I have to take a break

It may seem peculiar for me to take a break now, after only just re-starting my blog. But as I enter the last two weeks of my twenties, I am ensconced in a rather circumspect and philosophical mood. I recently read that 'one of life's greatest skills is knowing when to let go', and, well, now I have to let go--until further notice, this will be my last posting on "Musings from Singapore". a hiatus, brief, I hope.

I am not forgoing the pen--or keyboard, as it were--altogether. Trouble is, I can't seem to get enough of it. Between my full-time job at the EIU; my regular contributions for Lexean (the webpage is finally up and running!); my baby steps towards my mountain of a book; and penning postings on the blog that accompanies the book, I simply don't have time to regularly write on this blog.

So, please read my book's blog, which I co-write with my buddy Sumana. That has regular postings. Leave us comments, which will help us as we write our book. It should be out in the next year (mind you, I've been saying that for the past three).

goodbye for now,
whoever you are,
sudhir

Happy Birthday Malaysia

Of all the newspapers, I think The Economist sums up Malaysia's birthday the best:

After 50 years, Malaysia should stop treating a third of its people as not-quite-citizens

(I hope the link to this article works. If not, pick up this week's issue of The Economist)

wednesday i'm no love

I saw the Cure two weeks ago, at the Singapore Indoor Stadium. We had managed to get fantastic seats, front row of our section, a mere six feet from the poor sods in front who had paid $50 more.

They started playing at about 8.30, and we were in heaven, dancing and yelling and having a ball and a blast and the time of our lives. It didn’t take us long to piss off some people.

“Could you please sit down” was the nicest comment from behind. As the four of us kept rocking away, some of the unfortunate seat-bound tried appealing to the girls in our group, “Can you get them to sit down???” To no avail.

As the expletives started flying, we got increasingly annoyed, and so I turned around and cried, “It’s the Cure for godsake. It’s a rock concert! Are you going to be sitting the entire time??!!??”

They were.

Finally, some smart ass behind us did the sneaky thing and alerted one of the pseudo security guards/ ushers to our misbehaviour (standing and partying at a Cure concert). A sorry youngster half our size came screaming down the stairs and started yelping at us. Not wanting to cause any more of a scene, we sat down.

After about 20mins of listening to the Cure while seated, we had had enough. I climbed to the top of the stairs, and started dancing there, a long way off from our prized seats, which remained empty the rest of the show.

From above, peering down on the Singaporean audience, I felt sorry for Robert Smith and gang. These legends had flown all the way only to be faced with an audience that was sitting down and bobbing their heads up and down. Even the crowd in the pit was more interested in their latest digicam-phone than in the band.

I told a friend, “If you just looked at the crowd, you’d think you were at a jazz concert!”

“Are you kidding? More like an opera!”

(second friend) “No way. This is like a bloody funeral….”

At that moment, I was really pissed. But on the other hand, everybody behind us must have also thought we were real jack-asses for blocking their view. Who is right? I don’t really know…I mean, we felt it ludicrous not to stand at a rock concert. But they thought that the proper thing to do was sit, listen and appreciate. And we certainly weren’t going to change their minds that night…

But it’s a great metaphor, no? –

In any society, there are people who might stand and block the view of others because they think it’s the right thing to do.

Those who are blocked can either stand up and see the difference, or remain seated and scream at the blockers.

The blockers, when screamed at, can hold their position steadfastly, even amidst a torrent of abuse.

Or they can sit back down obediently.

Or they can go right to the back, to the outskirts of the group, and do their own thing there, hoping and wishing and praying that those still seated will eventually hear the same tune, and stand up.

In Singapore, for sure, too many people are doing their own thing on the edges of society, without respect, without recognition, without reward.

I can only wonder how many more were forced to sit back down....and how many more never stood up in the first place.

We should have just bought the cheapest tickets.

a migration of poor standards

I’m getting a little bit tired of Indians saying how much they like my country, Singapore.

The gushing never stops. Towering buildings; glitzy shopping malls; roads without potholes; clean, drinking water; spotless streets; safe neighbourhoods; efficient administration; incorruptible government; gateway to the world; ….they could go on forever.

(Every now and then, one of them questions the lack of genuine democracy here, while yearning for the chaos of Indian coffeeshop chatter and multiparty elections. But only for a moment.)

So, Indians love Singapore. Accountants, bankers, engineers, IT guys—no matter. They all love Singapore so much.

But what’s wrong with that? Well, I was particularly irked by a comment from a very senior Indian banker (so much so that I decided to write all this).

He said, “I don’t understand why you Singaporeans keep complaining about your Ministers’ salaries. After all, they deserve it—they do such a fantastic job! Look how well your country is run! You have no idea what corrupt government is. You have no experience of a fat, inefficient, bureaucratic administration, like we do in India. If you knew what that was like, you’d have no problems paying these guys their multi-million dollar salaries. What’s an extra million or two, after all?”

Indians love Singapore so much because they keep comparing our country to theirs. Many of them feel that we Singaporeans are ungrateful and spoilt—we’ve had it so good for so long, we know not what real hardship is.

There may be some truth to that, but I’m actually fed up with this general line of reasoning, because

1) Why are we comparing ourselves to India?

There are several different groups of people who enjoy comparing Singapore to countries clearly worse off than us. Our politicians; our neutered media channels; well-off Singaporeans who have succeeded here; and foreigners (like the Indians).

Perhaps sometimes there is reason to compare and reflect on our successes, but there’s a bit too much of that going on. In order to progress, we should be engaging in upward comparison, not downward comparison.

In other words, we should not be asking
“How did Singapore succeed economically where so many other poor countries have failed?”

But instead, we should be asking
“How come there are other countries that are more developed politically, socially and economically than Singapore (e.g. Japan)? What did they do right? How do we get there?”



2) Do expatriates really know what’s going on?

My Indian banker friend may not think an extra million or two is much. But not everybody is in his shoes. There are plenty of Singaporeans who are finding it tough to keep up. The bottom 30% of households has actually seen their real income drop over the past 7 years, even as Singapore continues to grow millionaires at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world. Income inequality is rising fast.

In this climate, raising the salaries of Ministers to stratospheric levels does, for many, appear like ‘legitimised corruption’ (a term bandied around on an online discussion group, Singapore Review).

I think a premium must be paid, because that is one way to lure the best. However, the current salaries seem a bit much (average salary of government minister--US$1.25m)

Sometimes it is good to get an external perspective on things. Other times, it is misleading. When a jet-setting Indian banker makes big proclamations about Singapore, its politics and its economy, after having lived only in a bubble of expense-account French wine and company-paid luxury apartments, it smacks of bias.
(For sure, I too don’t fully understand the challenges that many of my less well-off countrymen face.)

The irony? The well-heeled, sharp-tongued banker, having lived here for 6 months, will probably get much more air time from our government and its press than the fourth-generation Singaporean single mother in a 1-room HDB flat, her everyday a struggle.


Of course, it’s not just Indians from India who say these things. People from all over the world come here and say similar things. They’re just comparing life here as they see it with life as it was from where they came…only natural.

But that shouldn’t stop us from understanding the realities of life in Singapore, and trying our best to match up (and beat) the world’s best.

The Forbidden City

I quite enjoyed this musical.

So must our government. One of the underlying themes of the show is how an unregulated, untrammelled, free-wheeling media can distort the truth, and the chaos that distortion can cause.

Basically, English painter forms a close relationship with Empress Cixi. Empress opens up to her, sharing her life story. English painter relates all this to a sly English journalist who she's falling in love with. He happily humours the painter's infatuation as he writes a fantastic tale of an evil Empress mother murdering her son. This story gets broadcast, much to the chagrin of Empress and English painter.

English journalist goes on a long drawl about how his readers want something exciting and juicy, not the truth. The truth doesn't sell. And, also, about how he is part of a cunning international plot to destabilize China, on a mission from the Crown!

The free press, a dangerous institution indeed.

Other themes that were touched on: Orientalism, Historical narratives and powerplays. Also, the power of literarature versus painting:

One can share in the English painter's frustration, who after having completed a fine painting of the Empress, sees her attempt to portray this towering woman completely washed aside by the fibs the English journalist tells.

Hers is just a portrait, his a narrative long remembered, more easily reproduced.

random quote

"an insane asylum has lots of creative ideas, but you have to have management discipline to have a meritocracy of ideas"

The things that matter

In an article in The Straits Times Review today, Senior Writer Ong Soh Chin, gushing about Singapore, writes,
"There are few places in the world where the things that matter - transport, education, housing, health care - work as efficiently without having to pay an arm and a leg."

She is correct that we do provide those things cheaply. My question is - how did Ms. Ong decide what "the things that matter" in this world are? Is that her opinion? Her friends'? Our government's?

It would be prudent if our government - and its ardent orators - sometimes asked us what "the things that matter" are.

Rather than always telling us.

Singapore Government's take on old vs. new media

"I said that we will look at how we can have a lighter touch in regulating the internet during the elections. Er... Mr Brown's comment was not posted on his blog. If he had posted the same comment on his blog, we would treat it as part of the internet chatter and we will have just let it be. But he posted it -- he didn't post it -- he wrote it and published it in a mainstream newspaper. That's the difference. In a mainstream newspaper, you have to be objective, you have to be accurate, you have to be responsible for your views, and that's always been my position, or the position of this government: that a mainstream newspaper must report, you know, accurately, objectively and responsibly. And that they must adopt this model that they are a part of the nation-building effort, you see, rather than go out and purvey views that will mislead people, confuse people, which will undermine our national strategy."

12 July 2006, Minister for Information, Communication and the Arts, Lee Boon Yang, in an interview with ChannelNewsAsia reporters

Here is a link to the Mr. Brown article that my Government took great offense to:

"Rock the Junta"

is an article in this month's Mother Jones magazine about a Christian heavy metal band, Iron Cross, subtly screaming for liberty in Burma. I reproduce one interesting passage about the Orwellian culture of fear in this country:

'Even other Western tourists spoke in whispers, turning both directions to see if anyone was listening. This syndrome has a name among some NGO workers - "Burma Head." In a 1977 book called Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault discussed the social effects of surveillance, using a prison designed by Jeremy Bentham in 1787, called the Panopticon, as a model.

The cells are arranged in a circle around a central observation tower, so that one person inside the tower can see into every cell at all times, but the prisoners, while able to see the tower, never really know whether there is a person in there watching them, or not. The observer can see out, but the observed can't see in.

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.

This was why there was no visible military presence in the city. It wasn't necessary. The people controlled themselves. Even tourists were not immune. In the Panopticon of Burma, you were a prisoner among prisoners, each with your own cell. The effect was a deadening of desire, a flat-lining of curiosity and humor, and loneliness hung in the air, heavy as the smog cloud that covers all of Asia.'

human frailty as told by Zinedine

let me preface my World Cup Final observations by admitting how much I admire Zidane. His swansong I awaited like a numbed coke head, yearning for the highs of yesteryear, yet never truly expecting much more.

that it ended bittersweet was very French, very fitting and very forgettable, the effects of whisky having a far more brutal effect on my memory than age did on the Algerian-born star.

for those fully aware of the poetry and irony that littered the game, forgive my indulgence:

1. Zidane's penalty must go down as the cheekiest of all time. He sold a dummy to the world's best and most expensive goalkeeper, who would have saved it had he simply stood still and stuck out his left arm. More than that - he managed to score a goal without the ball touching the net. This is no mean feat, and usually requires the assistance of an opposing defender who's furiously scrambling to clear the ball away but is beaten by the narrowest of margins.

2. Zidane and Materazzi scored the two goals in normal time. You probably know that.

3. David Trezeguet, who missed the penalty that doomed the French, plays for Juventus in Italy. He was also the one who scored the extra-time winner against the Italians in the 2000 Euro Cup Final, a match best remembered for the Italian bench, arm-in-arm on the sidelines, prematurely celebrating an imaginary 1-0 victory while the clock still ticked...sure enough, Wiltord equalized for the French in injury time, setting up extra-time and then along came David Trezeguet.

4. In the week following their victory, the Italian Football Federation, embroiled in match-fixing scandals even before the World Cup, passed judgement on several leading Italian Clubs. Juventus (who Zidane used to play for) were the worst hit, falling to Serie B (Division 2), where they will probably flounder for a while. A mass exodus of players - Cannavaro, Buffon, Zambrotta etc. - is expected. AC Milan were also hit hard, and will start next season in Serie A with a serious handicap.

What does this all mean? Next season, Italy's almost-team, the perennial underachievers, the chokers, Inter Milan, will probably have their best shot at a Serie A title since the days of Lothar Matthaus and his German gang.

And, in all likelihood, after his impressive World Cup, their defence will probably be manned by the irrepressible Marco Materazzi.
What a week he's had. Talk about winning things because your opponents aren't around.


Like I said, forgive my indulgence, for now the serious story begins.

I do not believe any commentator out there has done the head-butting incident justice.

Many have pontificated for hours over the words that were exchanged; the moment's hesitation before violence erupted ("It was a premeditated head-butt!); the moral justification (or lack thereof) for responding with violence; the legacy that was Zidane; the culpability of the foul-mouthed Marco and other banalities that are almost always argued with colored lens on.

Discussing these things is all well and good, and fills many an evening beer chat, but really skirts around the most important human lesson to be derived from all this:

We are frail and fearful creatures, and if, in moment of intense stress and pressure, are pushed into corners and ordered to remain there, are prone to respond with momentary lapses of reason. And violence.

My father has told me that if he were Zidane, he would never have responded with violence. He knows this because others have cursed his mother and sister before and he hasn't responded.

I find this the most ridiculous statement (I told him so).

Simply because he has no idea how Zidane feels! The only person who would know how somebody would respond when placed in such a situation is, well, Zidane. And we got a clear answer.

My father would have no idea what it feels like to grow up as a Muslim Algerian in (ex-colonizer) Catholic France and then have to fight your way to stardom despite bigotry and all kinds of other pressures.

I flipped the question back to him:
Why would somebody - a model human being and global citizen, a role model and idol for millions of children the world over, in front of a billion watchers, on his swansong, on the verge of etching his name next to Pele's and Maradona's in footballing folklore - respond with violence?

In my mind, there is only one answer - human psyche is such. Human frailty is such. If even the most ostensibly glorious person responds with violence, how can we expect the average character to wave an olive branch?

I have therefore chosen to view Zidane as a prism for human psyche and actions.

the next time somebody asks me why a Palestinian or a Lebanese or a Tamil or a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew chooses to pick up a weapon, Zidane has shown that even the most exalted character, in a dream theater, chose violence as expression.

(But I merely seek to understand violence, not justify it. Zinedine Zidane, my idol and hero, is a blooming idiot for doing what he did. But he made me remember one thing - not everbody is Mahatma. Not everybody can turn the other cheek.)