God the Hobo

 

I’ve just come back from the UK on a business trip. Unlike the trip in June for my sister’s wedding, this trip happened to take place Autumn when temperatures were dropping. The boss, the junior who came along and the chairman who is Australian, ended up shuddering for a good portion of the trip because, well we’re all from places where winter is 16 degrees centigrade and anything below is considered Arctic.

I got lucky in the sense that I discovered “heattech”from Uniqlo, which helped deal with the cold. However, whilst I managed to deal with the cold better than my colleagues, I wasn’t so warm and comfortable that I couldn’t see a group inhabits London – the homeless.

Go to anywhere in London, and you will inevitably find someone asking you for spare change. You will inevitably see a section of any given tube station, which has become a makeshift shelter by someone homeless, who has subsequently put up a sign asking for donations. Take this fellow who had camped outside Tower Hill Tube Station as an example:

 

 I’ve lived in Singapore for nearly two decades now and whilst the prospect of growing old in Singapore are not exactly fun, I’ve somehow managed to take comfort in the fact that the weather remains relatively warm in Singapore and the prospect of freezing on the streets of Singapore don’t exist. However, even in this age of global warming, it still hit the minus levels and I simply cannot imagine how anyone could consider sleeping out in the open.

In a way, living with the homeless was what put me off London and made Singapore so much more appealing. I lived in Soho back then. I was where the “fun” happens to be. The amount of wealth in the area is staggering and as my mother often reminds me, I probably would have been more successful had a I settled in London instead of making my way back to Singapore. I think of people on leftist campuses who would go on the human rights bandwagon the moment they knew I was from Singapore and I’d be thinking, “ya, sure, we can be a***holes for locking up a few middle-class people for minor things but as a society, we’d never allow our young to make homelessness a lifestyle choice.”

As a matter of disclosure, that was the position I took back then, when I lived off Daddy. I’ve been through a few rough patches (Hotel 81 in Geylang was once home) and years in corporate insolvency have shown me the callous way in which Singapore thrives on what can only be politely called slave labour.  What’s more, we’re starting to show very visible signs of the same problem that London has – homeless people or people sleeping out in the rough (which, for the record is not happening because they think its fun).

The man that I am now has a lot more sympathy for the downtrodden than the student that I was once. Back then, I had the luxury of being take care of by Daddy’s money. Today, I look back as someone who has never “taken-off” and emotionally, its easier to accept that people simply don’t make it in life.

However, I still find it hard to accept that anyone would allow themselves to be in a situation where they had to sleep rough in minus temperatures. I can accept that for whatever corporate opportunities I didn’t get or take, I’ve had the good fortune to feel inspired enough to have the mindset to the see the potential in the things that I’ve done. I take the example of being a waiter and managing to find my IIM (Indian Institutes of Management) gig and opened several doors to law firms for the liquidator who employed me for nearly a decade. I don’t take particular pride of being in corporate insolvency but I see it as a means to getting through to places.

Being able to be optimistic even in the direst of circumstances has kept me going. Even as I push 50, I still function with that intrinsic belief that somehow, somewhere something will click.

For the guys living in the tube stations, that’s clearly not the case. Life is merely about making it to the next fix. What hope is there for them?

This is probably the main question that we need to ask as Christmas approaches. If you read the Gospels, you will see that Jesus was effectively the world’s first God of Hobos. There is no record of the man having a job beyond a stint in the family carpentry business, let alone any record of the man owning the cloths on his back.

Whilst Jesus was probably the first God who joined the ranks of the Hobos, his message was inevitably one of joy and optimism, as I was reminded by the Priest conducting third advent mass last Sunday.

 

 Jesus spoke to the downtrodden and told them there was hope for them. He urged his followers to serve them and to find joy in serving the down trodden.

Now, I am of limited intelligence, so I shall not pretend I know how to solve problems. However, I do believe that churches, temples, mosque and all forms of religious organisations have a role to play in helping the homeless get onto their feet. They should do as Jesus told them to do (Jesus’s message is applicable to everyone – Buddhist should take note that the Dalai Lama has said he is a Boddhisatva and Muslims revere Jesus as a Prophet of Islam). Go out – serve the downtrodden, give them a reason to live and take joy in doing so. Its only when these things happen will we start to resemble a society which can itself vaguely Godly.