’ve had the honour playing in some of Penang’s best places for music such as Hard Rock Café and ChinaHouse Penang. The pandemic managed to put a pause on that as Penang was especially tight with its standard operating procedures. Everything was shut down until April last year. We were finally able to play a show last July and wow, it was such a high! I also collect guitars! I have 13 guitars in my collection, some Fender Telecasters and USA Gibson Les Pauls. The dearest of them all is my beloved USA Epiphone SG double neck, similar to the Gibson version Slash from Guns N’ Roses owns.

Whatever I dreamt of as a kid, I pursued it and managed to manifest that vision into life and I am grateful for it. People think work would enable you to chase your passion but in reality, as clichéd as it is, it’s actually the other way around. You’ll find ways to do what you love.”

“I read Salina by A. Samad Said 17 times. It is one of those books that makes such an impact in you that it even to a certain extent, defines the life paths you would choose. This book took me on an adventure that culminated in a stage production I eventually directed in 1986, starring Fauziah Nawi and Jalil Hamid and then on to a lifelong adventure of words, language, literature that spanned 20 published books, and a career that embraced communication. At the heart of it was the drive for good storytelling – the kind of storytelling that made a 15-year old boy fall in love with a book and its stirring message.

And besides my wife, this is the love of my life – the magic of words, and how they can move mountains. For the pen is not just mightier than the sword, its creations are an integral need of the human psyche. Books feed our souls, our minds and our hearts and they allow us a glimpse into a thousand different worlds and build a delicious permutation of characters, emotions, perspectives, time travels, and the ability live a thousand different lives within one lifetime.

My involvement in theatre started when I was still in high school with the Sang Sepurba theater group. Later I was active with the Universiti Malaya Arts Group (KESUMA), the Children of Nature Group and also the DBP Cultural Agency.

When you grow up with a love for books and read voraciously, it transcends into almost all other levels of creative arts. From directing to writing scripts and even acting – I once played Pateh Kerma Wijaya and Sultan Mahmud in two dramas directed by Othman Haji Zainuddin titled Titah Tuanku and Zaman Gerhana – It has been a continuously exciting journey of discovery of how seamlessly artistic creativity permeates from one field to another.

I have introduced many names to the madness, mayhem and magic of theater and some of them are now famous directors, actors and art activists. Among them include Wan Hanafi Su, Sabri Yunus, Othman Haji Zainuddin, Ahmad Busu, A Wahab Hamzah, Bohari Ibrahim, Wan Maimunah Aziz, A Rahim Muda, Mohd Ali Osman, Shahrizah Ahmad and Rashdi Daud.

I have been blessed to work closely with national leaders who have changed the course of Malaysian politics and history, and I am publishing my memoirs as an editor in my latest book 1998: An Editor’s Story.

You can count a man as lucky if he has made a career out of his passion, because you never really feel you are working when you do what you love. My passions and my work have always been very intricately woven together, and thank goodness for that, and it all may have had something to do with a book I once read. 17 times.”

“Three X Co is a speakeasy bar at the 3rd floor in Bangsar Shopping Complex and is ranked no. 47 of Asia’s 50 Best bars 2021 by World’s 50 Best Bar. We have also been nominated as Asia Pacific’s Top 10 New Cocktail Bar in the “Tales of The Cocktail Spirited Awards” for 2018.

It’s something I started as a side hobby together with my partner, who has won global accolades in the bartending arena. My main business is trading, focusing on the construction industry. Though the turnover is huge, the margins are extremely small. Worse, the payment is very slow to come in, taking more than 4 months easily to collect. So what should be exciting about building a business, growing it and expanding it becomes limited to just worrying about cash flow, and recovery of debts, which drains your spirit after a while.

But where one spirit is drained, another is awakened. It was in the many business meetings over alcohol, that I realised how much cheap liquor is added into most cocktails which creates hangovers and unhealthy side effects.

I began to toy with the idea of doing something I am passionate about – a place where I can hang out with people I like over great drinks and well, where everybody knows my name, like in Cheers, so one day I woke up and said, “I am going to do it.” And just like that, I did. I just followed my instinct.

You see, once you have a sense of purpose, and you can see the end objective clearly, everything else falls in place and Three X Co was formed.

It has been almost 5 years now. Three X Co is cosy and gets an influential crowd that comes in after work just to get away from the madding crowd. We don’t compromise on the quality of cocktails and we only focus on the drinks, food can be ordered from the restaurants around. We are just about the ambience, the people and the prima donnas are our cocktails. It is almost like Three X Co is a stage and the cocktails are our stars.

I like the adventure of starting something new that I know nothing about and making it work tremendously well through a series of mini discoveries, and Three X Co is a testament to that. And who knows maybe in the future, my passion will be my mainstay and not the other way around.”

“I’ve always believed that when you do something right first, the money will come later.”