There is a standard home remedy in my family for people with
a bad case of the runs. It’s Coca Cola and salted crackers. Apparently, this
remedy is what Indian doctors recommend and when it comes to tummy problems,
the Indian doctors are the world’s best. There’s a reason for this. India has
one of the largest cases of tummy problems in the world (How do you think “Delhi
Belly” came about) and the Indian doctors deal with them day in, day out. What
other doctors see in text books, they see in real life.
Whenever I think this home remedy, I’ve often wondered if
there was a correlation between a country’s problems and its skill level at
dealing with them. I’ve never seen a study on this but there is some anecdotal evidence
for this, which suggest that lend credence to the idea that real success comes
from failure and real failure comes from success.
What are the anecdotes? Well, one of them comes from
success. I used to run the PR for Alcon, which is the world’s largest ophthalmological
company in the world. Alcon’s entire US$7.4 billion is built around the human
eye and all the possible ailments that can afflict the eye. Their PR strategy
was simple We promoted various ophthalmologist and their solutions to eye related
problems. The logic was simple, the more the doctors got promoted, the more
their business would grow and the more they’d have to buy from Alcon.
It was my privilege to help promote our leading ophthalmologist
like Dr. Julian Then of Eagle Eye Centre (who did my lasik for free), Dr. Gerard
Chuah of Total Eye Care Centre, Dr. Ron Yeoh and Adrian Koh of Eye and Retina Surgeons and Dr. Chris Khng of Eye Wise Vision Clinic. What I learnt from these men and Alcon was the
fact that Singapore’s ophthalmologists are highly respected on the international
stage and Alcon had chosen Singapore as its base to perform case studies for
their intra-ocular lenses on Asia eyes. Singapore’s
eye care is world class.
The flip side of our shinny status in the world of professional
eye-care. We have one of the highest, if not the highest rates of myopia in the
world. It’s been estimated that some 80 percent of us need assistance seeing at
a distance more than a few feet and that’s before you take the other eye issues
into consideration. With an aging population and an increasing amount of us
stuck in air conditioned places and staring at screens, Singapore is bound to be
an increasingly lucrative place for anyone in the eye care industry. I guess
you could say that the success of our eye-care specialist is like that of India’s
tummy doctors. They have plenty of eye problems that need solving.
The other anecdote comes at the other end of the scale and I
first noticed this at the end of 2013, during the Little India Riots. The Singapore
Police Force (SPF) were caught on TV (running away) from the rioters. Simply
put, they had no idea what they were doing. As the following video from Channel
NewsAsia explains, this was the first riot that our law enforcement boys had ever
seen in real life:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6SwdMS3uag
This isn’t the only incident where the SPF have been seen to
be ineffective on live TV. One of the more famous incidents comes from a Youtube
clip of a single Australian tourist fighting off the police in the airport:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Bg5QLPkiZ8
More recently (about a week back) it took a number of police
to subdue a single individual who had been tasered:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJDVuaR3kY4
It seems that our boys in blue are only effective when
dealing with people who will automatically give difference to the uniform. Unfortunately,
when it comes to dealing with people who do fight back, it becomes another
matter. In the case of the 2013 riots, the police were simply not used to a
situation where the migrant workers would fight back (this being a community
that shivers every time the police grill them for having the audacity to have a
cup of tea). The case of the Australian tourist was best summed up by a Pinoy
friend who said, “In the Philippines the cops would have pulled out a gun once
he started getting aggressive, he would either have got the message or be dead.”
The ineffectiveness of our boys in blue to handle nasty
situations comes from a happy situation. Singapore’s crime rates are low – so low
in fact that Singaporeans will happily leave valuables lying around in public
places. Our cops are for the most part uniformed clerks. Mos to their physical
confrontations come from training situations (no matter how realistic you make training;
you can never quite replicate a life or death situation).
There is a clear paradox at play here. One should realise
that problems are in fact not problems. When a problem presents itself, people work
to solve the problem. They get innovative and think of ways to beat the
problem. By contrast, your problems really begin when you have no problems. The
brain has nothing to focus on and one becomes lazy and complacent. Failure is a
wonderful teacher and success is very seductive.
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