Ending and Rebirth

 

The last few years of 2023 are ticking away and I’m due to work in the Bistrot on Telok Kurau, so I thought I would try and bash out a few thoughts of summarize the year that is going by and to express my hopes for the year to come.

In a way, 2023 was a brutal year. Thanks to the brutal attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 and the subsequently even more brutal Israeli reprisals on the Gaza strip, much of the world’s attention is focused on the brutality of that particular conflict and other conflicts that may arise. The chaos in the Middle East and Russia-Ukraine looks set to get worse by the fact that that 2024 is an election year in the USA and the world’s most powerful office is set to be a rematch of 2020, a contest between an elderly establishment candidate perpetuating the worst sins of the establishment onto the world and an unstable lunatic whose sole focus is to use the power of the office to cover his own personal weaknesses.

Since I joined the insolvency business, the turmoil on the global stage looks like a good Christmas present. Businesses around the globe are likely to be affected by the turmoil and many are likely to go under, which is good for insolvency practitioners around the world. Even the firm I’ve worked at for the last decade, which is a small player in the local Singapore market, has found its wings. In the past year, we’ve managed to set up our shop in Dubai and by the end of 2024, we are expecting to have a base in London.

So, whilst I have no great love for the industry that I am in, I’ve been able to enjoy certain benefits of the way the industry has moved. After many years of not traveling, I got to enjoy a trip to Jakarta and London for business purposes. I met people outside of Singapore and that can only help to keep my horizons normal.

On the personal front, Kiddo brought me to Hai Phong for a week and I believe this could be somewhere I may want to move to as I age. It’s not just the cheaper cost that make Vietnam attractive but the fact that there’s a sense of dynamism that is so sorely lacking in more developed places. Its one of those places where the poor don’t sit and beg or ask the government for handouts. They turn their little street holes into thriving enterprises.

The second personal trip was to head to back to the UK after 23-years for my sister’s wedding. I’m so happy I actually got to see the UK after so many years away and having my sister’s friends tell me “You were an important part of our childhood – what happened to you?” I am delighted that Tara has met someone she wants to spend the rest of her life with and I’m glad I had the chance to not only meet the new family but connect to relatives I haven’t seen for ages, specifically my stepdad, Lee who is 91, my stepsister Carol and her husband Sean as well as my Aunty Frieda and Uncle Adrian.

While my sister got married, I will officially be divorced next year. After 12-years together, Huong, the amazingly gorgeous Vietnamese woman I had the privilege of calling my wife, and I will go our separate ways. Her ambitions have taken her to the USA and I can no longer support her as her husband. As such, we dissolve our “life partnership” and move on. She will always have a special place in my heart and I like to think the same is true for her too and given that we’ve come back to each other so often, who knows where fate will take us.

Kiddo asked the simple question – “Will you still be my dad?” I’ve told her that the answer is always yes, but she’s now an adult and she has to find her own way and build her own life and I will be there when she needs me.

During the course of our separation, I’ve been asked if I would change anything. The answer remains no. Even if you were to take me back to the moment, I decided to marry her with everything I know now, I will always agree to get married. Our life together, good and bad made me a stronger person and my life would be poorer without those moments we had.

Another person who deserves mention is my intern, Mr. Jeff Yeoh, who came to work for us in July. At the age of 27, he told me he saw me as a “father-figure,” and I’ve found myself taking the trust he placed in me seriously. Its like this, when you have a little girl, the instincts are to try and protect. When you have someone of the same gender looking up to you, you actually need to show him or her what the future can be like. So, as I push 50 this year, I got to get it through his head that the future can be great if he steps out of his comfort zone and takes on the world on his terms.

The other person who had made life so much richer this year, is Ms. Genia Wee, my collaborator in the Chubby Tigers project. Genia is a tough and lovable cookie, who has a way of turning every meal you have with her into a joyful experience. She’s what Singapore needs – someone who is willing to discover the nooks and crannies of this little Island I have called home for the last two decades.

As always, I can only hope that 2024 will provide more adventures and opportunities to discover the world. I’m going to be 50 and its time I start discovering the unknown or the things that I never knew about the known world.  

“I Used that to My Advantage – Them Being Big and Me Being Who I am” – Mike Tyson

 

One of my favourite characters in my life is a girl called Zen, or Fleshball. Zen was, for a long time, Singapore’s proudest prostitute. She survived on the streets on Geylang and wasn’t shy about out it. This was particularly true when it came to former cops. Most girls who work in the business are weary of being spotted by ex-cops. Zen, would approach them and exclaim, “you look familiar – I know you.”

One of the best things about Zen is that God looks aren’t her strong point. At one stage, she was so fat that she waddled instead of walked. There’s something almost baby like about her. Yet, despite that, she remains super confident than better educated, better looking professional middle class women have been intimidated by her. My ex-girlfriend, who happened to be from Raffles Girls School (RGS), NUS School of Architecture and was the former head of marketing for Haymarket Publications in Beijing and Shanghai, actually got visibly jealous of her or as Zen said “Slimmer than me – but still jealous of me – never mind, I’ll teach her how to use make up.”  

I bring up the topic of Zen because of all the people I know, she’s the one person who remains a middle finger to the established order and established thinking, which is precisely what Singapore needs. I’ve argued that whilst Singapore is on paper, ticking along nicely, cracks are starting to appear in the system. Our government, which ranks as one of the least corrupt in the world, has seen a corruption scandal at ministerial level, something which no one would ever have imagined. You got to ask yourself – “what’s going on?”

The answer is simple – we grew so addicted to the playbook of the 1960s that we forgot that the world was actually changing and old paradigms are becoming less relevant. In a twist to “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” story, nobody is allowed to point out that the magnificent gowns are less so and that the emperor is going to be stark raving nude.

Take our great “tiger” economy. We are officially one of four nations that went from swamp to wealth in a generation. In the case of Singapore, the government argued that this was only possible because the government controlled everything. Instead of a public and private sector, Singapore has a government owned and government-controlled sector.

Anyone else in between the government owned and government controlled got crushed as being a nuisance. I think of our media scene, where SPH, the government-controlled owner of the print and MediaCorp, the government-owned, owner of the broadcast could actually get the government to remonopolise the media based on the argument that Singapore was “Too small for competition.” They got so cozy that they’d spend their time arguing over whether readership was better than viewership without realizing that the paying audiences were losing interest in both and advertisers noticed.

So, instead of making the monopoly players wake up to reality and face competition from smaller online players giving the market what it wanted, our pro-business government decided to bailout the big players and cripple the smaller players with laws like POFMA.

The business scene has followed the maxim of “God on the side of Big Battalions.” Instead of ensuring underdogs don’t get crushed, the system actively goes out of its way to make life difficult for anyone with the audacity to challenge the established players. Hence, super scale scholars get more. People like Zen are not expected to survive until election time. The fact that someone like Zen has the audacity to survive is an act of giving the middle finger to a system that sees underdogs as an inconvenience.

So, what can people who are not part of the established order do to survive? The standard answer is that you lie down and be grateful for the crumbs. But what happens to when you the establishment does not want to give you crumbs?

Again, I don’t have any real answers. However, I got interested in a YouTube video when someone made the point to Mike Tyson, former world heavyweight champion, who he beat bigger men. His point was that he used the fact that he wasn’t the bigger guy to his advantage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmJJK7Ac4Fk

 

 Think about it, Mr. Tyson wasn’t the biggest guy in the ring but he was the most devastating. He terrified larger men and the fights were often over before they started. How did he do it?

There’s something that our entrepreneurs need to take note of in the domestic market. Big players can be beaten and quite often, their biggest strength is their biggest weakness (the fact that they are the big player). Look at the media industry as an example. Both SPH and MediaCorp had the backing of the government and resources. Yet, this became a handicap as viewers and readers wanted something that didn’t seem like a government mouth rag. Like Mr. Tyson, the online media in Singapore has used the fact that its not big to its advantage. Entrepreneurs and small business owners should take note.

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.

A Tale of Two Pageants

 

This has been a funny year. I’ve known two women who got involved in Beauty Pageants. Like all good heterosexual men, I do like looking at good looking women and as a matter of disclosure, one of the women mentioned is my wife of 12-years and the other is a friend whom I’ve grown to care for.

The point of the pageants is, however, larger than the contestants themselves. There are sociological issues that become quite clear. Firstly, one of the best things about the two pageants is the fact that they were aimed at contestants over 35. Like it not, we are living in an aging society, where people are simply not rushing out to reproduce.

The main reason is simple – women have become educated to the point where they realise they have more value than just making babies. Hence, you have a growing number of women who prefer to be single and couples who choose not to have kids (or as my mother says “why have kids if you can’t bring them up in a world better than the one you were brought up in). End result – societies are becoming older and its good that we celebrate female beauty that goes beyond the obvious physical signs of fertility (big boobs, wide hips etc) and look at things like poise and elegance. Celebrating the beauty of older women is good for society. Teaching men to look for long term beauty for example, makes them understand that the “hot bods” they see on the beaches may not necessarily be the women they want to wake up next to in their later years.

 https://www.oprahdaily.com/beauty/a30980789/beauty-brands-women-over-50/

The second point is centred around the difference in approaches to the competition. The Vietnamese girl entered the competition with the determination to not only win but to use the competition to do things on a global stage. The Vietnamese girl not only went onto win the Singapore leg of the competition but got herself crowned as the global champion for that particular competition. To her, this competition was “important” not just for her but everyone around her.

 

 Determination and doing what it takes gets you places

The local girl, by contrast, didn’t treat the competition as a priority. When you arranged hairdressers for her, she was too busy. When you tried to get her input on things, she asked you to do for her, she threw a tantrum for disturbing her busy schedule. She did get placed in a talent segment but didn’t make it close to championship stage.

It’s not that the local girl is unattractive. She looked elegant and poised in the relevant promotional materials and there’s no reason why she could not have given the others a run for their money. However, that was not her goal and it showed. It was a distraction from her daily life.

If you look at it from a “lifestyle” choice perspective, there is no right or wrong. However, if you look at it from a “get things done” perspective, there’s a powerful point to be made. We are underestimating people from other parts of Asia because we think we are educated whereas they are hungry and willing to turn our trash in to their gold.

This is not to say that our people lack drive. Many of us work insane hours and are proud of pat ourselves on the back on the number of things we do in the office. I think of my intern who proudly talks about being a “Por Lampa” (Hokkien slang that roughly translates into ball carrier) person. Everyone I know who works with Singaporeans, says they we’re a hardworking bunch.

However, whilst we may be hardworking in functional in our own environment, we tend not to look at possibilities outside what we know and if anything, we psychologically collapse when things go off tangent. Even our ministers cannot function without a script. I’ll always remember watching Dr. Lee Boon Yang and Carl Bildt give speeches. Even the Ministry people had to admit that the Swedish minister outclassed ours in his delivery.

Look at the pageant as an example. Our local girls avoid pageants because they don’t want to get dissed online. The older ladies are usually in it for the fun than for anything else (I counted three familiar faces between pageants) and don’t really think of what they can milk from it.

The girls from elsewhere see things differently. The pageant is a stepping stone into something bigger. It’s their chance to make it big and so they go all out. In the first pageant won by the Vietnamese girl, it was very noticeable that the only other person offering competition was also Vietnamese. In the popularity segment, the two Vietnamese girls ran away with it.

So, yes, Singaporeans are smart and educated. However, we need to adapt our mindsets to the modern world. Opportunities that may not be in the conventional career path can opportunities for us. Staying with the familiar is not necessarily the way to go in a world where the familiar is closing in on us. Our foreign competition understands notions of “stayer” and “quitter” are outdated and the only thing that matters is what works best for you and the your family.

We Met as Strangers and Parted as Friends.

 

I come from a patchwork family. My mother has been married three times and has had a kid from each husband. My dad is also on his third marriage and a kid from two of his three marriages. Thus, whilst I have three siblings, we only have one parent in common. In the ever-tricky situations on race, I am officially the only “pure breed,” since both my parents are Chinese (mum and dad’s subsequent spouses are Caucasian).

If you were to look at my family, through the eyes of “traditional” values, you could say that we were the text-book case for social welfare and mental abuse. However, as my sister once put it, “We wouldn’t have our patchwork family any other way.” Whilst the family is made up of people of different ethnicities, religions, and cultures, we are actually similar in the things that matter. We have love for each other. I’m significantly older than my siblings. Since I moved back to Singapore rather than stay in the UK or USA, my experiences are totally different from theirs. Yet, we love each other deeply and the highlight of my most recent trip to the UK was having dinner with my brother and sister from my mum’s side:

 

 With Tara, Christopher and Urte (my brother’s girlfriend) at the German Gymnasium Café in Kings Cross London.

I bring up the experiences of my own family because I believe we live in a world where people are encouraged to be scared of people who are not like them. The power of race and religion to divide humanity and go against God are at strong points. Impotent charlatans who couldn’t get laid in a whorehouse are successfully rebranding themselves as “strong-studs” by attacking weak and vulnerable people who happen to be a shade darker than most.

It isn’t just about race and religion. Social class has also played a divisive part. Let’s not forget that Donald Trump successfully reminded white coal miners in Louisiana that they were being screwed by white financiers in New York.

So, you now have a situation where societies are now breaking themselves down into micro-groups based on ever possible division you could think of. People only want to huddle with people exactly like them.

Now, this is perfectly understandable if you’re a migrant in a new country where you don’t speak the language or know anyone. Human nature is such that we’ll drift to the people who are most like us to help us settle in a place. If you take me as an example, I grew up in England and in boarding school. Most of my friends were native Anglo-Saxons. However, if you ask me where I like hanging out best in the UK, the answer is going to be Chinatown in London. I am or was (the main language has moved from Cantonese to Mandarin) most familiar with the sights and sounds of the place.

However, whilst hanging out with your own kind is very natural when you are starting out, there comes a time when you need to break away from your own in order to grow. It is as simple as this – you are not going to get any form of change unless you face the need for it and the most painless form of change comes when you meet people who have different experiences from you.

Let’s look at the Singapore economy as an example. Sure, Singapore has been one of the great economic stories of the past 50-years. There’s plenty of money floating around Singapore. However, the uncomfortable fact remains this, the number of Singaporean businesses that have made great things beyond the local market and the number of Singaporeans in any given field who have achieved anything beyond the shores of Singapore can be counted on with one hand.

Lee Kuan Yew would have argued that this is because we are small. However, small is not an excuse, especially in this day and age of instant communications. The one common factor is this – our companies are increasingly run by the same people – ie people who went to the same school, junior college, army unit and university. Their career paths look ever so similar and so nothing changes. The men (they usually are) will then marry girls who are exactly like them and instead of making children the biological way, they will tailor make them to be exactly like them.

However, as European royal families discovered, the problem with inbreeding is that it eventually leads to deformities both mental and physical. The gene pool gets weaker and the species becomes prone to all sorts of nasty things.

I used to hang out with my own kind, namely PR professionals. Then, when I changed fields, I started hanging out with insolvency lawyers (which is where most of the work for liquidators comes from). Now, nothing wrong with that in that you want to know what’s going on in an industry and you do want to stay up to date with the movements in your field.

However, there’s one slight problem with that. If you only hang out with your own kind, you start getting this delusion that your own industry is the centre of the world and you fail to realise that your value is not being at the centre of the industry but how the industry benefits everyone else.

I discovered this last night when I went for a wine tasting event, that I’ve been attending for some time. I used to have a large group but that got smaller as people found other things to do. Then, last night an expected number showed up. The group was professionally diverse. I had my accountant and a professional nude model. We were joined by a businessman, a surgeon and a Bollywood Scriptwriter. We were later joined by an aspiring liquidator (a former junior colleague), a multilingual American arbitrator and an Italian data architect as well as an aspiring beauty queen and an ecommerce entrepreneur (my Chubbytiger partner).

 

 The businessman and the script writer admire the wine – Taken at Providore OUE

What made the event successful was that people had things to talk about other than their usual mundane business life. We were united by an appreciation of good wine (the surgeon recommended a great bottle) but we approached things from different angles.

This was a moment where people could help each other solidify ideas and somehow ideas could flow easily.

So, yes, by all means, we should be with our own kind. However, its important to move away from our own kind if we want to achieve any form of growth. Group think and inbreeding only make you weaker and seeking out differences and challenge are actually good for you.   

Should We Reward the Right Thing

 

I was at an all-day seminar oragnised by the International Fraud Group (IFG), yesterday. There were various discussions related to the issue of combating fraud and the one discussion that caught my attention was a discussion on whether countries should change their legislation to reward whistleblowers.

 

 As with most things, the biggest and most interesting cases of rewarding whistleblowers comes from the USA, where the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) paid a whistleblower a sum of US$279 million in May 2023.

https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-89

The main thrust of the SEC’s argument was that it made the payout because it wants to encourage whistleblowing. Whilst this was an amazing story, an American lawyer on the panel rightly pointed out that the system was not perfect.

Let’s face it, the topic of paying people for doing anything other than a nine-to-six job is something that many people struggle with. Call it the mentality of “I work so many hours a day for x number of dollars and so and so just makes one report and gets so much more.”

Whistleblowing is a particularly tricky topic in that it is more often than not an act that requires you to go against an organization or individual who has power over you. In school boy terms, you’re literally being a “grass” or a “snake,” to the hand that feeds and more often than not, to the “team” that you’ve grown up with. There is, in a lot of human societies thrive on concepts of “loyalty” to authority. That, as an Estonian member of the audience, pointed out, can be tricky, when you come from a society where people are terrified of “telling-on” people or oragnisations to the government. Post-Soviet societies are particularly terrified of this because they are trying to get out of a culture where people were terrified into “telling-on” their neighbours. A German speaking member of the panel made the point that the term “whistleblowing” in German is “informant” which has negative connotations.

Let’s face it, whistleblowing is not something that comes naturally and there are justified concerns that people may become “whistleblowers’ to get “revenge” on employers and that evidence provided by “whistleblowers” may be tainted if there’s a “reward” motive.

I get these points. Well intentioned systems can be abused. The welfare system in many Western countries is an example. The intention to ensure people don’t starve when they’re out of a job is a noble intention. However, the system has in plenty of cases “disincentivized” work. Rewarding whistleblowing can lead to abuse. So, the question is, why should you encourage people to be “disloyal.”

However, the case of not wanting to “reward” people for being “disloyal” has one fatal flaw, which is, it works on the assumption that people in authority are by default the good guys. One of the panelists in yesterday’s discussion is Ms. Ruth Dearnley, who is the CEO of STOP THE TRAFFIK Group, a charity dedicated to combating human trafficking. Her argument was simple – without whistleblowing she wouldn’t be able to do what she does. In Ms. Dearnly’s is in the business of helping victims of crime and relieving a menace.

To put it simply, those of us who happen to be working professionals living in a place where there is a “rule of law,” sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that everyone is like us. We go to work, which we may not necessarily like, does provide us with a reasonable livelihood. If you’re in a profession like law, accountancy or medicine, there is no need to “tell-on” your boss unless its an extreme “life-threatening” case. Members of any given profession have to comply with rules governing the profession as well as the laws of the land. So, whistleblowing only comes into our daily lives in extreme circumstances. – “Why rock the boat unless its life threatening?”

However, the sad truth is that the majority of the world’s population is not working professional and living in a country where there is rule of law. The fact remains, that in the majority of world, being an “honest” and “law abiding” person is the fastest way to die and easy to be tempted and tricked by anyone offering you better prospects. Go into any given red-light district, and you’ll find a young girl who thought she was going to work in a factory but was forced to get “f***ed” to keep other people rich. Ms. Dearnly had examples of boys who could use a computer and dreamed of working for a big IT company only to find themselves crammed into a cell, forced to run “love-scams.”

Let’s face it, these are stories that most of us know exists but they are usually things that don’t even enter our conscience. Yet, these cases exist. The world actually has people who are forced into situations where they are effectively prisoners of the “bad” people who profit from harming other people.

I believe that right thinking people will want the “bad guys” brought down and every right-thinking person will want “victims” to be rescued so that they can get on with life. However, you are not going to get that scenario unless people who are victims come forward.

Now, if it is challenging to get someone like me to come forward to do the “right-thing,” let us imagine what it is like to get someone who gets beaten up or tortured at the whims of their proverbial bosses. Sure, I may have my disagreements with my boss but I am NEVER in danger of losing my life or having harm done to my family as a result of those disagreements. At the most, I quit or get fired and work in a different industry but I don’t have a reason to move from where I am.

That’s not the case for people who are victims of trafficking, whether they are in sex work or forced labour. How do you get these people to help you out.

Yes, the SEC case is sensational. However, when you discuss the issue of whistleblowing, you are not asking people to try out for the lottery. You are asking them to stop the bad guys. Unfortunately, bad guys have a way of doing bad things to people whom they perceive may be a problem.

You need to tell people that you will stop bad things from happening to them if they do the right thing. They need to be able to “feel secure” if they do the right thing, whether that is to ensure basic protection both financially and physically.

No system is perfect. Abuses can happen. However, if you were to weigh up the cost and reward of incentivizing whistleblowing, its clear that society would be far better off if people felt secure enough to do the right thing.  

Everything has a Place

 

I am currently in London for a conference, which my employer is sponsoring. One of the lucky perks of being on corporate travel, is that my accommodation has been special. I am currently staying in the WarrenHouse Hotel, which is a lovely Victorian Era property which was converted into a boutique hotel. You could say that Warren House is very much part of the England that I would happily move back to at a drop of a hat (which to the relief of an English solicitor I met, I am aware that this is not the only part of England – there’s a part I would rather avoid).

Whilst Warren House isn’t as “grand” as the Westin in Jakarta (where I stayed in an earlier corporate trip), its cozy and everything in well done. It’s the type of place that would be perfect for a wedding venue (not that I am wishing the kid to get married anytime soon). Facilities are decent and, given that I have a foodie website, food is good.

My first meal at the hotel, was a full English breakfast (which consist of eggs, beans, sausage, mushrooms, hash browns and fried bread). I mean, when you’re in England, it would be a sin not to have a “Full English Breakfast.”

Meal was served in an elegant plate. Everything was “just right.” Eggs were poached as per request, mushrooms and bacon were flavourful

This version of an English Breakfast was exquisite and in terms of the quality of food, it beat the full English Breakfast that I had nearly six-months back when I was in Margate for my sister’s wedding. This was my first real English Breakfast in 23-years and it in a “Greasy Spoon,” which was ironically owned by Turks. The food was, well, I guess, the very reason why certain places are known as “Greasy Spoons.”

I’ve actually made a TikTok video on the comparison between Warren House Full English Breakfast and the Greasy Spoon Breakfast:

https://www.tiktok.com/@tang.li0/video/7306660498836147464

 

 Whilst there was no comparison in which breakfast was of a better quality, there was something strangely appealing about the breakfast in the greasy spoon, which the nice hotel didn’t have.

Then, I realized it was the experience. Most of us are going to have the full English breakfast in a greasy spoon. Greasy spoons are places that create memories of a certain community. They are places that have their stories and places where communities come together. If I think about it, the word that I should have used, was refinement. Eating in a hotel was definitely more refined. However, was it necessarily better?

This comparison struck me because I am from Singapore where the world’s highest paid ministers have made comparisons between dishes made in luxury restaurants and in the hawker centre. If I am not wrong, the minister who used this analogy was trying to argue that you had to pay more for the minister because the minister was “better.”

The truth is this, we do may more for certain luxuries because luxuries are made of a certain quality. A Rolls Royce will always be several notches above a Proton Saga. You pay for the experience of being a Rolls.

However, that doesn’t mean the Proton saga is complete rubbish. Like the Greasy Spoon or a hawker centre, it has its place and for certain things its actually better than a Rolls.

So, when we look at things, we need to look at the entire picture. We need to understand that everything has a place and a market. The refined stuff may not necessarily be better at everything every purpose.

Let’s go back to my Full English Breakfast. The food was much better in the hotel. However, it didn’t bring a community together in the same way that the greasy spoon did. Both were the same dish but serving a different purpose.

So, when we look at people, let’s look beyond the superficial and talk about who is better based on how much they have or where they were born. Let’s look at their purpose just like we do between the hotel and the greasy spoon.

 

She Should Never Have Been There in the First Place

 I’ve been lucky enough to know a few people in my life who happen to know some prominent people. So, thanks to social media, I am, on an occasion lucky enough to get the news feed about a posting made by someone prominent. One of the luckiest gems came from Lord Simon Woolley, who is a British politician currently serving in the House of Lords and is the Principle of Homerton College Cambridge. Lord Wooley’s post was on the sacking of former British Home Secretary, Suella Braverman and a copy of his posting is appended below:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/lord-simon-woolley-387611119/recent-activity/all/

 

 Taken from the Linkedin Page of Lord Simon Woolley

I agree with Lord Woolley. Ms. Braverman who has become probably the first person to get sacked from the same job by two different Prime Ministers, has been something of a controversial figure who has gone out of her way to pander to the worst in human nature.

You could say that Ms. Braverman had given herself a religious mission to save the United Kingdom from the very people who were more than willing to help the United Kingdom by working hard – namely anyone fleeing a war zone or anyone with South Asian ancestry. Ms. Braverman is the person who declared it was her dream to send asylum seekers to Rwanda and blamed those of Pakistani origin of forming “grooming gangs.” A list of Ms. Braverman’s controversies can be found at:

https://news.sky.com/story/suella-braverman-speeding-row-the-latest-in-a-long-line-of-controversies-12886789#:~:text=Ms%20Braverman%20also%20attracted%20controversy,to%20get%20off%20the%20ground.

The straw that finally broke the proverbial camel’s back and got her the sack was when she criticized the British police force for being “too lenient” on Pro-Palestinian protestors:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/13/uk-minister-suella-braverman-fired-heres-what-to-know

 

 Leaving aside one’s views of the Israel-Palestine conflict, this is an obvious violation of every ethics code. Citizens of countries that claim to be democratic have a right to protest for whatever they want and the role of the police is simple – they’re there to ensure that violence does not break out between rival protestors. The rules are supposed to be simple – you can protest, march, wear signs etc etc as long as you don’t get violent in your protest with the people protesting against what you are protesting and you don’t call for the extermination of anyone.

Having the person who is nominally in charge of ensuring law and order talk about how the police were too lenient or “not harsh enough” on one side or the other is obviously a violation of that understanding. It should be a “no-brainer” that Mr. Sunak, her boss would have had to sack her.

While the sacking of Ms. Braverman was long overdue, the question is – why was she appointed as Home Secretary in the first place. It’s not that this was Ms. Braverman’s first stint in the home office and Mr. Sunak cannot claim that he didn’t know what she was like. Ms. Braverman who held the job under Mr. Sunak’s predecessor, Liz Truss, had to leave the job because she couldn’t follow basic security rules when it came to her official communications. This should have been a red flag against bringing Ms. Braverman back to the Home Office. How can you let someone who can’t keep the simplest of rules to a job which is all about enforcing rules.

We got our answer a few days latter when Ms. Braverman started accusing Mr. Sunak of betraying the deal they had made. It turns out that the unelected Mr. Sunak who had lost the first leadership race to Ms. Truss, was so desperate for the top job that he cut a deal with Ms. Braverman to get support when he got his lucky break when Ms. Truss was forced to resign.

This does not speak well for Mr. Sunak, who, judging by his career at top investment banks and his academic credentials at Oxford and Winchester, is an intelligent man. Based on her record, its clear that one doesn’t need an Oxford Degree to know Ms. Braverman in the home office would be a problem. Yet, Mr. Sunak was so keen to get power that he struck the deal with her.

Ms. Braverman is what you call the awful subordinate who reflects poorly on her boss and the fact that she lasted this long only enforces the impression that Mr. Sunak, who claimed to want to run a professional government, has a flawed character. Ms. Braverman’s existence in his cabinet for the length that was only screams that Mr. Sunak is so desperate for power he’ll sacrifice anything resembling common decency to get it. That is not what people look for in a leader.

The Least; the Last and the Lost

 

My 84-year-old mother-in-law is a devout Catholic and as a result, I’ve had to spend most of my Sunday’s taking her to mass every Sunday evening at Novena Church. Although I am not Catholic (I am a Buddhist student of Christian Theology who has inevitably been blessed by Muslims, Jains and Hindus) I listen in and take in what’s being said. Today’s priest came up with what I thought was a valuable soundbite, which everyone seems to forget.

The service was about the “end of times,” or Judgement Day when Christ returns to judge humanity and the righteous are supposed to be resurrected. The priest made the valuable point that judgement day is not about a check list of how many commandments you broke and kept but about how you treated people, specifically the least, the last and the lost.

What made this resonate with me, is the fact that it seemed to touch on who Christ is and for that matter the Christian and just about every other religion. Read the Gospels and you will notice that Christ is a champion of the downtrodden. He is the ultimate rebel who showed up the respected members of society like the scribes and the pharisees for being hypocrites of the worst sort and offered to solace to the downtrodden like the fishermen, the tax collectors and prostitutes. The man wasn’t interested in collecting money from his followers but told the rich to sell all their possessions to become followers of his. Christ is the first God in human history who made suffering part of the ultimate divine glory:

 

 The King of Kings Showed us that Salvation was in Suffering and Sacrifice

I bring up this beautiful sound bite of the Least; the Last and the Lost because too many people get carried away with what I believe is the “wrong” thing (which I am aware makes me sound as dogmatic as the people I’m slagging off). Too many people get carried away with what I would call the “magic” of religion. Its as if you religion is a bargain where you pray to this or that God in the hope that by doing a certain number of prayers you will get health, wealth and happiness.

Now, I’m not denying the presence and probability of divine miracles. What I am saying is that the miracles are not actually the important part of the faith. Faith, as the Dalai Lama once said, should make you, “A better person.”

I think of the time I went to meet a Rinpoche in the airport. The man had a small entourage who had organized his trip to Singapore. The coffee session was very enlightening. The entourage had plenty of stories about all sorts of monasteries where there were monks who could do all sorts of miraculous things because they meditated on this way or that for decades of their lives and thus achieved so much merit.

Whilst these guys had plenty to say, the Rinpoche (who is supposed to be a living reincarnation who remembers his last life like it was yesterday) sat there looking rather bemused and whenever someone asked him about the magic, promptly said he didn’t know anything.

Now, this is a harmless story about people being focused on the wrong thing. It’s funny and cute in a certain way. What is not funny is when the focus on the magic becomes public policy and it comes a tool of oppression against the very people that just about every religion claim to champion. Think of India, which is officially secular but contains most of the world’s Hindus. Whilst the concept of “Untouchability” has long been abolished in the Indian constitution and legal system, you still get a large segment of the population getting the s**t kicked out of them because someone many thousands of years ago considered them unclean. Economic reforms have been doing their work in uplifting people beyond cast beliefs but its not happening fast enough.

Then, there’s the proverbial Holy Land to the Abrahamic Faiths. Three religions call this spot of the desert Holy and yet a host of very Unholy Things keep happening there in the name of the one God that all three religions claim as theirs.

If you leave you the main protagonist of this conflict (namely the Israeli Government and Hamas), you’ll find that the single worst group of people in keeping things in the Holy Land anything but Holy, you’ll find that they are inevitably the Zionist Christians. This refers to the group of Churches that believe that Christ will come again when the Israelis controls all the land. This is a group that has tremendous wealth and power or at least enough power to remind American politicians of both parties about which side they need to support. Hence, whenever a conflict between Israel and the Palestinians breaks out, you’ll find the most powerful man in the world doing what the Prime Minister of a strip of desert tells him to do.

Again, I don’t want to disparage belief in prophecy and whilst my study of theology is rather rusty, I don’t see how supporting a government that has on record killed 0.5 percent of a population of a territory (as reported by the Washington Post - https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/gaza-rising-death-toll-civilians/ ) could be an act of Holiness.

Let’s remember, the Gospels are very clear. Jesus was on the side of the least; the last and the lost. As horrific as the October 7 attacks against Israel are, indiscriminate bombing of people who are the definition of the least; the last and the lost and calling it self-defense if not something Jesus would condone. If anything, the Zionist Churches who are actively supporting the bombings need to ask if getting Jesus to return is in their interest at all.

Rolls Royce Government

 One of the funniest things about living in Singapore is that you often get told off by people from elsewhere whenever you suggest that things in Singapore are less than perfect. If you talk to enough foreigners about Singapore, you’re going to looks of “what are you complaining about,” whenever you try and complain about Singapore. It’s not just the people from the developing world but you get expats from American and Europe pointing out to you that life in Singapore is pretty good. I’ll always remember a Dutch fellow telling me “Singapore – where else is there?” Leave it to our foreign-born friends to make the point that whilst our ministers are highly paid, they’re worth the pennies.

If you leave out the usual gripes of the online crowd, there is a case for saying that the Singapore government has on the whole done a decent job. By and large the majority have plenty to eat and shelter. Our last riot was in 2013 and the one before that was in 1969. When people in London complain about constant train strikes, we in Singapore have experienced a grand total of three (3) major strikes in our history as a modern nation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_movement_of_Singapore

To enhance the feeling that the Singapore government is the Rolls Royce of Government’s, the faults of the governments in the rest of the region (specifically Malaysia and Indonesia) get highlighted. We’re told that entering the Malaysian state of Johor is to volunteer the get robbed at knife point. A good portion of us will inevitably have stories of being shaken down for bribes in Malaysia and Indonesia which will inevitably be followed up with the point that this simply doesn’t happen in Singapore. I think of IMPact 2013, when the then Deputy Prime Minister, Mr. Teo Chee Hean was asked about Singapore’s high cost. The reply was that other places in the region may look cheaper but there were hidden cost unlike Singapore where “What you see if what you get.”

I don’t doubt that there’s a certain level of low-level corruption in the region which somehow doesn’t exist in Singapore. Not worrying about being shaken down by anyone in a uniform is actually one of the better things about being in Singapore.

However, that doesn’t mean that Singapore is going to be “perfect” forever or that government officials in other parts of the world are necessarily corrupt and incompetent. I’ve started to know this from three international experiences I’ve had recently.

The first round took place around two weeks ago when I had to stand in for my boss at the Restructuring, Insolvency & Governance Conference 2023. The Guest of Honour was Mr. Rabbin Hattari the Permeant Secretary of the Ministry of State-Owned Enterprises.

 

 Opening of the Restructuring, Insolvency & Governance Conference 2023

Mr. Hattari speaks fluent English and has PhD in Economics from George Mason University. It becomes clear to anyone who listens to him speak that Mr. Hattari knows what he’s talking about.

One of the things that struck me about listening to Mr. Hattari speak was the fact that he didn’t try to sugar-coat reality. He told the audience that there would be pain in restructuring of state-owned enterprises (people inevitably get fired through no fault of their own). However, he then argued that this was necessary for the long-term health of economy. It would lead to a greater sharing of wealth.

 

 Mr. Hattari sums up his speech

I can’t tell you if every Indonesian official is like Mr. Hattari. However, the fact that Mr. Hattari has got wo where he has is a good sign for Indonesia. ASEAN’s largest economy is slowly but surely getting its governance right if it is getting people like Mr. Hattari into prominent enough positions. It won’t happen overnight, but there are reasons for Indonesians to feel optimistic about the future of its governance.

If Indonesia had reasons for some optimism, I was stunned by Kazakhstan, the land that too many of us know as Borat’s homeland. I had the privilege of being invited by the Kazakh Embassy to a conference on the Astana International Financial Centre (AFIC), which is modeled on the Dubai international Financial Centre (DIFC). The Governor of the AIFC, Mr. Renat Bekturov, who has a Master’s Degree in Banking and Finance from the University of Leicester proceeded to outline what Kazakhstan was doing to attract investment.

 

 Renat Bekturov, Governor of Astana International Financial Centre provides a list of what’s on offer

Some of the things includes things like:

1.     Presidential terms of now limited to a single seven-year term;

2.     Direct relatives of the president are not allowed to work for the government;

3.     Language of commerce in the AIFC is English;

4.     Law in the AIFC is English Common Law; and

5.     Judges are hired from the UK.

 

 The things on offer for Investors in Kazakhstan

It struck me that the Kazakhs had understood that having rules was essential to success and ironically this conference took place at a time when “super-strict” Singapore was loosening the rules on ministers and the president doing things beyond their jobs:

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/singapore-proposes-new-laws-president-ministers-hold-roles-foreign-and-global-organisations-3899721

 

 

 With the Governor of the AIFC

Since I didn’t go to Dubai this week, I went to the Poland-ASEAN Fintech Forum, which was held at the Singapore Business Federation Building today (14 November 2023). The point was made that Poland, which was effectively part of the Soviet Block 33-years ago, has now got a modern infrastructure where Fintech companies can be built:

 

 

 The state of the Polish IT scene:

The Executive Vice-President of the Polish Association of Banks, Mr. Wlodzimierz Kicinski, actually talked about trying to export “Blik,” Poland’s payment system into Central Europe and beyond:

 

 With the Executive Vice-President of the Polish Bank Association:

The message is clear. Places that were once poor and desolate are waking up to the importance of having good people in government. Their transformation won’t be easy. It won’t be as fast as it was in Singapore (let’s never forget that Singapore is a tiny place where its easy to control) but if they keep on this path, there’s no reason to suggests why they won’t be able to achieve prosperity and stability.

As Singaporeans, we can no longer assume that we will have the Rolls Royce of governments (if we actually had one in the first place). Its therefore imperative that we always ensure that our government machinery is always top notch. The rest of the world wants to catch up and they are taking the right steps.