A reunion of sorts

I just got back from attending the 2006 Multaqa Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah at the Shah Alam Concorde Hotel. I was invited to attend this annual conference by my friend who was my colleague and boss at IKIM, En. Mazilan Musa. He is now the Director of the Socio-Cultural Sector at the Malaysian Institute of Integrity or IIM for short.

Interestingly, it was a reunion of sorts for us who had at one time or another worked at IKIM. Aside from En. Mazilan and myself, Shahriza was also there. He started work at IKIM as the Assistant Programme Manager, and later upon obtaining his degree, he was promoted to the post of Research Officer at the Centre for Economics and Social Studies, which En. Mazilan headed until the end of 2004.

En. Mazilan then joined IIM and has been there since end of 2004. I was briefly under En. Mazilan when I was Fellow at the then Centre for Economics, Social Studies and Technology, before it was reorganised into 2 centres namely the aforementioned Centre for Economics and Social Studies, and Centre for Science and Technology. When it was reorganised, I was reassigned to the Centre for Science and Technology as Senior Fellow.

Since then, I left for Yayasan Ilmuwan in December of 2005 while Shahriza left for SMIDEC about a month later. While the three of us have been apart in terms of organisations, we still get in touch with one another. The rare opportunity to meet up at the conference was indeed a pleasant one, what more with the presence of 2 colleagues from IKIM, Puan Siti Fatimah and Azrina.

It was a good opportunity to catch up with old friends talking about old times, although the time spent may have been brief.