73 to 83: Autobiography in Fragments

I HAVE long wanted to talk about my life experiences—not so much out of ego, but as someone who lived through unusual and formative times. That’s why Behind the Stories, the book by The Edge—aptly subtitled “The making of The Edge—The people, the elations + heartbreaks of the past 30 years”—matters so much to me. It shows how a small group of people helped reshape the Malaysian media landscape.

The project affirms a belief I’ve carried for years, drawn from Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn’t think anyone was going to see was seen, and the person who feels it is a little bit better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling onto others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep going.

My new project, 73 to 83: Autobiography in Fragments, is a personal attempt to build stories from my university days through to my time at The Malay Mail and IOCU—the people I met, the situations I found myself in, and how they helped shaped me. As someone remarked, it’s quite “Gump.” It is also about Quality—how we can share such experiences in novel ways—as storytelling in fragments, with images and text like those of classified ads.

73 to 83 has been in the making for a while. I’ve already posted two stories about it—read them here and here. This story serves as a hub, linking related Substack entries in a structured way, much like I did with Lanna. Read here.