In Bangkok
A RECENT lunch conversation with Chaturon Chaisaeng, once a deputy prime minister in the Thaksin Shinawatra cabinet, took a surprising zig-zag from politics and democracy, to music and the recording industry.
After Mr Thaksin was deposed by the military in September 2006 and opted to stay overseas in self-exile, it was Mr Chaturon who took over the reigns of the Thai Rak Thai party as acting leader.
A former leftist student activist, Mr Chaturon, now 52, had always maintained a studious distance and independence from Mr Thaksin, and was regarded as one of the few in the party who had his democratic credentials intact.
At a talk he gave at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand (FCCT) soon after being named acting leader of the party, he smiled wryly when asked whether he had shares in the stock market.
In his usual deliberate, soft spoken manner, he explained that the difference between him and Mr Thaksin was that while the billionaire former premier was pondering the purchase of an entire football club, he himself was agonizing over the purchase of a single expensive golf club – the kind with which you hit the ball.
His leadership lasted just a few months. The Thai Rak Thai came a cropper in August 2007 with the Constitution Court's decision to dissolve it on grounds of electoral fraud. Mr Chaturon was among 111 top executives banned from politics for five years.
He resigned himself to life on the outside, with at best an advisory role in politics.
And with time on his hands, he rekindled an interest in Chinese and went to Beijing to study the language. A love for music serendipitously combined with this interest, and last week, he released two lavishly packaged CDs of his own work, singing Chinese and Thai songs - including covers of classics by the charismatic Teresa Teng, who died tragically of an asthma attack in Chiang Mai in 1995 at the age of 42.
No surprise then, at the abrupt conversational gearshift over lunch, to the travails of Mr Chaturon's voice training.
The CD has been generally well-received. And though it has yet to hit the top ten, one political analyst who knows Mr Chaturon quipped: ''Singing is still certainly better than conspiring in the dark alleys of Thai politics.''
Singing for his supper: Chaturon Chaisaeng
ST Photo: Nirmal Ghosh