Dads, Kishore Mahbubani and A Boy Named Sue

Some fathers can appear aloof and uncommunicative. Don't let that fool you.

- Ravi Velloor

Perhaps the most touching part of Kishore Mahbubani's memoirs, Living The Asian Century, is when he talks of meeting the father he seems so much to resent, while on a home trip between postings to Washington and New York.

“I saw how proud my father was when I came home for a visit; he took out his wallet and showed me all the press clippings about my posting that he had neatly cut and saved,” Mr Mahbubani writes.

The senior Mr Mahbubani had risen through a hardscrabble existence, wound up as a salesman in a Sindhi textile merchant's shop, and got into trouble with the law – fetching him a jail term that would break up the family.

Mr Mahbubani's narration reveals he himself was firmly on his mother's side, and he credits his late mother for his own in-built resilience – even if your tummy is churning, walk around as though you have ghee (clarified butter) on your lips!

Anyone who watched Dean Mahbubani endure the travails that followed his Op-ed in The Straits Times on Qatar's lessons for Singapore, and the Huang Jing episode, would know the good professor learnt that lesson well.

Years later, his elan is intact, and he continues needling Western audiences to rethink attitudes to China, and much else.

That said, this isn't as much a column on Mr Mahbubani as about parent-son relationships, which can be complicated. In the best of times, it is said that male children start out as mama's boys and end up as father's best friends.

But it isn't always so.

FROSTY FATHERS In the era that Mr Mahbubani was born, it was common in many Indian families for fathers to keep children at a frosty distance – no doubt, all part of creating the aura required to assert authority over what often were large households.

That was the case with my friend, M, who gained fame as a broadcaster on the BBC's Hindi service.