Fabio P.

Notes from My Journal When I Met Fabio

Link to His Video About Air Asia's Sneaky Ticketing System

His Website In English and Italian

His Writing About Singapore

Meeting again in 2012

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Notes from My Journal When I Met Fabio

From Journal August 24, 2003 - The day I met Fabio in Singapore

I was going to take a ferry over to one of the Indonesian islands but I stopped to talk to Fabio. I heard him having a disagreement with the manager of the backpackers. I thought he was Israeli from his look and accent and from the fact he was complaining. I felt a little judgmental at the time. When I saw him again I decided to go talk to him in an attempt not to prejudge him. It turns out he is from Italy. We talked for nearly 3 hours about everything from the history of Malaysia to politics and religion.

One of the things he said was that he thought America was doing a lot of good for the world up till 1945, but he doesn't think it has much to teach the world now. I said "Except maybe what not to do." He laughed and agreed.

(Jan 2012 update - I'd like to hear what Fabio has to say about my pages on America and Life in the USA)

He worked in the computer field, saved his money and has been traveling for almost two years. We talked about how Americans don't travel much like that and if I told people I met an Italian that has been traveling for two years they would say "He is crazy." He laughed and said people in Italy say that about him too. They just say, "Oh there goes Fabio again..."

He said he thinks most ideas come from America -- Both good and bad. We talked about how America is a leader, but in the wrong direction.

He said he thinks the cold war was mostly marketing. He said it helps to market your views when you have someone else to compare them against who you can say are the bad people.

We talked about how the Malaysians and Singaporeans can't agree on the price of the water Malaysia sells to Singapore.

Fabio said he reads about the history of each country he visits. I learned more about Singapore from him than anyone else so far. He told me there are no elections here.

He also said he doesn't think democracy is the perfect system, then we talked about the importance of educating people, and how real education included traveling.

As I told him about some of the parents I have known and talked to he said it made him realize how lucky he was. He quickly understood a lot of what I was saying about how teenagers can be treated worse than criminals by some parents. He rarely got defensive. Most of the time we talked he had a look on his face which showed how much he was really thinking about everything. He looked a little troubled even, telling me that all of this was really important. When I told him I am asking a lot of questions and he said at one point, "I am really interested to know the answers to your questions" and I think he sincerely meant this.

He also mentioned the Asian Wall Street Journal so I suspect he reads it and a lot of other things when he travels. He really impressed me. And inspired me to keep more current on what is happening. He was telling me about the low price of drugs in Asian countries and where the drugs are manufactured.

He also told me about a friend of his who has emotional problems. He has been on lithium and other drugs. He said this friend's brother is 100% sure that his problems were caused by his family problems. I asked, "Like what kind of problems?" He said that the parents got divorced when the boys were young and the father had a lot of money and convinced the court to let him have custody. He said the father would use the children in the divorce battle. For example, Fabio's friend told him that his father made him write a letter to the courts saying how bad his mother was. He didn't want to do it but his father forced him to and told him what to write. Fabio said this letter became part of the court evidence and his friend still feels guilty about it because he hurt his mother. His brother has gone back to courts and told them what his father did and tried to get his mother to be treated more fairly. I suspect that the father tried to hurt the mother in every way he could, including not sharing his money with her and trying to impoverish her, as many people do in divorce battles.

This was probably the most interesting discussion I have had on this trip. He listened to me yet he had a lot to say himself. I could tell he was really thinking about what I said. As I spoke to him I thought, "I might be talking to someone who will be in a position to really influence someone someday. He is going somewhere in life. While traveling he is collecting a lot of information, doing a lot of thinking."

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Fabio told me about Cambodia. He said the children in Laos would come out from swimming in muddy water to run up smiling and waving when the bus arrived.

He said:

From the stories my grandfather told me about Italy it seems like that is how Italy was after the second world war.
People were more sincere, less sophisticated.


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His friends in Singapore took him to see a movie. Pirates of the Caribbean. Fabio didn't want to go. But they had it planned. They didn't ask him.

A backpacker told me her friend in Singapore took her to all the expensive tourist attractions.

About Sentosa Island Fabio said: Only go there if you want to laugh. They imported the sand from Indonesia. Everything is fake.

About his friend in England:

"He looks at things from a totally different perspective. Approaches things from a completely new angle."

Reminds me of my letter to the lawyer at Indiana University - Can't you think of something more creative? (Garnier case)

fabio - bought a newspaper as we were walking. noticed that people didn't wait for others to exit metro before trying to get on.

also commented on "wash hands" part of signs in bathrooms.

Aug 28

saw fabio in internet cafe - he told me about taking ride on lrt (light rail) they charged him two dollars for overstaying his ticket. his israeli friend went all the way around for 80 cents. but he had an ez link card.

told me about how the lrt windows turned white when they passed close to a house.

Aug 29

About Indonesia - fabio said they don't really want to develop the country. they want to keep it at a low level to keep wage costs down.

He noted the irony of telling high school students they couldn't go shopping (in their school uniforms) in a consumer culture.

He told me about the two signs. one says "save water" right next to it is a sign saying you can get fined for not flushing the toilet.

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Fabio chatted with sarah a little. then we had chicken rice. when we left i said "keep writing, and keep thinking." He smiled, pointed to me and said, "you do the same."

Fabio is possibly the closest person to me that I have met. He wants to write. He doesn't care about money. He thinks. He questions. When I told him that the sign said the next train is not taking passengers he said, "Why?"

Aug 30

fabio wanted to know why the australians stop work at 5 and go home and have a barbecue while the italians are still working till 7.

he wanted to know why they follow the speed limits when americans and italians don't.

we talked about working together to set up a writer's community. it has been one of my dreams.

Fabio told me yesterday when we chatted that he met someone in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia who was very smart and spoke English perfectly, but because he was not a Muslim he was discriminated against. I have heard this before so I believe it. Fabio said the guy is now homeless and has been told that the police are going to take all the homeless people 15 kilometers out of the city for a week because there is some kind of international meeting in KL. The same kind of thing is happening in Bangkok. They are moving all the homeless people, beggars, prostitutes etc. and spending a lot of money to temporarily clean up the city to make it look better for the foreign visitors. This kind of thing really disgusts me. Fabio said they will be talking a lot about poverty in the meetings, yet they don't want to see the poor people. Fabio is easily one of the smartest people I have ever met. Smart when it comes to seeing through hypocrisy. Like Sarah, who is a genius in this regard. I told Fabio I felt discouraged because I keep getting rejected but he said to keep fighting. He said for him it just makes him try harder when people reject his ideas. I hope Sarah will also keep fighting. But I don't like the word "fighting." Just persisting. Not giving up

steve: www.eqi.org/fabio.htm

steve: it is about a guy i met in asia- super smart.

steph: this guy sounds really intelligent. i laughed when he said the bit about australians working till 5 and following speed limits

steve: lol and yeah he is smart. he doesnt miss much...

Interests: Reading, writing, travels, mingling with the world at night, playing guitar (that's a new one and I still don't know how to), drinks, soft decadence, dinners, parties (only some of them), movies (only a few), looking for that pang of surprise that you get when once in a while - often in a long while - you meet a person and he/she proves to be an interesting/cool/funny/clever/real (most of all real) one and stops being an acquaintance thus becoming a friend.

From http://www.english.fabiopulito.com/2011/02/piece-of-soul.html

A piece of soul - Singapore

Old Singapore

What do we feel when we look at the pictures of a place that we know, when the images date back to when we were not yet born? I can still remember what I felt the first time I saw some old pictures of Singapore. I looked at them, changed angle and read the caption: a comment, a date and the name of a place that I knew but couldn't recognize. My curiosity aroused, I returned to those places, convinced that I had missed something, because of carelessness or bad choice of the point of view. Roads, quarters, squares, bridges, wharves: the names had remained the same, anything else was unrecognizable. I could place myself behind a column, stare at the view for minutes trying to get hold of some half-hidden detail, but there was no way to bringing back to life the foreshortened image of the photo, sometimes not even in part.

It's true that the same thing would happen pretty much everywhere if one looked at a sixty-year-old picture, but in Singapore the concept of restyling has been pushed to a level that might have never been reached anywhere else. Demolitions, renovation and restoration works, planning, experimentations, regulations, standardization, all this with only one goal in mind: the realization of a vision. The one of a hyper-modern, hi-tech, functional, organized, controlled, clean, safe, ordered city. And as none of these qualities has something to do with the past (actually they are all its children, but they don't need it anymore...ungrateful offspring), the heritage of that past has been ignored. Therefore anything that was not an obstacle has been molded and reshaped to meet the new requirements, whereas what was seen as a hindrance was removed outright. As a consequence the city-state has inevitably lost its character, got rid of a piece of soul, thinking perhaps that it could live off the body alone. The aseptic veil and the sophistication are things that you can see not only on buildings, restaurants and streets: you inhale them with the air you breathe, they brush against your face when you turn at a corner or cross a threshold. Singapore could have been a rich and advanced version of Rangoon, Malacca, Goa, Luang Prabang, Phuket town, Penang, Hoian. It decided to become the copy of some city fancied by a science-fiction writer instead. An imperfect copy, as they all are. And it did so without many scruples.

Perhaps the zealous authorities do feel some remorse though, if they love to retrieve these photos and show them in public, or if they organize some nostalgic old postcards exhibitions.

That's why I advise those foreign visitors who arrive to Singapore and are amazed by its organization, cleanliness and order, but most of all by its offer of cutting edge technology, to search for those images, watch them carefully, then turn around and look out, and ask themselves whether it was worth wiping off history in order to offer the tourists this life size scale model and lots of shop-windows filled with electronic trinkets that will arrive to their cities only a couple of months later.

As for myself, this is one of those moments when I would like one of my favorite dreams to come true: getting hold of a time machine and travel back...years...back...back...decades, to when the photographer took those shots. Even a black and white, vaguely milky world would be fine.

Fabio and I met again for the first time in about 8 years. We spent several hours talking. I felt sad when it was time to say goodbye...

I won't write about all that we talked about now - Now I just want to put this link in for Fabio about the "right" to interesting education... We talked about needs and rights - Actually it was more like me giving him my speech about it ha ha. He seemed to quickly understand the basic difference between the two, but I'd like to inspire him or motivate him etc to think about it more.

We also talked about leadership. He said something like he thinks a leader should have new ideas, not just follow whatever the public polls show. I thought of him when I saw this manager vs leader comparison.

And we talked about democracy and being controlled by people who are less informed / knowledgable.

We also talked again about intelligent answers.

We met in Kuala Lumpur. He has been spending a lot of time in Thailand and he will go back there in a few days.