One of my favourite characters in my life is a girl
called Zen, or Fleshball. Zen was, for a long time, Singapore’s proudest
prostitute. She survived on the streets on Geylang and wasn’t shy about out it.
This was particularly true when it came to former cops. Most girls who work in
the business are weary of being spotted by ex-cops. Zen, would approach them
and exclaim, “you look familiar – I know you.”
One of the best things about Zen is that God looks
aren’t her strong point. At one stage, she was so fat that she waddled instead
of walked. There’s something almost baby like about her. Yet, despite that, she
remains super confident than better educated, better looking professional middle
class women have been intimidated by her. My ex-girlfriend, who happened to be
from Raffles Girls School (RGS), NUS School of Architecture and was the former
head of marketing for Haymarket Publications in Beijing and Shanghai, actually
got visibly jealous of her or as Zen said “Slimmer than me – but still jealous
of me – never mind, I’ll teach her how to use make up.”
I bring up the topic of Zen because of all the people
I know, she’s the one person who remains a middle finger to the established
order and established thinking, which is precisely what Singapore needs. I’ve
argued that whilst Singapore is on paper, ticking along nicely, cracks are
starting to appear in the system. Our government, which ranks as one of the
least corrupt in the world, has seen a corruption scandal at ministerial level,
something which no one would ever have imagined. You got to ask yourself – “what’s
going on?”
The answer is simple – we grew so addicted to the
playbook of the 1960s that we forgot that the world was actually changing and
old paradigms are becoming less relevant. In a twist to “The Emperor’s New Clothes,”
story, nobody is allowed to point out that the magnificent gowns are less so
and that the emperor is going to be stark raving nude.
Take our great “tiger” economy. We are officially one
of four nations that went from swamp to wealth in a generation. In the case of
Singapore, the government argued that this was only possible because the
government controlled everything. Instead of a public and private sector,
Singapore has a government owned and government-controlled sector.
Anyone else in between the government owned and
government controlled got crushed as being a nuisance. I think of our media
scene, where SPH, the government-controlled owner of the print and MediaCorp,
the government-owned, owner of the broadcast could actually get the government
to remonopolise the media based on the argument that Singapore was “Too small
for competition.” They got so cozy that they’d spend their time arguing over
whether readership was better than viewership without realizing that the paying
audiences were losing interest in both and advertisers noticed.
So, instead of making the monopoly players wake up to
reality and face competition from smaller online players giving the market what
it wanted, our pro-business government decided to bailout the big players and cripple
the smaller players with laws like POFMA.
The business scene has followed the maxim of “God on
the side of Big Battalions.” Instead of ensuring underdogs don’t get crushed,
the system actively goes out of its way to make life difficult for anyone with
the audacity to challenge the established players. Hence, super scale scholars
get more. People like Zen are not expected to survive until election time. The
fact that someone like Zen has the audacity to survive is an act of giving the
middle finger to a system that sees underdogs as an inconvenience.
So, what can people who are not part of the established
order do to survive? The standard answer is that you lie down and be grateful
for the crumbs. But what happens to when you the establishment does not want to
give you crumbs?
Again, I don’t have any real answers. However, I got
interested in a YouTube video when someone made the point to Mike Tyson, former
world heavyweight champion, who he beat bigger men. His point was that he used the
fact that he wasn’t the bigger guy to his advantage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmJJK7Ac4Fk
There’s something that our entrepreneurs need to take
note of in the domestic market. Big players can be beaten and quite often, their
biggest strength is their biggest weakness (the fact that they are the big player).
Look at the media industry as an example. Both SPH and MediaCorp had the
backing of the government and resources. Yet, this became a handicap as viewers
and readers wanted something that didn’t seem like a government mouth rag. Like
Mr. Tyson, the online media in Singapore has used the fact that its not big to
its advantage. Entrepreneurs and small business owners should take note.
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