2 Magazines Dec 07 - Jan 08 Article on Stuart Jay Raj

1. 2feature
99By Jim Algie
Sex, Tarts and Aphrodisiacs
A Maestro of
Many Tongues
2magazine speaks to a man who is turning his
multi-linguistic skills into the ABCs of a successful
and multifarious business venture.
Thai is, like, well, it’s a tonal language and they’re
much more difficult to learn than other languages,
says the expat, using an alibi (or a drawn-out syn-
onym for slothfulness) that you’ve doubtless heard
many times before.
Ask polyglot Stuart Jay Raj what is the major
speech impediment for farangs learning Thai and
you’ll hear something different: “It seems foreign,
but 60 to 65 percent of Thai is based on Sanskrit,
which is part of the Indo-European group of lan-
guages that are cousins to Latin and Greek.”
He ought to know. Fluent in more than a dozen
languages (including Thai, Mandarin, Bahasa Indo-
nesia and Danish), the 32-year-old is on speaking
terms with around 15 more tongues. Earlier today,
before our interview at the Greyhound restaurant
near Soi Aree, he’d just received an email in Thai
from a Buddhist monk in Los Angeles who has
been using Stuart’s podcasts for RadioBangkok.
Net to teach foreigners and natives about Thai
language and culture at a temple. Stuart shook his
head in disbelief and smiled when recounting the
email and how the monk had said “it’s funny that a
foreigner knows more than some of us about our
own language, but thank you”.
By now, the communications expert should be
used to such accolades. Only a few weeks before
this rendezvous he’d been giving a presentation at
a government office, crammed with the biggest of
bigwigs from the Office of the Thai Senate and the
National Language Office. Here were the folks you
would see whispering in the prime minister’s ear
during an official overseas visit, or the first to greet
visiting dignitaries in the Kingdom. Stuart was there
to teach them presentation skills, so they don’t say
to Dick Cheney, “Do you like Thailand?” he mocks
in pitch-perfect Tinglish. “You eat sapicy food?”
(In order to loosen their tongues further, he’s even
planning on taking them along on photo shoots
with supermodels.)
But his sense of humor often underlines a more
serious sub-text. This was apparent when he
asked the assembled throng about a Thai proverb
that asks whether you should hit a cobra or an
Indian first. Nearly everyone there shouts Ti khaek
because the cliché (also used in Singapore and
Malaysia and other countries) implies that the
Indian will bite you first. From a different angle, it’s
a backhanded compliment about the hardnosed
business techniques of Indian people.
Imagine the crowd’s shock when Stuart revealed
his father was Indian but that his mother was Aus-
tralian and that he grew up Down Under. Because
of his language skills most locals, upon meet-
ing him, think he’s half-Thai. Stuart likes to keep
them guessing. “I don’t call that lying. I call that an
investment.” Once the relationship has been solidi-
fied, he will tell them he’s actually half-Indian. The
usual reaction, he said with a laugh, is, “Oh, I’m
sorry to hear that.”
But anecdotes like these serve him well as a fa-
cilitator, cultural troubleshooter and linguistic bridge
in his work throughout Asia with multi-tentacled
conglomerates like Tesco, Pepsi and the UN. The
parable about the Indian and the snake is one of
those slippery stereotypes that will slither away if
you try to grasp it. These stereotypes, rooted so
deeply in our languages and cultures, cannot be
uprooted, Stuart advises his clients, you just have
to work around them.
As a boy growing up in Sydney, embedded in
a community of Chinese-Indonesians, he quickly
came to terms with Mandarin, Javanese, Bahasa
Indonesian, and a dialect of West Timor. On a
family trip to the United States, he returned with a
renewed interest in his father’s mother tongue of

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Hindi. At their house, his mother entertained her
Thai friends. But most of all it was his maternal
grandfather, a communications expert in World
War II, who fostered in him a love of decoding sys-
tems, whether they were linguistic, electronic or a
Rubik’s cube – to the point where the two of them
would communicate with each over by tapping out
Morse code on the dinner table.
“On his deathbed, when he had Parkinson’s dis-
ease, he had to teach himself to write again. Even
then he could still draw the schematic diagrams
for radio transceivers he used during World War
II,” said Stuart, the managing director of his own
company, Kogneit, whose slogan is “Think, Create,
Communicate”.
Even though he still enjoys working with Austra-
lian companies, his assessment of his homeland
is spiked with a few wry asides. “Nice car, nice
mortgage, nice divorce, nice psychiatrist bills. A
lot of Aussies feel that the government owes them
something. But there’s an edge to life over here [in
Thailand], so if you don’t perform you die.”
For him, what Aussies call the “tall poppy
syndrome” is a double-edged sword. In one way,
it’s meant to keep people on an even footing. In
another, it discourages anyone with lofty ambitions
by ensuring they get cut down to size.
But there’s no question that his homeland gave
him a foot up on the ladder of learning that your
average Bulgarian or Cambodian would never have
gotten a toehold on.
His academic pursuits on both sides of the
lectern – doing a double major in applied lin-
guistics and political science, and later teaching
Southeast Asian studies at Griffith University in
Coffee Works in Thailand. Since Kenro is working
for the UN now in Africa, coordinating some tens
of thousands of people, the group has been on a
sabbatical for a while. But expect them to swing
back into action with a new bassist in 2008.
Even when speaking about jazz, his obses-
sion with communication remains on the tip of his
tongue. He doesn’t believe that people are neces-
sarily more predisposed to using either the creative
or the analytical sides of their brain. By way of an
example, he argued that all music which “is pleas-
ing to the ear is also mathematically perfect”.
It’s the kind of insight that Stuart specializes in.
Brisbane – was the ‘seed money’ for the windfall
he’s now reaping. A recent two-week seminar
he led in Beijing was business as usual for the
linguist. Switching back and forth from Hindi to
Mandarin to English, Stuart had to teach a group
of urban transport professionals how to make their
language, presentations and materials more street
level so they’re comprehensible to the people on
the ground.
In action he’s a dynamic performer who comes
off as part-businessman (the three-piece pin-
striped suit) and part entertainer (the pop star’s
tendrils of gelled-up hair). During the presentation
for high-ranking Thai bureaucrats, he kept the
more straitlaced scholars enthralled by throwing
them tidbits of knowledge – the rolling r’s Thais
use do not actually exist in classical Thai; they
were an invention of the aristocracy – along with
a few Indian-style head wobbles for comic relief;
and a high-energy floor plan that saw him rarely sit
down or stop moving. His references to “popular
culture” (if that isn’t an oxymoron), in a slideshow
containing images of George Bush, Britney Spears
and Chairman Mao, which was intended to show
how we judge people by how they speak, kept the
presentation from ascending the steps of the Ivory
Tower and disappearing into the ether of higher
learning.
His entertainer’s flair stems partly from his many
years as a jazz pianist. With the ROL Trio, he has
jazzed up numerous nights at local venues like the
FCCT and Tokyo Joe’s. The group’s name is an
acronym of its members’ surnames: R for Raj; O
for Kenro Oshidari, the group’s bassist and main
songwriter; and drummer Dale Lee, the owner of
And that’s the direction he sees his career and
company moving in – what he calls the “Stuart Jay
Raj brand” – bringing together big business and
small enterprises, high-brow scholasticism and
middle-brow populism, NGOs and the UN, into an
all-over-the-map career that could sport a slogan
like “Unite and Conquer.”
Now how would you translate that into Mandarin
and brand it in Russia?
Check out Stuart’s blog at stujay.blogspot.com
to find out, among other things, how he attempted
to learn Vietnamese in just three weeks.
“60 to 65 percent of Thai is based on Sanskrit, which
is part of the Indo-European group of languages that
are cousins to Latin and Greek.”