Thank You Mr Ng

 

It’s been a rather wild few days for me as a blog publisher. In the last few days, I’ve seen more people flock to my obscure part of cyberspace in the last five days than I have in the last few years.

As a rule of thumb, socio-political blogs don’t attract much traffic and are notoriously hard to make money from. Nobody goes online to read pro-government news when they can read it off the Straits Times. Nobody wants to be seen pumping too much money behind anyone mildly critical of the government. Then, this is Singapore and we live in an age of extremities. You are either a government book licker or you foam at the mouth whenever a government minister appears on TV.

I don’t do either. I like to think I question objectively and give credit to the parties when credit is due. I’ve been told that I’ve been branded as “anti-establishment” and when I worked freelance, I few people pointed out that I was probably too “anti-establishment” to get much work. On the other hand, I’ve also been labeled a government boot licker by the online crowd. Apparently, I’m influencing people to be more pro ruling party by subliminal indoctrination and I’m handsomely rewarded and living a life of luxury.

So, since both sides don’t like me, I don’t get much readership. If I get 70 plus people looking at a simple posting, I’m happy. It’s reflected in the revenue I make of the blog. Online advertising as managed by Google pays very badly and it took me six-years to get adsense to pay out $150.

Then things changed. My last piece, which talked aboutthe lack of leadership has sent statistics soaring. I’ve gone from being happy with 100 viewers a day for the entire blog (from the global community) to some 2,000 plus per day in the last three days. Ad revenue has gone up too and it looks like I may get my second payout way ahead of schedule:

 

 What happened? Well, I can’t tell you that I’ve become a significantly better writer overnight. I can’t tell you that a magic fairy dropped by and decided to make everyone in Singapore read my last piece. I don’t think I said anything that was especially radical or insightful that would be make the great and good rush towards my insignificant corner of Cyberspace.

The only conclusion that I can think of is that readers are p**ed off about certain things and desperate to find something that vindicates their views about a certain topic. It’s a case of come and read this – this guy is saying what we all think.

This is perhaps something that the powers that be need to take note of. Why do certain corners of cyberspace get a sudden rush of attention?

In the post-9/11 world, one could say that this is an indication of terrorist threats. However, let’s take a step back. How much of a threat is terrorism on the scale of things and are does terrorism become a convenient excuse to suppress opinions that one doesn’t like?

In the case of Singapore, we need to look at the development of online media. How did sites like Independent Singapore and TREmeritus (both of which pick up my pieces from time to time) and let’s not forget the Online Citizen come into being in a media environment where editors know what’s good for them?

The fact remains, the internet has made information easily accessible. Setting up a website costs significantly less than it does to set up a TV station or a newspaper. Anyone can set up a website. Websites are also easily accessible. You can click a button to get a website. You don’t need to leave the house and go to a shop like buying a newspaper. Getting access to a website is easy and cheap unlike say a newspaper or TV program.

However, there are other aspects of online media, which the bureaucrats couldn’t understand. People were willing to work for free. As far as our bureaucrats are concerned, people only do things for money. So, when it comes to the media, it was made such that journalists in the main stream received decent salaries in return for doing what they were told to do. Not only did the mainstream have a grip on the revenue side (where else where you going to advertise), they also had a control of one of the biggest costs components in any business – labour. If you want to work as a journalist in Singapore, its either SPH or MediaCorp. These are the only guys with the money to pay salaries.

This isn’t the same for online media, which gets people who are pretty much volunteers. Without volunteers, many of the websites would have shut down ages ago. However, they’re not short of labour. So, here’s the question, why do people volunteer their time to produce news stories if they’re not getting paid?

Whilst I don’t have the empirical evidence, it’s clear that people are not satisfied with a single source of information. People are willing to offer their time and energy to create alternatives or they need a place to vent and demonstrate their frustrations. When one source of information refuses to even pretend to provide answers to the basic needs of the consumer, the consumer will then look elsewhere.

Which is probably why I need to thank Mr. Ng Yat Chung for helping make my little corner of cyberspace that much more known. It was not my writing but his performance as a CEO of both NOL and SPH, which was interesting to the public. The fact that Mr. Ng tried to bully his way into being absolved for the mishaps made him a laughing stock and his defenders in government looked sheepish for even being near him.

So, I’d love to say that I did something special to make my little blog a little less insignificant. However, credit must go to Mr. Ng for being a master clown in the art of being a donkey. This is something that people who lash out at the media should understand. While there is undoubtedly plenty of manipulation of the message in the media (I used to work in PR), in most cases, the media is conduit to more people to see how people expose themselves.

 

The Buck Didn’t Reach Here.

 

One of the most interesting moments in my years of blogging was to have an article I wrote on SPH get picked up by Independent Singapore. The article went round my professional circle and my employer called me asking me if I was “crazy” because I was risking being sued for stating that SPH failed as a business.

The truth is, I would love for SPH to sue me, an insignificant blogger. At worst, I would be financially ruined and forced to spend whatever’s left of my working life cleaning toilets. The management of SPH would have had to explain in open court how they went from printing money because they controlled virtually all the advertising space in the country to needing government welfare in a country that prides itself in having no welfare.

My perverse desire to be sued by SPH for pointing out the obvious was further enforced by the news that the police had been called in to investigate a scandal where SPH had inflated its circulation figures. In the article, the former CEO, Mr. Ng Yat Chung is quoted to have said, “I note with regret and disappointment that certain individuals in the SPH Media circulation department appeared to have misconducted themselves in relation to circulation numbers during the period of review by the (audit and risk committee).” The extract can be found at:

https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/companies-markets/sph-media-files-police-report-following-investigation-overstated-circulation

 

Given that Mr. Ng is a former artillery man, I guess should be kinder to him. However, while he may have come from the same army formation as me, Mr. Ng has had a habit of demonstrating the reasons why there’s been a sense of dissatisfaction with what one can call the “Singapore Elite.”

The background is simple. Guys like Mr. Ng seem to get parachuted into the type of jobs earning the type of pay that most of us can only dream of. We are told that this needs to happen because guys like Mr. Ng are the best and brightest that Singapore has to offer. If you look at Mr. Ng’s qualifications, they are impeccable. The argument is that people like him are so intelligent that they need to run all sorts of places for the benefit of the nation. It’s been sold that our elite are so elite that they’ll automatically turn everything they touch into gold.

It’s this line of thought that got Mr. Ng his job at NOL despite no proven record of having boarded a ship. When he later became CEO of SPH, he had no record of ever having reported on a story or sold a page of advertisement. Yet, somehow the boards of those companies believed that he had the magical talent to turn things around. When you live in the real world, you’ll realise that the mess at both NOL and SPH were to be expected.

This is not to say that outsiders to an industry can’t run particular businesses. However, the outsider needs to invest considerable time in learning how the industry that he or she has been entrusted to run before they are start doing anything. In such situations, the insiders usually retain a lot of power but at the same time, the person who remains responsible for everything is the guy in the leadership position.

Ironically, the organization that seems to understand this best is the army. If you look at armies around the world, you will notice that officers, particularly junior officers are paired with non-commissioned officers (NCO) who are vastly more experienced. The young officer understands that he needs the NCO to get things done while the NCO knows he depends on the officer for guidance on the mission. A relationship of mutual respect has to develop. I remember asking a former US Army Sergeant-Major who one deals with a superior who could be your son. His reply was “The NCO has a duty to train the young officer to be the best officer possible.”

This clearly didn’t happen at both SPH and NOL. Take one of Mr. Ng’s first decisions at SPH as an example. Within a month of becoming CEO, Mr. Ng conducted a mass retrenchment exercise. Sure, the company’s revenue was falling at the time and he must have assumed that cutting people would have saved cost. Unfortunately, the people he culled were the people who create the product that the business was selling. As such, the media business became weaker and the management was too busy defending a monopoly position that was becoming increasingly irrelevant.

While incompetence is not good, the refusal to acknowledge mistakes was worse. The public may have forgiven the screw ups if Mr. Ng had been the military officer he’s supposed to be and lead from the front. However, in ever instance, Mr. Ng has behaved more like a bullying-bureaucrat hiding behind his desk. Think of his infamous “umbrage” moment when he tore into a reporter for doing her job and asking him a question he had to know was going to be asked.

Now that there’s a scandal, it was someone else’s fault. Sure, nobody expects the CEO of a company that was the size of SPH to know minute detail of daily operations. However, what expects of a CEO is accountability. A boss is paid more than the employees for a particular reason. He or she has far greater responsibilities. Sure, bosses take credit when things go right even if it’s obviously not all their work. At the same time, bosses also get the blame when things go wrong, even if its not their fault.  

That’s clearly not the case that’s happening here. Mr. Ng is now scrambling to distance himself from the things that went wrong during his tenure as CEO. Here lies the problem. Mr. Ng has shown that he’s more than happy to take the perks of top jobs but not the responsibilities that come with it and the only person who seems to think this is OK, is the Artful Arse-licker, who has a talent for thinking of justifying the unjustifiable.

https://www.critical.sg/p/has-ng-yat-chung-failed-as-a-ceo

He is unfortunately for him; a symbol of what people find wrong with our elite. We don’t expect people to make perfect decisions but we do expect leaders to take responsibility. BY refusing to take a shred of responsibility for the failures under his tenure as CEO, Mr. Ng has also made us grateful that we’ve never had to fight a war with him in charge. It says a lot about his character and we cannot expect our elite to make things work if all their interested in is getting the perks of the job without the responsibilities.

As stated, the beginning, Mr. Ng and his management team are welcome to take me to court if they believe if pointing that they did not preside over what can only be called failure of management.

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother;” – Henry V, by William Shakespeare

 I recently caught up with a girl I used to hang out with around a decade ago. One of the nicest things about my relationship with this girl was the fact that she was a single mother of two lovely kids who despite the mother’s bitterness to the world (she had been going through a tough battle with her ex-husband for child support) were somehow loving and innocent. I was particularly fond of her younger boy and one of the saddest things about not having this girl in my life was not having the boy around.

Although the mother and I didn’t exactly have the easiest of relationships, I kept my heart open to her because I figured that anyone who managed to produce nice kids had to have something going for her. So, when we managed to bump into each other in cyberspace, a virtual meeting ended up becoming a real meeting. It goes to say that I did ask about her boy and then she said that he had gotten out of national service. At that point, things turned a little awkward because I think my disappointment must have showed.

I mean, I wasn’t a fan of national service. I guess you could say that had I not had to spend two and a half years in the army, I would not have. However, when I look back at the time, I spent int the army, I would argue that it was probably one of my most important formative experiences. School and University in England were fun and very special experiences which I got back in touch with in my most recent trip to the UK.

The army, was, however, the most important formative experience in that it was the first time I really met people who were different from me. It was the place where I had to learn that life wasn’t so much about what you know but about how you use it and the reality of life is that its not who or what you know but how you use it.

By far and away the most important thing that I got out of the army were some of the best friends that I could ever had. These are the guys who were there for me in some pretty messed up times and because of that, we became what William Shakespeare’s Henry V calls the “Band of Brothers.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-yZNMWFqvM

 

 

 

It’s hard to explain the bonds of friendship to anyone who hasn’t had the experience that the military provides. Its like this, you know who your true friends are when the chips are down and unlike say, colleagues that you share an office space, the friendship and bond is not based on self-interest rather than on what’s in it for me.

The concept of “we few; we happy few” wasn’t just a concept for Shakespeare. The concept exist in a universal time line was shown in the 1994 movie Renaissance Man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzIyExlEcyk

 

 

Being part of a band of brothers is something that stays with you. It’s a form of protection to have people who will look out for you when things are down. It’s also a form of growth when you have people who want you to succeed.

Its like this, when I heard that the boy didn’t go through the army, I felt sad for him. Sure, he’s not going to go through some of the awful things I went through in those two and a half years but he’s not going to have those two years to develop the type of friendships that I managed to. These were the friendships that made my life so much richer.

The Problem is not Who Gets the Job – The Problem is the Job

 The big news in Singapore is that our Senior Minister, Mr. Tharman Shanmugaratnam (“Mr. Tharman”) has resigned from the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) and the Cabinet in order to run for President. Given that Mr. Tharman has been one of the most prominent members of the government, it seems all but assured that he will be Singapore’s next president.

In a way, you could say this is a career highlight for a man who was once a student activist. Mr. Tharman is what you call that most unusual of Singaporean politicians – he’s a technocrat who has is in touch with the ground. Of all the Ministers produced in Singapore, he alone has been recognized beyond the shores of Singapore, having been appointed Chairman of the IMF’s International Monetary and Financial Committee, Chair of the G20s Eminent Persons Group on Global Financial Governance and Chair of the Group of Thirty. Yet, at the same time, Mr. Tharman has consistently been one of the most popular politicians in Singapore.

Mr. Tharman is such a star that, he’s actually had to go out of his way to say that having a contest for this upcoming presidential election is important to him:

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/tharman-hopes-singapore-presidential-election-will-be-contested-says-its-important-him-3554061

 

As if there was a magic political genie, the most recent announcement in the wake of Mr. Tharman’s announcement is the fact there will be another contender, who is Mr. George Goh, an entrepreneur who brought Harvey Norman to Singapore. Mr. Goh is in many ways a compelling candidate with a rags-to-riches story. He’s another gem in Singapore – a genuine private sector entrepreneur. However, nobody doubts that Mr. Goh will, at best pick up the protest votes – if he’s allowed to run.

The problem here is not Mr. Tharman or Mr. Goh. Both have compelling stories that make them good representatives of the nation. While Mr. Tharman is undoubtedly the better known of the pair, both have carried themselves with a certain amount of gravitas that befits a head of state.

The real issue here is the presidency. Ever since we broke away from colonial rule, it’s been very clear that the role of Head of State has been largely ceremonial, like that of the British Monarch. However, while the role has been largely ceremonial, it’s been a political football to be kicked around at the whims of the government. In his biography, Lee Kuan Yew made it very clear that he needed a Malay to be head of state because he needed to show the Federal Government in Kuala Lumpur that a Malay could rise to the top in Singapore. So, Yusof Ishak became our first head of state. For a while, this was the unspoken rule where ethnic minorities became president, whilst the Chinese majority ran the government.

Suddenly this changed in 1993, when Ong Teng Cheong became Singapore’s elected president. The rules changed. The presidency was no longer about being a symbol of racial harmony but about looking after this thing called the “reserves.” The president is in theory the only office elected by every Singaporean (you vote for the individual not a party) and is in theory an impartial voice that is above the political fray (in theory the president MUST NOT be a member of any political party). Sure, the president is still pretty much like the British monarch – only able to act “upon the advice of the Prime Minister,” which in layman speak is “will do as I’m told,” but unlike the British Monarch, the Singapore’s President has in theory the ability to say no, especially if he or she thinks the government is going to steal from the proverbial cookie jar.

However, whilst the theory is that the president has a separate democratic mandate in order to be an independent voice, the practice has been rather different. Of the four “elected” presidents that we’ve had, only two have actually faced a contest of sorts. Ong Teng Cheong ran against Chua Kim Yeow. Mr. Chua’s entire campaign was “vote for Mr. Ong, he’s much better than me,” and he still got 30 percent of the vote. There could not be a clearer message to the government that “the people” expected to use their mandate and were not going to give the government’s boy a free ride, even if the other guy was begging them to do so.

The only other president who faced a contest was Tony Tan, who despite a track record of government service and having the full weight of the government machinery behind him, only got in with 0.34 percent of the vote.

When came to the presidents of ethnic minority backgrounds, the government went out of its way, to borrow a phrase from our Prime Minister, “fix” the contest and both were selected. This was painfully obvious in the case of Madam Halimah. First, they conveniently changed the constitution to state that only a Malay could be president. Then a whole group of potential candidates were disqualified for not being Malay. Then, when it came out that Madam Halimah was actually an “Indian Muslim,” you had the then Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office, Mr. Chan Chun Sing proudly displaying a lack of cultural understanding, declaring “An Indian Muslim is a Malay.”

Both Mr. Tharman and Mr. Goh would do well to study the fate of our presidents. Yusof Ishak and Benjamin Shears had the good fortune to die in office and only Wee Kim Wee managed to retire was from office with dignity and died at a ripe old age.

Anyone who had any form of ground support was effectively neutered. Case in point is Devan Nair, who was a prominent trade unionist. The office took him away from his people in the unions and when he was humiliated for having a sip too much, nobody was there for him. Ong Teng Cheong was a successful Deputy Prime Minister who spearheaded the creation of our MRT. He had the tenacity to do the job as described in the constitution and to make matters worse, he mentioned that there were teething problems. His reward was to be told to shut up and when he died, there was no state funeral for a former head of state.

The other Deputy Prime Minister to take the job was Tony Tan and had democratic legitimacy was effectively a silent president who was never really seen in public except for a trip to the UK where he and his wife looked like miniatures next to the then Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

The two most recent presidents from the ethnic minority communities, namely SR Nathan and Halimah Yacob have effectively towed the party line. In a way. Mr. Nathan is the luckier of the two. His career was in the civil service and had a track record of being loyal to the government. Whilst he was often lambasted by the online crowd, he wasn’t a threat and he didn’t come from a background of having “ground support,’ from any particular group. So, you could say the presidency was a good and lucrative retirement for him.

Madam Halimah on the other hand is from the trade union movement. She was, prior to her climb up the ladder of politics, he respected enough figure. She is, unfortunately now a butt of jokes on the internet about whether an Indian Muslim is a Malay.

Both Mr. Tharman and Mr. Goh will not be able to do much and in the case of Mr. Tharman he needs to study what has happened to people in the post. He has ground support. Polls have shown that people want him as Prime Minister, despite the constant reminders that Singapore is not ready for a Prime Minister from an ethnic minority. Mr. Tharman needs to tread very carefully as president. He will not be allowed to be independent even though the public expect him to be so. He needs to retain support from his people on the ground to get elected but at the same time he needs to assure the government of the day that he is no threat to them. Instead of being in a politically neutral office, Mr. Tharman may find that the presidency to be the most difficult political balancing act of his stellar career.

The Things that You Shouldn’t Outsource

 

This weekend, I met an American who had volunteered to send his son to do national service. He was proud of the fact that his son was posted to be a medic and he was also glad that his son, who had been to international schools finally got the chance to make Singaporean friends.

He had, however, one complaint, which was the fact that from what he saw, basic military training (BMT) was “soft.” He told me that when he went for the initial parent’s visiting at Pulau Tekong, he saw an army of Bangladeshi workers raking the leaves.

While I generally try to avoid getting into the “It was tougher” in my day line when it comes to national service, I did tell him that there was a time when raking leaves was considered “rest” for soldier in BMT. His immediate reaction was “Yes, if those boys raked the leaves, they will look at Bangladeshi workers in a different way.”

OK, I get that the Singapore of today is very different from the Singapore of the 60s and the nature of warfare has also changed. Technology has seen to it that you can get the firepower at the push of a button that once required several men. I am reminded of the time I was invited by the then Chief of Artillery to “review” the Primus Gun in 2003 because he felt that it was worth getting the perspective of someone trained on the old Field Howitzers. My first question to the young commander was “What’s your gun drill like?” He stared at me blankly and then the S3 had to sheepishly say, “Our gun drill is called push button.”

So, like it or not, this is the way things heading. With our small population and lack of strategic space, our military needs to have the best technology available if it is to have an edge against any potential adversary. When my batch got the FH2000 in 1998, it was considered the state of the art. I take my alma matter, the artillery as an example. In 1998 my batch were told that we had a wonderful gun called the FH2000, which required an eight-man crew and could send rounds up to 40km away. This was progress because we had eight instead of 12-men on a crew and we did considerably less hammering of things. However, in 2003, Primus came along and artillery was no longer about sitting there and firing rounds. It was about mobility. Then in 2011, we became one of five US allies that got to use HIMARS, where a single HIMARS unit could do as much damage as an entire six-gun battery under the old system.

Technology in the military like elsewhere is supposed to give you more bang for your buck. Having said that, there are something that shouldn’t change. Soldiers, for example, need to be physically more resilient than your average civilian even if the technology the soldiers of today allows them to do more damage with a single shot than their predecessors could.

What is true of a professional army should actually be more so on a conscript army like what we have in Singapore. For your average Singaporean, national service is often the first “away from home” experience that our young men have and it’s supposed to be the place where you get some of the harsh realities of life kicked into you. It is, for example, the place where you actually discover that Singapore is much larger than the small magic circle your junior college would have let you believe.

However, in 2011, we realized that this was increasingly untrue. Someone caught a young recruit walking to camp with his maid:

 

This caused something of an uproar and the Ministry of Defense had to come out and say that it had counselled the young man. However, whilst many old folks like me had lots of grumbles about, there were those who thought differently and actually didn’t see what the issue was. I’ve even found a note written in 2017 telling us not to be mean to our boys in green:

https://pride.kindness.sg/dear-singapore-stop-taking-army-boys-granted/

Whilst I do believe soldiers should be respected for the work they do; I think the writer is missing the point. National Service is the first time that many of us actually thinks of us. The boys from well to do families who went to top schools suddenly experience what its like for the wider world to think of them as nothing but another nuisance. It’s in that moment where they have to bond with the boys from less well of families and be actual humans rather than part of the magic circle that they were told was their birthright.

Well, that’s clearly not happening if you have recruits getting their maids to carry their rucksacks or Bangladeshi workers doing area cleaning. When you allow this to happen in national service, you actually normalize the idea that you are too good for certain things and certain entitlement attitudes are normalized.

When I thinks of national service today, I inevitably think of how we treat construction workers. It rained today and as the bus drove past a group of construction workers, I noticed that nobody was going to stop the work. Interestingly enough the SAF actually has protocols to stop training if the rain gets heavy or if there’s a thunderstorm.

 

 So, what’s the message here. Nobody cares about construction workers because they’re usually dark skinned and don’t vote in elections? National Service boys cannot be put into anything that might scratch them because they’re kids of people who vote?

Or is the message simply this. We no longer produce men in Singapore so we cannot expose them to a knock or two. Again, this is not to say that we should return to the “brutal” training of the 1960s. However, we should not go through the other extreme where we panic every time one of our boys gets a nose bleed.

You cannot talk about foreigners “taking” from us until our young men actually go through experiences that give them resilience. Our guys need to be able to take a knock and get right back up and fight. You can’t outsource resilience to Indians and Bangladeshis. The point of National Service is to toughen us up. I think of the current UAE President, Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who felt that his people needed to be toughened up and imposed ju-jitsu in schools and national service.

When you mollycoddle our boys and tell them that they don’t need to carry their bags or clean up after themselves, you turn them into the type of people who are only good for being automatons in cubicle land and in need to be told what to do by people who once experienced what it was like to pick up their own bags.

Bad Neighbours Aren’t Necessarily Bad for You

 I arrived back in Singapore on Wednesday and after a few hours of rest at home, I was off for a networking event at Duane Morris & Selvam LLP, a law firm that my current employer works with. This event that I attended is part of a regular series where they invite the various ambassadors in town to give a talk.

 

 HE Mr. Antti Vänskä, Finland’s Ambassador to Singapore with Mr. Eduardo Romos-Gomez, Partner at Duane Morris

You could say that geopolitical movements and history met at this series. Their last talk was given by the Ukrainian Ambassador, Her Excellency (HE), Ms. Kateryna Zelenko on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and I guess it was only logical that the next talk would be from a country that has a history of dealing with Russian aggression – Finland. The talk was given the outgoing Finnish Ambassador His Excellency Mr. Antti Vänskä.

 

 With HE Ms. Kateryna Zelenko, Ukrainian Ambassador to Singapore at Duane Morris & Selvam LLP

The Ambassador’s talk was informative in that he gave the historical context of Finland’s relationship with Russia and the historical move to join NATO. I will leave the topic of Finland’s accession to NATO to educated people and touch on another topic instead, which is the topic of how we’re shaped by our environment, particularly when we live in rough neighbourhood.

This was a topic that I touched on in my final year dissertation. I talked about how National Service had shaped culture in Singapore. The argument was based on Andy Grove’s line of “Only the Paranoid Survive,” and small nations like Singapore had thrived because they were constantly fearful of being eaten by larger, hostile neighbours. Outside Singapore, the examples were Israel, Taiwan and Finland. While the “hostility” that Israel and Taiwan face is well known, Finland made the list because my best friend at the time was a Finn and we bonded over beer and army stories (Had just finished National Service at the time).

What became very clear about our respective war stories, was the fact that he had significantly more pride in his military service than I did in mine. The only “upmanship” I had over him was the fact that I did two and a half years, whilst he did a year. However, he actually had pride in his uniform and talked about how good it felt to walk around town in that uniform. This wasn’t the Singapore experience. My memories of the military were the joy everyone took on weekends when we could book out in civilian clothing.

I believe that difference between us was history. Finland had been part of Russia. The Soviet Union had actually invaded Finland. The Finns had to fight for statehood and whilst there hadn’t been an invasion of one country by another at that time in Europe, the possibility of Russia getting nasty remained a reality.

By contrast, Malaysia and Indonesia have never invaded us. Sure, the threat may have been real in the 1960s but nobody had walked onto our soil by force. I guess its just a case of preparing for a threat that may happen and a threat that has happened before and could well happen again.

So, the Finns and their governments have grown up with a watchful eye on their Eastern border. The Finnish military is well equipped and even before they joined NATO, the Finish military saw to it that its equipment was interchangeable with NATO’s equipment.

 

 Although Finland has only joined NATO recently, the Ambassador made it clear that Finland did not consider itself “neutral.” Accession to the EU in 1995 is seen in Finland is an alignment with the Western World. The Finns have seen to it that they are active members of international alliances and as his Ukrainian counterpart said in the latter discussion “Neutrality is not a luxury you can afford when Russia is your neighbour.”

What makes the Finnish experience interesting is that the “unfriendly” neighbour has been something of a motivating force to get things done. Like its Nordic relative, Finland is run on Social-Democratic principles. The country has a good working social welfare system but at the same time has a functioning market economy. Taxes are outrageously high by Asian or American standards but people get educated and are healthy.

The Finish economy makes up for a lack of size by being innovative, not just in terms of products produced but also in terms of resilience. Take the most prominent Finnish Company – Nokia. This was a company that was the byword for mobile phones. Then management screwed up when it ignored the threat of the iPhone and that business collapsed. However, whilst it lost its mobile business, Nokia as a company remains very healthy and as moved into other areas like building networks.

While everyone outside Finland knows about Nokia, the Finish economy is larger than that. For a highly taxed economy and a society that believes that the rich should feel the pain when they get caught breaking the law, the country does have an entrepreneurial class operating in highly advanced areas like Solar Foods, a company that literally makes protein from thin air.

Finland is what you’d call the hyper achiever in its corner of Europe. According to Transparency International, Finland is the second least corrupt nation on the planet (ahead of Singapore). It ranks as most digitalised country in Europe, first in terms of sustainable development, business environment and political and civil freedom.

 

 All of this has been achieved with a large and “nasty” neighbour. If you look at the general theme of Finish foreign policy, you’ll see three key themes – namely having tight security and economic alliances with Western countries, keeping the Russians calm and at the same time ensuring they are in a position to fight should they need to. Call it a case of needing to build up strength because the other guy is an 800-pound gorilla or in his case a bear.

To its credit, Finland as used paranoia to its benefit. It’s shown that small countries merely need to be constantly thinking ahead if they need to survive. One doesn’t need a heavy hand. One just needs to have trust between the governed and governing classes. There has to be a common objective to survive and thrive.  

A Bit of Mumbai on the Thames

 I’m now in London and am about to go for some meetings. I am staying with my youngest brother who lives near Canary Wharf, a place which has seen some drastic changes since I lived in the UK.

For many people who have never been to the UK, London is pretty much their experience of the entire country. However, if you’ve lived outside of London, you’ll realise that there is a huge difference between London and the rest of the UK. If you were to look at the UK as a family, London would be the child that got everything, including all the genetic benefits of being born to fairy tale royalty. I can’t think of any other capital city in the G7 that plays such a dominant role when compared to the rest of the country as London. On the good side, people seem better looking and more confident when compared to the rest of the UK. On the downside, London traffic is awful. London accounts for a quarter of the nations GDP and contributes well and above what it takes out from public finances. It’s as if you only notice that the rest of the UK exists when it comes to football season (Manchester and Liverpool).

One of, if not the factor in making London such a dominant force when compared to the rest of the UK, is the fact that its very international. When the rest of the world comes to the UK, the predominantly stay in London and when I lived in the UK, one of the great jokes was the fact that its hard to find an English person on the streets on London.

The British government has literally invited the world’s wealthy to live in London (something which we’re working on emulating in Singapore) and having a sizable real-estate portfolio in London itself is often part of the prerequisites of being wealthy. Its said that this policy has made London the world’s laundromat for money (a point that one makes about Singapore but in less open ways). The two most prominent groups of people parking money in London are the Russians, hence “Londonigrad” and the South Asians (India, Pakistan and Bangladesh), hence “Lodnonistan” or “Londonabad.”

I’ll leave aside the topic of money laundering to intelligent people. What I will say, however, is that one of the great joys of having so many people from elsewhere settle in a single place is the fact that you get good quality cuisine from a variety of nations. Nowhere is this truer when it comes to Indian food. If you like north Indian food, take a trip to the UK and you’ll get probably the best Indian food around.

I was reminded of this when my brother brought me out to Dishoom in Canary Wharf. This is literally the success story of the Russel Peters joke about the ancestral home of every Indian being the UK. Dishoom is a British-Born chain of upmarket Indian restaurants.

The Dishoom restaurants are modeled on the “Irani-Cafes” of Bombay (now known as Mumbai). They even had signs in Hindi and as my brother pointed out, they even adjusted the smells of the place.

 

 Food was pretty good too. Had Naan, dhal and paneer dishes, which were brought to us by a chap from Bangladesh and a lady from New Caledonia, who claimed that she was probably the only person from her country to be in the UK.

 

 Whilst the crowd were mixed, you got a dominant enough number of people of South Asian origins (while its not politically correct to notice the ethnic mix, I grew up doing so when judging restaurants – in a Western country, I will only enter a Chinese restaurant if Chinese people enter – it means the food is reasonably good).

You could call the experience of being in Mumbai or at least the parts of Mumbai that the like Baal Thackery would want the world to see.

How did it happen? I guess you could say the large South Asian diaspora in the UK has ensured good quality food. This is a community that has worked hard and built decent lives for itself (you never see a homeless person of Asian Origin in the UK). Its also a story of how the British as a whole have welcomed South Asian cuisine into and made part of their own. Dishoom is, I believe an example of what you could call what people can build up if they had the chance to.

This little bit of Mumbai on the Thames has proven that you a single city can add to the life and landscape of the place. It’s a reason for places to be open to the outside world. Places that are open inevitably prosper. Places that shut themselves inevitably don’t – anyone want to migrate to Pyongyang?

Local Flavour

 I’ve just left Margate and am staying in London for two days before heading back to Singapore. I thought I’d try and see if I could squeeze out a thought or two about the week I had in a small town in the South of England.

My stay if coloured by the fact that I was primarily there for family that I hadn’t seen in years. As such most of the focus was on that rather than on being in a small town. I grew up in small town England and I wanted to get out. There was not much to do and everything was, well the same. However, now that I am older and lived in both London and Singapore, I’ve started to look at small towns with different lenses. You could say that age makes you appreciate the fact that there is a lot to be said for tranquility and focus. The hustle and bustle that was once considered “excitement” might actually be the thing that makes you less productive.

Another thing about being in a small town is that you learn to appreciate all things local. In a way, we don’t feel it much in Singapore because of our lack of size. Take the S-League as an example. People found it hard to get excited about “local” teams. How much rivalry do you expect between Tampines and Toa Payoh when there’s not much difference between the places. The S-League didn’t excite people but the Malaysia Cup did. Singapore played as a state team within the Malaysian league and it was fun for us to beat the Malaysian teams and it was fun for the Malaysian fans who wanted to see their teams beat Singapore.

Why do we get worked up about our local places? I guess the answer is familiarity and there are things about our local areas that are unique. There are things in our local region that are special to us. In Margate, it was expressed in beers. There were craft beers which were brewed and designed in the region.

 

 The same can be said for our food. I grew up in small town England. There was a Chinese restaurant that served Chinese food. However, this was food from Hong Kong and while it was food, I was accustomed to, it wasn’t “home.” However, when I moved to London and found a place that sold “chicken rice,” I was reminded of home. This was something unique to Singapore and Malaysia.

Think of that most Singaporean of dishes – Laksa. There are a variety of this dishes based on unique localness. The two that come to mind are “Penang” and “Katong” laksa. A list of laksa varieties can be found at:

https://theculturetrip.com/asia/malaysia/articles/the-different-types-of-laksa-you-can-eat-in-malaysia/

So, here’s the thing. When you look at a place, don’t think of it was a single entity. Think of it was a myriad of entities with their own local flavours. If you look at how we are becoming global and looking for global standards in just about everything, we also need to look at the fact that people are also growing more attached to their “local” things. Think of the HSBC Campaign “The World’s Local” Bank, which made them the world’s strongest financial brand:

https://ipa.co.uk/knowledge/case-studies/hsbc-how-a-brand-idea-helped-create-the-world-s-strongest-financial-brand

If you can respect a person at the local level, you can touch their hearts. So, don’t just look at a person by his or her passport. Look at where in that country the person came from and try and reach out on that level.  

The World is a Big Place

 The Stupidity of Linguistic Chauvinism  

I ran into a British Born Chinese girl at an event organized by my sister tonight. The conversation inevitably turned to the topic of growing up between East and West. Both of us admitted to being Chinese illiterate and she talked about how everyone in Hong Kong called her a Banana (Yellow on the outside but white on the inside), which was a moniker my mother takes pride in when describing us.

Where we differed was in attitude. She expressed frustration that people in the Chinese speaking world couldn’t accept that someone who looked Chinese wouldn’t speak Chinese. She said, “Can’t they understand that you could have been adopted by a White Family and therefore wouldn’t know Chinese. I explained to her that while Singapore is predominantly English speaking and I am most comfortable in the English language (and admittedly not comfortable in Chinese), there are situations where I need to use Chinese because the people, I deal with a more likely to reveal things to me in Chinese than they would be in English.

I do get where a lot of Chinese kids who are born in the West come from. Why should they speak Chinese when they identify as American, British or wherever they were born. Chinese was at best a language that they spoke to old folks and only when forced to. As far as these guys are concerned, their entire life is going to be in a Western environment and there’s no earthly reason for them to look at the Chinese language.

The reason why I get this, is simple. I grew up in a similar situation. I only maintained enough Cantonese to order food in the take away (the quality of food is inevitably better when you order in Chinese) but other than that, there was no reason for me to use a Chinese language.

However, I believed and I still believed that the future would inevitably be outside the Western world and so I returned to Singapore. It turned out that my affinity would be the other Asian Giant as well as the Arabian Gulf and so instead of being in more Mandarin speaking situations, I found more value in picking up a phrase or two of Hindi from Bollywood movies as well as the odd Arabic phrase here and there.

Still, I understand that I will be in situations where I have to deal with people that will only respond in Chinese. Like it or not, China is a huge market with an increasingly well to do class of consumers. Many of the “good ones” will learn English but their main language will be Chinese and to reach them, you must have some knowledge of Chinese.

Then, 2016 happened. The Americans voted for Trump and his brand of self-serving nationalism and the British decided that they needed to protect themselves from people who do work and voted to leave the EU. The problem was both sets of nationalists had no plan to get things done. The “strength” they promised turned out to be nothing more than chest thumping. You’re talking about people who love to provoke fights but when the other guy says “boo” they suddenly discover the ability to fly.

The best tell tale sign of how well Brexit has turned out can be seen in this sign in Margate with Nigel Farage, the genius who championed Brexit:

 

 The fact that someone like Farage can sell a bad idea so successfully by appealing to the worst in people, should be a sign that depending on a single world for survival is plain stupid.

This is not to say that the BRICS countries are paradise. They also have plenty of issues. However, the Western world has shown that it can change for the worse and if you don’t fit into the mainstream, you can find yourself in a sticky situation.

I remember being a supermarket promoter at an NTUC and having to communicate in Chinese to the heart landers. It was really tough for me to do it but I kept reminding myself that I better get used to operating in Chinese because Trump was President of the USA and the British had allowed nationalism to triumph over economic pragmatism.

This is not to say that English will be replaced as the world language anytime soon or that the English-speaking world will collapse. However, one should always be prepared to operate in a different environment than the one grew up in. The world is constantly changing and if you are only able to work in one type of environment, you’re begging to made extinct.    

Love Wins

 

My sister got married to her partner yesterday in an outdoor ceremony. It was a beautiful ceremony. Our patchwork family came together from as far as Australia, Singapore and the USA. On her partner’s side, they came as far as Sierra Leone in West Africa. This was an event filled with plenty of laughter and not to mention good food.

I bring up my sister’s wedding because in Singapore finally managed to repeal that most pointless of laws, 377A at the end of 2022. The law, which criminalises sexual relations between men had been something of a controversial topic and it took several years before the Government agreed to remove this colonial era law.

You could, I guess, argue that it was a tough act for the government to carry out. While the LGBTQ community in Singapore had argued that the law was discriminatory, there were also the voices of the shrill “conservatives” who argued that allowing homosexual behaviour would lead to the collapse of society.

I’ve argued that no matter what one thinks of the LGBTQ community, the law was clearly pointless. It didn’t protect anyone except repressed homosexuals who needed the law to protect them from being themselves. I believe a former Chief Justice and two former Attorney-Generals have said as much even if they expressed it in much better terms. So, I am happy that the Singapore Government has finally seen the obvious – that every argument made in favour of keeping the law has been proven to be nonsensical.

However, there was a compromise. In return for lifting 377A, marriage is enshrined in the Singapore constitution as being between a man and a woman. Hence, while the LGBTQ can legally have sex with their chosen partners, their rights to have their relationships protected still does not exist.

Should this matter? The Nordic countries for example, are filled with couples who happily live together and have children but do so without that contract called marriage. Surely our LGBTQ community can do the same.

Ironically, it was Ms. Stephanie Thio of TSMP Law (Ms. Thio is the sister-in-law of Professor Thio Li-Ann, Singapore’s most prominent anti-gay activist) who argued that we need to start thinking of the protections that LGBTQ couples have. As my youngest brother’s girlfriend said, “If anything happens to him, the hospital isn’t going to let me do anything as his girlfriend. It’s a different story if I am his wife.” In a heterosexual relationship, a wife is legally allowed to take care of a husband should anything happen to him and visa-versa. By refusing to grant legal recognition to LGBTQ relationships, you actually deny an individual the right to be cared for by the person who is likely to know them best.

I go back to the example of my sister. When she first came out and told me, I was a little taken back. However, she was still the same person after she told as she was before she told me. Nothing changed because of her admission. She remains the sister I grew up loving.

Once the proverbial cat was out of the bag, she seemed happier. From what little I got to see of her relationships, it seemed that she was happier in her “girl-girl” relationships than in her “boy-girl” relationships. She was initially a bit apprehensive about coming out to my mother but everything turned out cool.

My step-father, who grew up in the 1950s in the USA (not exactly a LGBTQ-Friendly era), said it best at last night’s wedding. In his speech he said, “I didn’t lose a daughter tonight. I gained one.”

I know that the argument is that it’s argued that same-sex relationships are not “normal.” However, what defines normal? My sister’s marriage to another woman involved letting families know. It planning an event and by extension a life together. She wanted everybody to know.

My first marriage, which was a “normal” heterosexual marriage between a man and a woman wasn’t like that. I literally shuddered at the idea of planning a life together and I made it clear that I didn’t want my family to know that I was getting legally bound to her. I acknowledged to her that whilst I would try and make it work with her, I didn’t see my life with her as being filled with happiness.

So, what’s normal here? You could say that my sister’s marriage is not normal because it was with someone with the “wrong” gender. You could say mine was with someone of the “right” gender. However, if you leave that aside, my sister actually got it right. Her marriage made everyone in the family happy because she was happy. As my step-dad said, he gained a daughter and I gained a sister. In my first marriage, I actually risked losing my family. My mother actually made me promise I’d get out of the marriage if I was unhappy and the family celebrated the day, I took out a Protection Order against her and when she actually saw the light and divorced me.

 

We are often obsessed with the wrong things. In marriage we get obsessed with gender, social status and prospects. We don’t think enough about the things that count like love. If there’s anything that made my trip worthwhile is the fact that my sister’s wedding showed me that love wins and I managed to gain an entire family in the process.

What’s A Local?

 Went out to an English Pub yesterday. I grew up in a small English town and the pub was the centre of communal life. You could say the Pub is to an English village what a Kopitiam is to a Housing Estate Singapore. It’s officially a place that serves food and drink but it’s also so much more. The pub is what you could call the heart and soul of communities. People in any given community gather in pubs. Hence when someone talks about “my local,” they mean the “local pub.”

So, given that I am spending the better part of my trip in the UK in a small town called Margate, I thought I would try and get a bit of nostalgia and went found a local English pub called the Whig & Pen.

 

Was a great experience. The place was fairly empty as one expects at two in the afternoon. However, it had the feel of the pubs that I remembered from 23-years ago. There was a variety of beers and I decided to go for a local ale.

 

 Since I was a little peckish, I wanted to grab a small bite, thinking I’d get something like a small pie. Wet outside to look at the menu that was pasted proudly onto the wall.

 

 

Yes, a local English pub in the middle of nowhere was proudly displaying that the food it was serving was Thai. The tourist in me thought “WTF.” I mean, I didn’t fly all the way out to England to have Thai food, which is practically everywhere in Singapore.

However, it did hit me that the pub owner knew what he was doing. There was clearly a demand for Thai food and the customers who were predominantly white Englishmen felt that it was perfectly natural to have Thai food as part of their daily lives.

As much as the tourist in me was disappointed not to get “English Grub” in an “English Pub,” I realised that this was something to be celebrated. Something which was exotic to the community had become part of the community.

There’s nothing wrong with being exotic. I had fun as an ethnic minority for seven years of my life. Everyone knew my name and it did feel good to be easily noticed. When things go right, being exotic makes you stand out.

There is however, a downside to it. When things go wrong, you are an easy scapegoat. Again, I make the point that I am ethnic Chinese and I live in the only country in a region where the ethnic Chinese are the majority. As any Indonesian Chinese will tell you, its pretty darn easy to end up on the wrong end of things when you are “exotic” to the majority.

So, normalisation is actually something to be celebrated. Englishmen having Thai food in a pub or going for a curry after the pub as if it was the most natural thing in the world is in fact a wonderful sign of how things should be.

Food is essential to existence. Cuisine is a vital part of any culture. We end up growing up with certain flavours and smells as part of our identity. I think of one of chefs I used to work with at the bistro. He cooked beautiful French and Italian food. However, when we out at night, it was always for kway teow.

So, if you look at how food plays such a vital role in our emotional identity, sharing our food is like sharing who we are. If anything, food is probably the easiest step in creating cross cultural bonds. Think of it this way. I may be predisposed to hating a certain ethnic and religious group. However, if I taste a dish from that said ethnic and religious group, I may find that I find it delicious. Then you get the idea that anyone who comes up with something this good might not be so bad after all. Then you make the psychological leap of reaching out to people in the group that you were trained to hate from the start.

Race relations in the UK are far from perfect. However, this a country that has welcomed its first Prime Minister from an ethnic minority (though as my Indian friends point out – he is a coconut – brown outside and white inside). Well, I’ve argued that Rishi Sunak is whiter than white and brown man who is acceptable to a white majority. However, it also takes two to tango. The public in the UK had to discover the joys of curry first. Once they discovered the joys of curry, they then decided to make curry their own. Once curry became part of the mainstream, it became easier to accept the people from the curry making community as part of the mainstream.

It starts with sharing a meal. So, as much as the tourist in me was disappointed not to get something typically English in that most English of institutions, I will celebrate the fact that English pubs take pride in serving Thai food.