Yinglee Scores With Karma

AN ATHLETE IN SONG, YINGLEE SCORES WITH KARMA, HARD WORK

It wasn’t just the national women’s volleyball team that became popular when they won the Asian championships in Nakhon Ratchasima last month. The song “Khor Jai Ther Lak Ber Tho” by Yinglee Srijumphon was a hit too.

The mor lam sing (fast-paced mor lam) tune served as the soundtrack for the Thai team’s juggernaut march through the tournament. Even the Japanese squad was dancing along to it at their hotel. The music video has racked up more than 50 million views on YouTube and Yinglee is fully booked with appearances into 2014.

Unfortunately Yinglee doesn’t expect to make a lot of money despite her hectic schedule. She tells Who? magazine that she gets Bt70,000 or Bt80,000 for every show, but then has to pay her band, her dancers and her crew and is lucky to stuff Bt15,000 in her purse. They can do four shows a day, but she still isn’t getting rich.

She’d certainly like to be better off after nine years in the business, during which she had to overcome numerous obstacles and even changed her names several times. Yinglee credits her good karma for getting her to the top, and isn’t about to stop doing good deeds and donating whatever cash she can to worthy causes.

“I eventually realised that changing my name never helped at all,” she says. “What helps is doing good deeds and doing your best every time you’re onstage. Then you’ll earn it all back.”

NO DOUBTS ABOUT DOTS

Life is a matter of connecting the dots for Thana Tieanatchariya, former vice president of Dtac and the man behind its successful “Happy by Dtac” campaign. He left the company in 2010 and has been doing some career wandering, from McJeans to digital TV at GMM Z, only to show up at Dtac again to help establish Telenor as one of Myanmar’s first foreign telecom operators. Thana says every work experience is like a dot and they will all eventually join up in a picture of a joyful life.

His latest dot is running the Academy of Business Creativity at Sri Pathum University alongside the well-known economics columnist Sorakol “Noom Muang Chan” Adulyanont, who’s just left Matichon publishing group after decades of service there.

Getting an education at Thana and Surakol’s school costs Bt100,000, but they have no problem filling the 100 available seats. Still, Thana is wondering if he should be back in a more “stable” job rather than meandering about as an independent. Deep inside he wants to have freedom, he says, and the time to take care of his family. But it shakes him up a bit when people he respects ask him why he doesn’t find a job with real security.

“I know it’s not right to pay too much attention to other people’s expectations,” Thana says. “Freelancing, with all its new experiences, is earning me more new dots. And I believe all those dots I’ve been earning all my life will eventually arrange themselves into some kind of picture. And that picture will lead me on to what I want to do later.”