There goes the 100-day mark

What is work to you?

When does the line cross between exercising a life-long calling and dragging your body through a 9-6 routine?

As the hours become days, the days become weeks, the weeks become months, and one can't help but wonder what will come at the end of the tunnel. What does one see beyond the paper shuffling, carrying out of orders from above, and enduring the punishing over-time schedule?

Mark Twain once joked that Man is a creature made at the end of the week's work when God was tired. God subjected Adam and Man to painful toil all the days of their lives as punishment for their intransigence. Man was not just a result of His work - we are made to work.

But work we must. No one said it was going to be easy. Nor will anyone hand you candy, hold your hands and sooth your ego with fine sugarcoating. Work can be intense and no one is going to apologise for that.

Above all, work is like living a faith. You have to find a reason to believe and hold on to it firmly. Beliefs may change, and life is a journey of finding the right set of beliefs that fit with our values, aspirations and dreams.

As an officer in the foreign service, I sometimes find myself fighting futile battles against the Great Wall of bureaucracy, and the armies of people looking to "cover" (protect) themselves on the job, sometimes at the expense of efficiency. Bureaucracies are a fixture in huge organisations, including the civil service, which is a necessary irritant to work with.

But these naggings aside, working on international relations is a whole new ball game beyond the theoretical models we used to explore as students, and the polished and simplified articles we read in the press. It is like being at a soccer match and watching the game from the start to finish. The audience gets to note every single foul committed by the players, the dirty tricks that players sometimes employ to get ahead, but also the little triumphs that makes soccer the phenomenal sport that it is. This definitely beats reading about the results from a news headline.

You get privy to the thoughts of the world's movers and shakers: Presidents, Ministers, politicians, diplomats, academics, and more. You become aware of the dynamics of competing and converging national interests, and the ruthlessness of realpolitik. You also become involved in the cumbersome but important process of drafting texts where the slightest misplacing of a comma can mean everything.

International relations used to be a distant blur of wars fought between diplomats and soldiers, and spoken in a language that may as well be Klingon to any of us. But now, I am more appreciative of how it affects the world, our national interests and our daily lives. Diplomacy is a world that never tires or sleeps. For every minute that we rest on our laurels, our foreign compatriots are probably working as hard, or even harder, to get ahead.

Take for instance the Doha Round negotiations in Geneva: The trade representatives to the World Trade Organisation engage in horse-trading and deal-making to protect their national interests. Sometimes, they have to work behind-the-scenes to gather allies and deter rivals. We work hard so that the food we put on the table will remain affordable, our companies can enter new markets without fear of their technology being stolen by competitors, and there are enough jobs to go around, among many knock-over effects of effective diplomacy.

The movies may glamourise diplomats as sipping champagne while rubbing shoulders with the world's elite and striking deals that will affect the world. WikiLeaks may remove the veil of secrecy over diplomacy and reveal the hilarious side of political reporting. Cast those impressions aside, diplomacy is about ensuring the continuity of our way of life and making our society a little better for you and me to live in, by ensuring that our interests are secure.

I guess I will be staying at where I am for some time: watching, learning, experimenting, making mistakes, but above all, holding on to a faith.