I Hate it When People “Chope” Seats – Please Continue to Chope.

One of the most irrirating things about Singapore is a practice known in local lingo as “Chopeing.” The practice is “chopeing” is an unofficial form of reserving spaces. This habit is most prominent in food courts and hawker centres where people “reserve” seats before going to buy food from one of the stalls in the centre. Unlike formal restaurants where the seats are the property of a single establishment, seats in a hawker centre or food court are common property and anyone can sit anywhere he or she choses to sit.

In practice, hawker stall seats are a free for all. However, a culture of “chopeing” has developed where all you need to do is to leave your business card or a packet of tissue paper on a seat and it’s effectively yours.

Personally, I hate it. It’s like, you have an hour for lunch, there’s only one place to eat and its filled with people. You get your food and there’s an empty seat – then all of a sudden, you see a business can or a packet of tissue paper and you’re left standing and looking for a place to sit again. I mean, who the heck reserves things with a packet of tissue paper? In places outside Singapore, a group will go out for lunch, leave one person to sit there and reserve the seats and then buy his or her stuff once the rest have come back. Only in Singapore does a packet of tissue paper count as reserving the seats.

Having said all of that, I respect the fact that you can “chope” your seats with something as biennial as a packet of tissues. This irritating habit is based on what of the things that makes Singapore a decent place to live in – safety.

To put things in a nut shell, if you saw a packet of tissues lying around in somewhere outside Singapore, you’d pick it up and use it and that’s just tissue paper. I’ve seen people reserve their seats with things like a set of headphones and today, I even saw something resembling a purse. Once again, if you saw a pair of headphones lying around, you wouldn’t think the place was reserved, you’d think that someone had left a pair of headphones behind for your taking.

Yet, and yet, this is Singapore and there are harsh penalties for crimes. Our crime rates for the most part are low and while you can say that this has made the population complacent, there’s a lot to be said for being able to leave your goods unattended in a public place and be confident that they’d still be there after taking a small walk. 

Top Class from Middle Class !!! - Global Leaders from India

By Mr. KV Rao

I was born and raised in India in small towns, and started reflecting how is it that so many of my compatriots make it to global leadership positions ?

Many of our ilk have left the shores, for distant foreign lands. Have studied and imbued the best of cultures, but retained some of some of that inner rusticity, and native eclectic personalities. They have made it to the top jobs of Google, Microsoft, Mastercard, or a Pepsi, and the list is endless and still more to surface. All have been exceptional fighters, who seem to compete fiercely but fairly, often guided by their simple inner compass. All have had their roots in Middle Class India. What is the magic that’s at work ?

Typically, in a middle class family, that typifies some common basics - a high dose of personal values with low resources, what in a South Indian phrase is termed as “high thinking and simple living” - hard work, education, discipline are the key mantras drilled into young minds, to help them break through the glass ceiling. Exceptionally strong personal family bonds, and a natural willingness to put oneself down for the other, compassion and care seem to naturally flower

 What are those simple things that make them such effective leaders. Here are some reflections :-

1. ‘There was never enough ….’   If one grew up in my generation in middle class India, life was always on the edge. Just about balancing ends with limited means. That meant, living happily and contented with what you have, than to aspire for what you don’t. Realism, practicality. But, also have the uncanny ability to stretch the buck – unbelievable value engineers, we are naturally. No wonder, hard to beat an Indian at cost cutting. !. Defining needs vs wants was deeply embedded in the frontal lobe of the mind, filtering away desires :) 
2. “We always ate together….” . Families would wait for each other to eat together. (Also the fact that there were hardly fridges then, and you ate hot and fresh !).There was sharing and caring. The bonds built were deep that lasted a life time, and giving and serving each other, imprinted that quality of care for a lifetime for another member of the family. 
3. “We celebrated together, we mourned together …” Families, lived as communities, extended with relatives, friends and neighbors. Much to the chagrin of modern nuclear families, there was little private and personal space  ! … All celebrations were shared, and so were the strains of illness or misfortune. Jumping in to help, give someone a shoulder was so very natural. That was the normal thing to do, not an act of valor or sacrifice. Your loss was mine, your success too was mine. Empathy a natural flow.
4. “Maths and English, are important…. “. Our fathers simply emphasized on 2 subjects, Maths and English, particularly in South India, as if they were meant to train the left and right brains, and eventually spur some whole brain activity. In hindsight, they seem to make sense. English opened the doors to global opportunities, the computational abilities pushed forward analytical thinking. 
5. “ We laughed a lot, joked, and pulled each others leg… “ Families, neighbors, and community living provided the best of entertainment, and a source of immense comedy. Radio and cinema was the only companions, and Black & White TV just came in with one or two long running serials. Sense of humor was valued, and we learnt to laugh, when nothing else could be done. Being sportive and getting the rough edge, is so normal, no big deal. It built great resilience and forbearance, for there were many things we could not change but had to live with. 
6. “ We prayed together….. “ . There was always a routine of prayer, whether you liked it or not. Before you start the day, go to college, go to exam, go to an interview. All of which, reinforced the positive belief, that no matter what, there is something more powerful and higher that resides above you, and cares for you should you make the effort to reach out. It ingrained the simple truth of focusing on the effort and leaving the ultimate result to the forces that be. It also made one more prepared to take risks, and face failure – a trait that today people struggle with, to fail, and yet to rise and be innovative.
7. “ There is always a fix …."  Last but not the least, there was never a “no” to be taken. There is always a fix, a Jugaad if you may, or a work around. Hard to accept and give up. Persistence, thinking upside down, creativity or sheer street-smart tactical reflexes. Or the ability to bow, and accept failure honestly and humbly. It’s a potent combination of inner strength and outer smartness, to craft a strategy that works in the face of adversity.
8.  “ You are not the smartest .. “. When you grew up, you always had someone much smarter than you, much better than you. You often wonder you were blessed or damn lucky to be where you are. There is a common streak of simplicity and most importantly humility. Go back to point 6, above – there was also someone “above” there who wished you well. Humility reinforced. !

 It is not the top management schools that honed the skills alone, but the the middle class homes of India that gave many of our generation, that inner compass and embedded CPU that makes one see life with a set of different lenses.

Leadership today, hinges on the ability to inspire, share, care, lead with empathy. Inflect clarity, sharpness, and fight the forces of competition with courage and tenacious persistence, never to give up. The ability to remain cheerful, spread laughter and joy around the work place. The training school of which is located in middle class Indian homes, that have often produced top class international business leaders

All Men are Equal – Some Are More Equal than Others

Do We Need More Equality?

If there is a theme that makes our chattering classes chatter, it is the topic of inequality. However, unlike the other topic that riles people, namely arseholes and what we do with them, the topic of inequality has a way of making people, particularly those in power, squirming in discomfort.

Just mention the fact that Singapore, when measured by the Gini Coefficient (standard measurement of social inequality), is one of the most unequal societies in the world in a public forum. Before you know if, you’ll have a good portion of the government reminding you that such measurements like the Gini Coefficient don’t really tell you the whole story (which was something my former headmaster used to do when the school wasn’t ranking that highly on the league tables – he changed his tune the moment the rankings reflected something he liked to see) and they’ll then roll out all the wonderful social programs that they’ve come up with to prevent the poor from dying on the streets.

While I’m not going to dive into statistics to prove a point. What I will say is that Singapore is an obviously unequal place. In my daily life, I deal with Indian and Bangladeshi construction workers earning the princely sum of $1,100 a month (US$800/Euro 700 or GBP 646) and I also deal with high flying corporate lawyers earning that amount in an hour. In Singapore, it’s a national celebration when the likes of  Facebook’s co-founder, Eduardo Saverin who has a net worth of over 11 billion US dollars settles in Singapore (or when James Dyson buys a very expensive piece of property) and at the same time, we’re perfectly content for a legion of dark-skinned Asian workers to come here to work what can only be described as “slave wages” (we even get indignant when the dark people have the gall to riot after the police protect the guy who runs over a dark person).

In fairness to Singapore, we’re not the only unequal place on the planet. My university days were spent in London’s Soho, and the common sight was tramps on the streets camping outside bars waiting for people throwing a couple of hundred pounds away to spare them some change. You could say that Singapore’s inequality is only more telling for me because it’s physically more compressed.

The other observation that I’d make is that nobody seems to have really “rioted” over the “unfairness” of society. So, the question that we all need to ask is whether inequality is really such a bad thing after all.

For me, the answer was given by Raghuram Rajan, the former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor at IIMPact 2013, when he argued that it all depended on how people saw the elite. Dr. Rajan argued that people could accept inequality if they saw the elite as getting there through hard work and guts. However, if people saw the elite getting ahead at their expense, they would not accept it.

Dr. Rajan’s point was clearly visible in the Arab Spring and seen in places like Tunisia, where the average educated person needed to work a few jobs to buy a loaf of bread while any idiot who had the good fortune to be related to president Ben Ali, would inevitably get rich.

By contrast, America has held relatively steady even though you have the likes of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates whose net worth’s are comparable with GDPs of some nations and at the other extreme, you have dreadful levels of poverty (American satirist, PJ O’Rouke, went as far as to compare Detroit to war-torn Beirut). Bezos and Gates are perceived as ordinary guys who had a great idea that could change life for the better and made a fortune from it (and made many other people rich in the process – think of the Microsoft millionaires in Seattle). While their fortunes are greater than what the average man could dream of, they are not resented because they are ordinary guys who made good rather than crooks who screwed over the ordinary guy.

The problem with inequality arises when the ordinary guy is made to feel that he’s being screwed for merely being born. To a certain extent, that has become true in America with the election of Trump, who is ironically the prime example of someone who has benefited from the faults of the system (inherited wealth, payed less than minimal wages – if he paid at all, coopted local government officials to do him favours etc). Despite being a product of the faults of the system, Mr. Trump is a genius at tapping into the resentments of the average man and exploiting them to his advantage – the average man being so excited that he’s got poor Mexicans, Chinese, Indians etc to blame that he forgot that the guy really screwing him is the Wall Street banker or dare I say, the Manhattan Property Developer.

In Singapore, something similar is happening. The average person notices that life is becoming expensive. Leaving the rising costs of houses and cars, we, the poor sods notice things like we need to top up our bus cards three times a week instead of twice as we did a few years back. At the same time, we’re noticing how things which were meant to be “equalisers” like the scholarship system are looking more and more slanted against the ordinary people (the idea of the scholarship system is good – your family background is secondary to your academic ability – however, over time, the guys getting the scholarships are – the same guys who’ve been getting them for the last few decades – the families that can afford top notch tutors).

So, what do we need to do? I believe the answer should focus giving those at the bottom of the heap the feeling that they have a chance, no matter how slim of coming up on top. Most people can accept that life is intrinsically unfair, and the poor do accept that the rich will have advantages.  What the poor will find hard to accept is that they and their children are automatically screwed for being born into the families they are born into and that the rich remain and get richer at their expenses because the system is slanted in such a way. Society only works when the rich get richer and the poor get richer too.

Free market on its own won’t do the trick and some government intervention in life is necessary. To use sporting analogies – you have the European Champion League, where the top clubs (Man United, Real Madrid, AC Milan etc) win pretty much everything, get more money, buy up the best players and continue winning and there’s nothing left for anyone else.

What you need is something like the NFL, where the rules are such that the losers at the bottom of the heap get the first pick of the top talents coming out of the college football system, from where most players come from. This so called “socialist” arrangement has ensured that competition remains healthy and no one team ends up wiping everyone else out of the field.

It’s time for us to reject populist nationalism that leads to nowhere and to look to leaders willing to come up with sensible rules that will offer the downtrodden a glimpse of hope.

Where Do You Come From?

I’ve been away from my desk for a better part of this month and so it’s been hard to sit down and bash out a reasonable blog entry. However, thanks to the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue’s latest tweet, I’ve got something to write about.

The background is well known. The Occupant decided to do what he does best and bashed out a “Tweet” telling four Congresswomen who are “women of colour” to “go back to where they came from.” As expected, this has caused something of a “shit-storm.” On one hand, you have people denouncing the occupant as a “racist xenophobe,” and on the other, his supporters are lapping it up as an example of how their hero tells the world the “ugly truth.”

As always, comedians have had plenty to work with and social media discussions have been passionate. The Occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has continued to add fuel to the fire by doubling down on his tweet. While a good number of decent people are getting upset, I believe that the Occupant has done us a very important service by getting us to ask ourselves what makes a citizen.

Let’s start with the obvious. The tweet was intended to be racist because racist statements are inherently provocative. The women in question were all US Citizens, with three of the four being born in the USA. The other common factor was the fact that they were not white. The message was clear – these four non-white women were not “real” Americans, even if they had US passports. The Occupant’s supporters then turned their focus on the one woman who wasn’t born in the US, Ilhan Omar, the Congresswoman from Michigan. Apparently, Ms. Omar, who came to the US at the age of 10 from Somalia is “anti-American” because she doesn’t follow a known Zionist narrative that Israelis of European decent, have a “God-given” right to take land from brown people. As far as the Occupant’s supporters are concerned, Ms. Omar has now replaced Osama Bin Ladin as the spokesperson of every terrorist organization out there. Any rational person would see that this only makes Ms. Omar different from her fellow citizens, not “anti-American.”

As one looks at the events surrounding this debacle, the key question that we need to ask is “what exactly is it that makes one an American,” or that matter of fact, a citizen of any society. Is it ethnicity or religion? If you take Israel as an example, the answer would be religion. Israel officially claims to be the “homeland” of the Jewish people. When you think of Israel, one automatically assumes that its citizens are automatically Jewish. Yet, at the same time, Israel has “Arab” citizens, who are for the most part Muslims and contrary to what the average American may believe – Christian. The Arab citizens of Israel have the same rights of the average Jew and they do things like serve in the Israeli military (something which Orthodox Jews do not do). Are Israel’s Arab citizens any less Israeli than the Jewish ones?

In Singapore, where I live, we have a similar question. Is being a Singaporean about race? Our founding fathers were booted out of the Malaysian Federation because we claimed that we didn’t want being Malaysian to be about a particular race or religion and so, we, the citizens of Singapore now have a ground level culture where we’re a patch work of many things. I’m an ethnic Chinese working with a Malay speaking colleague on a project where I much Dossai (South Indian food) on a daily basis. I look to the fact that I have various shared experiences like National Service and a love for various cuisines as the things that bind me to Singapore and Singaporeans. Does that make me more Singaporean than someone like my restaurant owner, who is ethnically Caucasian and has never served a day in uniform but speaks “Singlish” and swears in Hokkien (with a French accent) and chats about the creaminess of durian. While I struggle to pay my bills, he runs a relatively successful business that employs otherwise unemployable Singaporeans – would that for example, give him more claim to being Singaporean than me?

I’ve tried to escape belonging to a particular country and focus my belonging to a people. My parents, are very sure that they are “Singaporean of Chinese descent.” I like to think of myself as being “Chinese” but not from China. For me, Singapore is home in as much as this is where I am physically based. However, I see the Chinese diaspora in the China towns of the Western world as being home too. 

Although I speak Cantonese like shit, it was the language that for many years that gave me a feeling of belonging into a pretty cool network (speaking to your Chinese take away guy in something other than English ensures the food is better). Having said that, a client of mine once asked, “Are you sure Tang is Chinese, he seems more Indian.” He has a point, I’ve picked up bits of Hindi, which gives people the impression I speak the language. I still can’t pick up a word of Hokkien, the majority dialect of Singapore’s Chinese (I get away with it in Singapore because everyone then assumes, I’m Peranakan – which is partially true too). 

I’m still trying to figure out what makes me, me. I’m obviously Chinese with a Singapore passport but culturally British in so many ways but at the same time emotionally Indian, as this particular client pointed out (apparently, I’m the talk of his office – the Chinese boy who eats dossai with his hands). 

If I’m constantly trying to work out who I am as an individual, I’ve got to assume that nations are also doing the same with their national identities. To, which I need to state, that while I have no conclusive answer to what makes a nationality, I’d urge people to ask themselves the question every day. It’s only by asking that question on a daily basis that one reaches something that they’d like the answer to be. 

And the Land of the Brave and the Home of the Free

It’s no secret that I don’t like Donald Trump as a President. I believe that while his policies may have a short-term gain in some aspects, in the long term, his boorish behavior and downright nasty policies on immigration and foreign policy will be bad for the world and America, the nation that he claims to care so much about.

A few Americans I know, would say that my dislike for their president might have something to do with the fact that my personal politics are slanted to the left or that I don’t understand what or how “White America” feels about being displaced by migrants from Mexico and “losing” the global stage for “unfair” competition from China and to a lesser extent Russia and India.

My dislike for the Trump administration has nothing to do with either. I don’t consider myself particularly slanted to the political left or right. One of my professors (A Canadian Lady living in London) complained that she had failed to put a liberal thought in my head. I also don’t believe that government is a solution to anything particular (which puts me in the Reagan version of the conservative movement, though in Singapore I guess I’m considered something of a loony left radical).

I also stress the point that I am the ideal target for ‘anti-immigrant’ messages. I belong to the ethnic majority in my homeland and I am a “college graduate” who had to take on a blue-collar job in my late thirties just to make ends meet. Yet, despite being shoved onto the ground when I could least afford it, I understand that I’m not entitled to a cushy office job (most are overrated in my opinion) and my lot in life is not the fault of the poorer and darker people from other parts of the world. So, I’m sorry, I simply cannot rationalize or internalize “anti-migrant” sentiment.

I have family from White America. Both parents remarried White Americans after they got divorced and I struck the lottery. On my Mum’s second marriage, I got a wonderful stepfather, Lee who brought me to my extended family lead by my stepsister, Carol. From my Dad’s second marriage, I got the most amazing granny, Joan. For me, this part of my family represents why America in so many ways is the Greatest Nation around and I say this as an ethnic Chinese who does look forward to a strong and vibrant China.

What makes America great. Well, the statistics are glaring. Despite China’s vast and rapid rise, America still leads the way in so many aspects of life. It has the world’s largest economy, the world’s most innovative universities and the most technologically advanced military machine (as a matter of fact, America spends more than the next 26 nations combined – 25 of which are allies or as a Taiwanese fellow once said, “China is modernizing its military but it’s modernizing from the 1950s).

For me, these are just statistics. China will be the largest economy by the mere fact that is has so many more people and when China is the largest economy, the average Chinese will feel less well to do than the average American. China is very advanced in certain technological sectors (e-commerce and e-payments as in my previous posting) but the world still looks to Silicon Valley for leadership in innovation. America still rules the world and I believe its for a good reason, and that reason can be found in my American family.

The key to American dominance of the world lies in its ability to be open to the rest of the world. There’s something about America that makes people want to go there and not just go there – go there and succeed. Trump and gang may complain about people from “Shithole” nations but these are the very people who come over and make the place work. As one Southern Baptist I know said, “Americans always complain about the Mexicans but its Mexicans who make the basic services run.”

And it’s not just the Mexicans who want to come to America and to do well. One of my best friends in Singapore is a Nepali migrant who wants to go to the USA because he believes, despite Trump, that its place that all you need to do is to work hard and in the Americans I know, things like race or religion don’t matter as long as people believe you made your success through hard work. I have a friend of Pakistani Decent who has done well in the USA and the fact that he’s Muslim and a darker skin tone that the majority in Oregon is not a factor in how people view him.

I make no secret of the fact that I disagree with much of American foreign policy, particularly in the Arab World. However, I also believe that America has done much for the world to be thankful for. In Europe (a continent that I called home for my formative years); it was the “Marshal Plan” that helped Europe rebuild after the second World War. In Asia, a continent I currently call home, it’s the American military that has kept stability and American education has helped mold the minds of very successful business leaders.

While the Trumpites might disagree with me aggressively, I’ve noticed that America has actually grown despite competition from Europe (particularly Germany) and Asia (Japan, India and obviously China) despite having “given advantages” to its competition. As Jack Welsh, former CEO of General Electric (While GE may be going through a rough patch, it has proven to be a far more successful business than say – The Trump Organization).once argued “You can complain about China growing or you can look at the opportunities a growing China offers you.”

My family America continues to welcome me with open arms despite the fact that my parents are no longer married to their respective second spouses. When I told Nora, my dad’s second wife about Jenny, her first reaction was “Tell my granddaughter, welcome to the family.” To me, that’s America and that is why America remains great despite Trump.