my true love: HAKIM. have you seen the film 'the princess bride'? then you know exactly what true love is all about :P if not... go and get the film and watch it... now!

yet to explain why hakim is to explain my understanding of the world. hakim just simply is perfect for me. on first meeting him everybody, including myself, perceived him as shy, but if you have had the chance to get to know hakim better you know that he also has a wicked sense of humour and that he loves to laugh, to joke and to play. yet most importantly underneath his outward shyness lies a solid strength and a will that defies norms and conventions and enables him to follow his own mind and feelings. and it is this inner strength that made it possible for me to deeply fall in love with hakim, and even to marry him. the easiest thing to explain our feelings for each other is to post the speech that i wrote for our wedding solemnisation that took place on 21st march 2009 at terrace garden in telok blangah hill park, singapore. i feel that it captures the essence of our believes, so here it comes:
"we are here to celebrate love. by all outer appearances, hakim and patricia, are as dissimilar as yin and yang or the sun and the moon, yet love has brought them together. and when we think about the universe and observe day and night, we understand that the sun and the moon are part of the same cosmos, and that one needs the other, and that only together they create an entity.
what kind of love brings people together and makes them want to walk the path of life together? the classical greeks believed in the ancient oneness of the souls. to them our eternal quest for true love originated in the mythical history of mankind. in the beginning humans where hermaphrodites; being both man and woman united in one body gave humans extreme powers. observing this, the gods felt jealous. they understood that the strength of these humans lay in their togetherness and to weaken them they decided to split them into half, leaving men and women to wander through eternity in the search for the other half of their soul. it is the recognition of the soul’s other half that unites people in true love.
this mythical account of jealous gods and amalgamated humans is one explanation for love crossing time, borders, and conventions. today we have come together to witness two people who were born at different times, and in distant parts of the world, and yet they are here today to publicly declare their love."

well this is about it. i simply know that it feels right to be with hakim that is it. i knew that since the moment we kind of split up because our age and cultural differences made the relationship hard and then got back together because we simply missed each other far too much. this was about three months we had met and since then i know that hakim is the man i want to be with. so after this everything simply fell into place and the marriage was not only a natural progression from there, or as hakim put it "we married because we love each other so much". on a practical note the marriage was a necessity to give us the chance to finally live together. this might sound daft, but as long as hakim is on workpermit he has no freedom, including the freedom to live with me.

in case you are not familiar with this, but workpermit is basically a singaporean term for modern slavery. it is a visa that allows you to work, while taking away pretty much all your freedom. workpermit holders are exploited to the extreme, ill treated, and get virtually no respect from local people in return. the companies house them in appalling conditions and even confiscate their workers passports illegally. the list is endless, and as i said, it is a modern form of slavery, sanctioned by the state.

us marrying will not only make our love official, but also allow hakim to break out of this vicious circle of exploitation and give him the two things he desires most, his freedom and to live his life with me. so we are now both waiting for his dependant pass, which has been approved but not sent out to us yet, but as soon as he has this pass we can finally move in together rather than having a weekend-marriage. i miss hakim so very much. the loveliest moments for me are waking up next to him and to fall asleep in his arms and i really miss this... big big time ***

and before i forget it; as you can see from the few pictures that i posted here we celebrated in bollywood style and and that not only could we celebrate with our close friends, the entire universe celebrated with us; while is was raining cats and dogs virtually all over singapore, the universe send us the most beautiful sunset, casting the firmament in a golden glow and ornamenting it with two rainbows. as if the location itself was not beautiful enough, this simply made it perfect. and if this sounds enticing and wants you see more pictures then you can go to my picture blog or maybe you prefer to watch any of the videos that were taken on the day in which case you can go to my youtube site and check them out. have fun!

... it turned out that the MOM did approve the pass within 3 days but we did not get the notice until 3 weeks and 4 telephone calls later, as they managed to send it to a totally unrelated address twice! once we got it hakim told his employer about it and guess what happened? they freaked out! and guess why? because their 'slave' dared to break the cycle of dependency and exploitation, which they considered unbearable. so first they doubted that hakim could have gotten the pass, presuming he was lying, then they tried to say that it was illegal for him to change his pass which lead them to call the MOM to complain about it, only to be informed that hakim was in his rights and that they should simply cancel his workpermit online. all this resulted in a major showdown in the office of his employer right constructions when the boss refused to hand hakim his passport which they keep against international law under the pretext of safety. the entire confrontation was so bizarre that it bordered on the comical if it were not for the fact that the right construction people where driven by their utter disrespect for foreign workers in general and hakim in particular. anyway, hakim did get his pass, and the company was so offended by his strive for freedom that they refuse to employ him any longer. the only good thing that came from it was the benefits that all the other supervisors received in form of a pay-rise. so that left hakim the hero of his ex colleagues and free to find a decent job elsewhere.