This weekend I found myself at a very interesting forum conducted by MP for Pasir Ris Pungoll GRC, Dr Janil Puthucheary. The forum was focused on the issue of low-wage workers and the key question of the event was, “How much are you willing to pay?”
The general thrust of the discussion was thus – people agreed that there are groups in Singapore that work for what can only be called subsistence wages. Toilet cleaners for example, are paid on average, the princely sum of S$600 a month for a 6-day week. People agreed that they’d be willing to pay more to use a public toilet if it doubled the wages of the toilet cleaners. Then the question moved onto bus drivers. Dr Puthucheary then asked the ingenious question – “Would you pay more if it was guaranteed that the increase would go to the bus driver?” The two most prominent answers from the audience were ‘Depends if it’s a Singaporean or PRC bus driver”and“If the fair goes up to S $1.75 a journey, I’ll join the Worker’s Party (Singapore’s main opposition party).”
While it was heartening to be part in a lively discussion on the issue, I felt that everyone was skirting around the brontosaurus in the room – the role of the government. To be fair to the organizers of this event, they belonged to the Youth Wing of the ruling People’s Action Party. As such, it would have been hard for them to tackle the issue openly. However, if one seriously intends to get serious about tackling the issue of glaring inequality in Singapore, one must question the role of the government in the equation.
Generally speaking, setting wages is usually a question of how much an employer is willing to pay to get things done and how much an employee is willing to do for a certain amount of money. This is usually a case of a thesis meeting its antithesis to form a synthesis (In simple terms, two opposite’s crash into each other to create something new). Employers will generally want to pay as little as possible to get the most amount of work while employees will want the most wages while doing the least amount of work.
Somehow these opposing needs create a balance. It’s not a perfect balance. Market forces usually play the key role in deciding the value of wages. When there is a recession, employers don’t hire so those with jobs will sacrifice pay and perks just to keep their jobs. When there’s a boom and there is a lack of people to do the jobs created, then wages shoot up.
While everyone talks about market forces, most people forget that government plays a crucial role too. Firstly, the government sets the tone for the market through things like regulations. More importantly, the government has to play the crucial role in ensuring that the balance does not tip too far either way. Governments have to see that people get wages they can survive on (Think of Arab Spring where ordinary people took three jobs to survive) but at the same time, the government has to ensure that businesses can afford to hire people (Think of the UK in the 1970s when taxes were close to 100 percent of income – businesses could not make a profit). If you like, the government is the referee in the game.
Singapore’s government has a slight problem as a referee – namely the fact that the government is in fact the biggest owner of business in Singapore. The government owns the Government Investment Corporation of Singapore (GIC) and Temasek Holdings Pte Ltd. These entities were set up to manage the compulsory savings of the population and at a later stage budget surplus. The value of assets controlled by both these companies runs into the billions. The largest shareholder in the biggest companies listed on the stock exchange is Temasek Holdings.
In fairness to the Singapore Government, it’s kept a relatively hands off approach in the management of the large companies. The CEO’s of companies like DBS and SIA have gotten there on their merits as business people rather than government bureaucrats. State ownership has not handicapped SIA from becoming a world-class airline. DBS today hires senior people from international banks like Citibank to ensure they play as serious international players.
One can also argue that in the initial days of independence, this situation was necessary. Singapore did not have the people to run big corporations and the symbiosis between civil servants and people running large corporations was a way of sharing talent. You can argue that making civil servants spend a stint in corporations has helped to create a business friendly civil service. This in turn has been a powerful selling point in keeping the much needed foreign investment coming into the country.
A first rate bureaucracy has been one of Singapore’s strengths. The Singapore government machinery sounds like a private sector corporate machinery talking about things like efficiency and customer focus. This has been good for Singaporeans.
While all these arguments are compelling, they are losing their potency and starting to look like tiered and increasingly irrelevant arguments.
From the business perspective, it’s possible to argue that government ownership has actually held Singaporean businesses back. Of the large corporations, only SIA has a made a mark in its global industry. The reason is simple – this is an industry where the Singapore government’s protection is useless and the airline has had to face competition from global players. The other corporate giant to hold its own has been SingTel, which used its cash pile from its days of a monopoly to acquire overseas assets. Today, SingTel’s main source of revenue is from Optus, its Australian subsidiary.
The untold tale here is that prior to acquiring Optus, SingTel tried to acquire assets in Hong Kong and Malaysia. The fact that SingTel’s main shareholder was the Singapore Government was the very reason why regulatory authorities stopped SingTel from taking over companies. Let’s face, telecommunications is a sensitive business and as friendly as Singapore’s government may be to other governments, there are few governments in the world that would allow their telecom companies to be bought over by what they view to be another government.
More worryingly is the fact that many of Singapore’s big corporations are only big at home. They have been protected from the laws of competition and have been allowed to grow flabby. Think of Singapore’s media industry. An element of competition was introduced. Both media houses lost a ton of money and the government allowed them to remonopolise. Everyone slapped their backs, happy that they had shown that the market was “Too Small for Competition.” Unfortunately they were too busy defending their turfs that they forgot about product innovation. While the media houses spent their energies sniping at each other’s product (think of the endless arguments on whether viewership or readership was more important,) the public found alternative news sources on the internet. Sure, the bloggers didn’t make money but they gained credibility at the expense of both print and media – enough for the Executive Vice-President of Marketing at Singapore Press Holdings (a former editor) to write an op-ed piece lamenting the fact that government ministers were choosing to use their Facebook accounts to make announcements instead of calling for an old fashioned press conference.
As the need to expand beyond Singapore’s shores grows, business and government need to relook their relationship. Business should have the freedom to act as businesses rather than as part of a government.
If the business case for the government to get out of business is compelling, the argument from a social policy perspective is becoming crucial.
Let’s go back to the fact that the government now has a problem with growing inequality. Let’s take the example of bus and train drivers, the group that Dr Puthucheary brought up.
Public transport is a potent issue. It’s used by most of population and so most of the population has an opinion about it. As far as the public is concerned, public transport has become worse and more expensive at the same time.
As far as most people are concerned, this situation has come about because the government allowed an influx of foreigners to enter the country but didn’t ensure that the nation’s infrastructure was prepared for this. Talk to any random person on the streets and they’ll tell you that busses and trains have become overcrowded (expect to wait for three trains to pass by during the early morning commute) as fares have increased. Both public transport operators SMRT and Comfort DelGro have been declaring record profits for shareholders for the last eight-years. Then, when the system started to experience breakdowns, the government stepped in and announced that it would finance more buses from the taxpayer’s fund. Erm, as most of us are concerned, we, the tax paying public are providing a subsidy to companies that are printing money from us.
It’s hard for the government to be seen to play the crucial role in situations like this. The public expects public transport to be affordable and of a high standard. The public transport operators are under pressure to deliver a service and profit to their shareholders. To deliver a profit for their shareholders, the operators, minimize spending on basic infrastructure like more buses and hiring less experienced drivers from elsewhere, thus adding to the downward push for blue collar labour.
A neutral government would be able to see that the situation is unsustainable and would be able to bring all parties together. It would be able to insist on certain delivery standards by the operators – yes, you can make a profit but you got to have no breakdowns within the year etc etc.
Unfortunately, the Singapore government isn’t a neutral referee. On one hand it has pressure from the public. On the other it has its own interest as a shareholder in the system. The CEO of a public transport operator deals with the government as both a regulator and a shareholder. The dual nature of the government’s role here produces an inborn conflict of interest. On one hand it needs to keep the public happy. On the other hand it wants to collect profits. Is anybody surprised that the government was quite content to allow the public transport operators to up fares and skimp on basic maintenance as long as not too many people complained and things ran. Let’s face it, nobody talked about buying more buses until things broke down.
Government must get back to basics and become a neutral referee rather than a shareholder with a vested interest in one side of the game. It’s only then that people will start believing that the government has its interest at heart and interested in looking after all parties.
Only when the government divest itself of its business interest will topics like “inclusive society” be more than just a hot talking point.
Friday, May 04, 2012
A Story of Wages
You have to thank the world’s socialist for bringing us a public holiday devoted to the idea that we should celebrate labour, more popularly known as the sweat we need to put into get our daily keep. This year’s Labour Day in Singapore has been particularly interesting because after years of trumpeting the importance of economic growth, we’ve now decided to focus on the issue of equality or to be more accurate inequality.
Singapore is a well-known economic success story. However, in recent years, it’s become a noticeably unequal society. One Nominated Member of Parliament went as far as to describe the situation in Singapore as having a small group who earn some of the highest wages in the world and pay some of the lowest cost for basic labour. A report by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the nation’s central bank, pointed out that two-thirds of the population earns less than the national wage.
Working professionals in Singapore compare their salaries with peers in London and New York. Unskilled labourers compare wages with their peers in Dhaka and Manila. Actually, we’ve moved people from London and New York by giving them a premium on-top of what they were getting at home. At the other end of the social scale, we pay wages slightly higher than in Dhaka and Manila and then proceed to make cost so high that they were actually no better off than if they stayed at home. It doesn’t take an economics degree to realize that when it comes to wages, Singapore is both a first world and a third world country rolled into one.
Thanks to a prominent economics professor, this situation has come into the spotlight. The said professor has suggested that there needs to be a major wage and job restructuring where we jack up the pay of the low wage earners (S$1,500 a month and less) and freeze the pay of those earning high wages (above S$15,000 a month and more).
The government (filled by the world’s best paid politicians despite a recent pay cut) has gone on the war path. Minister after minister has come out to denounce the proposal. As far as the powers-that-be are concerned, you cannot have a raise in wages until there is a rise in productivity.
Having been a small businessman (glorified free-lancer) for the last decade, I’m in an interesting position to look at this issue.
On one hand it’s frustrating dealing when the people who pay you live under the impression that you don’t need to eat, sleep, bath or use the toilet and therefore have the superhuman ability to work for them for the sheer love of it. I’m sorry but what I do happens to be called work and I need money to survive. I do well enough for the people who pay me and I get frustrated when I’m told that I’m worth so many dollars less than what I’ve done. Now, if I can feel that way about bashing things out on a computer and making phone calls, I can imagine how many times people who do heavy lifting or running 12-hours a day must feel about the pay they get for the work they do. I hate it whenever people think they’re doing me a favour when I do work for them.
There is a flip side to this too. Just as I get frustrated with people who think they’re doing me a favour when they give me work, it’s equally frustrating to deal with people who think they’re doing me a favour when I give them work. I’m still traumatised by a bad hire I made for a two-day project a month ago. The so called hire decided that it was acceptable to throw a tantrum just as I needed to deal with a minister’s press secretary. This particular hire decided that it was acceptable to sms a mentor of mine and her brother to complain that she bored and being victimized.
What this particular hire forgot was the fact that I was paying her money and providing her with exposure to the highest profile group she had ever been exposed to. She blamed her behavior on constipation and I guess to be fair, her behavior improved with the clearing of her bowls.
So, where does this leave the wage debate? Well, I believe that people, who hire, need to be fair about the wages they pay. Just as the business needs task to be done well, people need to have enough money for them not to worry about how to pay their bills. A job is essentially a trade-off between the employer’s money and the employee’s time. Fairness in this trade isn’t an airy-fairy concept. It’s common sense. If you want to get an employee to give their all to you, you have to ensure that he or she has a wage that covers basic living expenses and to build a future.
Having said that, I don’t think government legislating things like a government mandated minimum wage won’t necessarily make things better. If I’m expected to pay high wages to people like my bad hire, I’d rather do things myself.
I also find the idea of keeping jobs for certain people of certain races or nationalities to be downright offensive. As a business, I take the risk and I need to manage my cost and talent to reap the necessary rewards. It is not the job of businesses to hire based on a government’s political needs nor is it the job of business to create social policy. Businesses should hire the people who are most hungry for the job because they’ll be best at it.
Funnily enough, the two examples that come to mind are from the military. In the US Army, it’s been found that Blacks tend to perform better than Whites. The American Army is the one place where you’re likely to see more blacks bossing whites around than in any other organization in the nation. The reason is simple, the average black soldier looks to the army as way up in life while the average White Soldier looks at the army as a dead end job.
The same is true in the British Army, where they found that you’re average Gurkha makes a better solider than your average British Squaddie. The average squaddie’s came from families where the army was a better than nothing job while the Gurkha’s saw service in the British Army as way up in life.
Neither the US or the UK is about to go through a reduction in recruiting less Blacks in favour of Whites or less Gurkha’s in favour of local Brits (though admittedly this may slow and stop thanks to the Maoist politicians in Nepal.) Part of the reason is culture. In the US there is a need to provide black people with good jobs and since the army does a good job of it, nobody will think of stopping the army from hiring blacks. In the UK the link with the Gurkha’s is historical and part and parcel of Britain’s place in the world.
However, there’s a more important underlying reason. Both armies believe in hiring the best people to fight wars. As such, the Blacks in the US Army have earned their place by merit as have the Gurkha’s in the UK.
What is true of the military should be true of business. Hire based purely on merit. Yes, Singaporeans are more expensive than say Filipinos and many other Asians. However, cost isn’t the only factor in deciding who to hire. Deal with any service industry in Singapore and you’ll find that if you get decent service, it’s from Filipinos. I remember the head of a prominent shoe shop chain telling me, “If I could, I’d sack all the Singaporeans and replace them with Filipinos. The Singaporeans are so grouchy they kill any incentive my customers have to buy. The Filipinos on the other hand manage to smile at work even when there’s a personal tragedy – they produce the work environment that I want.”
I remember my previous CO, Colonel Toh Boh Kwee’s line,” Nobody owes you a living.” It’s something people like my bad hire need to understand. Contrary to what many of Singapore’s alternative thinkers might think, foreigners are not there to screw Singaporeans. They cannot be blamed if they’re hungry and manage to work the “EQ” required in today’s market.
Let’s face it; we also live in a world of “outsourcing.” Technology has made it such that even you kicked out all the foreigners, many of the jobs would simply move to cheaper locations. Think of the call centres around the world. You can kick out the Indian entrepreneur who owns a call centre in your country. However, that particular Indian entrepreneur can simply relocate back to India and instead of having a situation where you had one or two jobs for the locals; you have a situation where there are NO jobs for the locals.
A compromise of sorts needs to be achieved. While I may not believe an enforced minimum wage would make things better, I think there should be guidelines of sorts as to what constitutes a reasonable salary and reasonable perks. Unfortunately in the Asian context, too many employers think of employees as cost and thus try to push wages to subsistence levels.
Employers need to understand that human assets are simply that – human and assets. People work to provide for their basic needs. People ‘go-all-out’ for things that will not only provide their basic needs but also help achieves aspirations. Blacks and Gurkha’s in the US and British Armies see their jobs as fulfilling aspirations and hence they work harder than their respective White and British counterparts.
It’s not just about money. If employers want to maximize the potential of their employees, they have to find ways to make people feel like they can achieve their aspirations by working for them. Both Google and 3M practice allow employees to devote 15 percent of their allotted work hours to personal projects. It’s no coincidence that these two companies are regarded as amongst the most innovative in the world.
Then there’s the fact that employees are customers too, especially if you work in the FMCG sector. Henry Ford paid his workers an unthinkably high US5 an hour back in the 1890s because he wanted his workers to buy his cars. If you look at things this way, the most reasonable wage to pay someone enough for them to be your customers. I remember having this argument with one of my early clients who sold top grade pillows – they were not paying me enough to be a customer (The GM of this company came up with a unique solution – he paid me in pillows, which I had to give up as part of my divorce settlement – I did get the Harry Potter book).
Having said that, I think employees need to be responsible for their own development. A job is not an entitlement and in this day and age of outsourcing and free people movement, you cannot expect your passport to give you a job. Organisations are focusing on being lean and looking to hire the best.
Personally, I think we need to look at the concept of a job as being an ‘exclusive’ to a particular company. You look at the average eight-hour day and you need to question how many of those hours are actually productive.
I think there is a situation where the employees are becoming more like ‘journeymen’ in the old ‘apprentice’ system. Once you have a skill of sorts, you should have the freedom to sell your hours accordingly and to the highest bidder. Businesses will only pay for hours where real work is done and people do not need to be dependent on a single entity for a living.
There are, of course, many issues at stake but it’s worth looking at what really needs to be done and what can be outsourced. The traditional job structure has many benefits and in many cases will remain as it is. However, as the nature of businesses changes, so does the nature of jobs. Outsourcing may kill traditional jobs but it provides a way of living to many and in balance that outweighs the cost. Rather than try and legislate it away, let’s see how we can maximize it.
Singapore is a well-known economic success story. However, in recent years, it’s become a noticeably unequal society. One Nominated Member of Parliament went as far as to describe the situation in Singapore as having a small group who earn some of the highest wages in the world and pay some of the lowest cost for basic labour. A report by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the nation’s central bank, pointed out that two-thirds of the population earns less than the national wage.
Working professionals in Singapore compare their salaries with peers in London and New York. Unskilled labourers compare wages with their peers in Dhaka and Manila. Actually, we’ve moved people from London and New York by giving them a premium on-top of what they were getting at home. At the other end of the social scale, we pay wages slightly higher than in Dhaka and Manila and then proceed to make cost so high that they were actually no better off than if they stayed at home. It doesn’t take an economics degree to realize that when it comes to wages, Singapore is both a first world and a third world country rolled into one.
Thanks to a prominent economics professor, this situation has come into the spotlight. The said professor has suggested that there needs to be a major wage and job restructuring where we jack up the pay of the low wage earners (S$1,500 a month and less) and freeze the pay of those earning high wages (above S$15,000 a month and more).
The government (filled by the world’s best paid politicians despite a recent pay cut) has gone on the war path. Minister after minister has come out to denounce the proposal. As far as the powers-that-be are concerned, you cannot have a raise in wages until there is a rise in productivity.
Having been a small businessman (glorified free-lancer) for the last decade, I’m in an interesting position to look at this issue.
On one hand it’s frustrating dealing when the people who pay you live under the impression that you don’t need to eat, sleep, bath or use the toilet and therefore have the superhuman ability to work for them for the sheer love of it. I’m sorry but what I do happens to be called work and I need money to survive. I do well enough for the people who pay me and I get frustrated when I’m told that I’m worth so many dollars less than what I’ve done. Now, if I can feel that way about bashing things out on a computer and making phone calls, I can imagine how many times people who do heavy lifting or running 12-hours a day must feel about the pay they get for the work they do. I hate it whenever people think they’re doing me a favour when I do work for them.
There is a flip side to this too. Just as I get frustrated with people who think they’re doing me a favour when they give me work, it’s equally frustrating to deal with people who think they’re doing me a favour when I give them work. I’m still traumatised by a bad hire I made for a two-day project a month ago. The so called hire decided that it was acceptable to throw a tantrum just as I needed to deal with a minister’s press secretary. This particular hire decided that it was acceptable to sms a mentor of mine and her brother to complain that she bored and being victimized.
What this particular hire forgot was the fact that I was paying her money and providing her with exposure to the highest profile group she had ever been exposed to. She blamed her behavior on constipation and I guess to be fair, her behavior improved with the clearing of her bowls.
So, where does this leave the wage debate? Well, I believe that people, who hire, need to be fair about the wages they pay. Just as the business needs task to be done well, people need to have enough money for them not to worry about how to pay their bills. A job is essentially a trade-off between the employer’s money and the employee’s time. Fairness in this trade isn’t an airy-fairy concept. It’s common sense. If you want to get an employee to give their all to you, you have to ensure that he or she has a wage that covers basic living expenses and to build a future.
Having said that, I don’t think government legislating things like a government mandated minimum wage won’t necessarily make things better. If I’m expected to pay high wages to people like my bad hire, I’d rather do things myself.
I also find the idea of keeping jobs for certain people of certain races or nationalities to be downright offensive. As a business, I take the risk and I need to manage my cost and talent to reap the necessary rewards. It is not the job of businesses to hire based on a government’s political needs nor is it the job of business to create social policy. Businesses should hire the people who are most hungry for the job because they’ll be best at it.
Funnily enough, the two examples that come to mind are from the military. In the US Army, it’s been found that Blacks tend to perform better than Whites. The American Army is the one place where you’re likely to see more blacks bossing whites around than in any other organization in the nation. The reason is simple, the average black soldier looks to the army as way up in life while the average White Soldier looks at the army as a dead end job.
The same is true in the British Army, where they found that you’re average Gurkha makes a better solider than your average British Squaddie. The average squaddie’s came from families where the army was a better than nothing job while the Gurkha’s saw service in the British Army as way up in life.
Neither the US or the UK is about to go through a reduction in recruiting less Blacks in favour of Whites or less Gurkha’s in favour of local Brits (though admittedly this may slow and stop thanks to the Maoist politicians in Nepal.) Part of the reason is culture. In the US there is a need to provide black people with good jobs and since the army does a good job of it, nobody will think of stopping the army from hiring blacks. In the UK the link with the Gurkha’s is historical and part and parcel of Britain’s place in the world.
However, there’s a more important underlying reason. Both armies believe in hiring the best people to fight wars. As such, the Blacks in the US Army have earned their place by merit as have the Gurkha’s in the UK.
What is true of the military should be true of business. Hire based purely on merit. Yes, Singaporeans are more expensive than say Filipinos and many other Asians. However, cost isn’t the only factor in deciding who to hire. Deal with any service industry in Singapore and you’ll find that if you get decent service, it’s from Filipinos. I remember the head of a prominent shoe shop chain telling me, “If I could, I’d sack all the Singaporeans and replace them with Filipinos. The Singaporeans are so grouchy they kill any incentive my customers have to buy. The Filipinos on the other hand manage to smile at work even when there’s a personal tragedy – they produce the work environment that I want.”
I remember my previous CO, Colonel Toh Boh Kwee’s line,” Nobody owes you a living.” It’s something people like my bad hire need to understand. Contrary to what many of Singapore’s alternative thinkers might think, foreigners are not there to screw Singaporeans. They cannot be blamed if they’re hungry and manage to work the “EQ” required in today’s market.
Let’s face it; we also live in a world of “outsourcing.” Technology has made it such that even you kicked out all the foreigners, many of the jobs would simply move to cheaper locations. Think of the call centres around the world. You can kick out the Indian entrepreneur who owns a call centre in your country. However, that particular Indian entrepreneur can simply relocate back to India and instead of having a situation where you had one or two jobs for the locals; you have a situation where there are NO jobs for the locals.
A compromise of sorts needs to be achieved. While I may not believe an enforced minimum wage would make things better, I think there should be guidelines of sorts as to what constitutes a reasonable salary and reasonable perks. Unfortunately in the Asian context, too many employers think of employees as cost and thus try to push wages to subsistence levels.
Employers need to understand that human assets are simply that – human and assets. People work to provide for their basic needs. People ‘go-all-out’ for things that will not only provide their basic needs but also help achieves aspirations. Blacks and Gurkha’s in the US and British Armies see their jobs as fulfilling aspirations and hence they work harder than their respective White and British counterparts.
It’s not just about money. If employers want to maximize the potential of their employees, they have to find ways to make people feel like they can achieve their aspirations by working for them. Both Google and 3M practice allow employees to devote 15 percent of their allotted work hours to personal projects. It’s no coincidence that these two companies are regarded as amongst the most innovative in the world.
Then there’s the fact that employees are customers too, especially if you work in the FMCG sector. Henry Ford paid his workers an unthinkably high US5 an hour back in the 1890s because he wanted his workers to buy his cars. If you look at things this way, the most reasonable wage to pay someone enough for them to be your customers. I remember having this argument with one of my early clients who sold top grade pillows – they were not paying me enough to be a customer (The GM of this company came up with a unique solution – he paid me in pillows, which I had to give up as part of my divorce settlement – I did get the Harry Potter book).
Having said that, I think employees need to be responsible for their own development. A job is not an entitlement and in this day and age of outsourcing and free people movement, you cannot expect your passport to give you a job. Organisations are focusing on being lean and looking to hire the best.
Personally, I think we need to look at the concept of a job as being an ‘exclusive’ to a particular company. You look at the average eight-hour day and you need to question how many of those hours are actually productive.
I think there is a situation where the employees are becoming more like ‘journeymen’ in the old ‘apprentice’ system. Once you have a skill of sorts, you should have the freedom to sell your hours accordingly and to the highest bidder. Businesses will only pay for hours where real work is done and people do not need to be dependent on a single entity for a living.
There are, of course, many issues at stake but it’s worth looking at what really needs to be done and what can be outsourced. The traditional job structure has many benefits and in many cases will remain as it is. However, as the nature of businesses changes, so does the nature of jobs. Outsourcing may kill traditional jobs but it provides a way of living to many and in balance that outweighs the cost. Rather than try and legislate it away, let’s see how we can maximize it.
Monday, April 23, 2012
The Love of Your Own Kind!
Since I collected payment from my first decent sized job for the year, I decided that it was time to start saving again. Two dry years and the absence of a retainer client made savings all the more important. So, I decided to take a tenth of what I made and split the savings between my Central Provident Fund (CPF – a compulsory saving scheme for all Singaporeans) and my Standard Chartered Account.
Discovering Standard Chartered again was a wonderful joy that put one of the biggest “hot-button” issues into perspective – that it the issue of foreigners.
Despite having no presence in the UK, Standard Chartered is a British Bank, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange. The bank, along with the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) was a bastion of British Commercial Dominance in the colonies. Standard Chartered, along with HSBC remains the only commercial banks in the Western World that issues currency (Hong Kong Dollar, the other to issue Hong Kong Dollars is the Bank of China) and its presence in emerging markets has helped Standard Chartered remain fairly strong despite the financial crisis (American Express Banks was bought by Standard Chartered).
I became a Standard Chartered customer in 2005, when I started writing for Arab News. The Arabs paid me with a cheque that was to be drawn on a Standard Chartered Bank account. At the time, the account they had on offer paid me a grand total of 1.88 percent (which may not sound like much but in Singapore its considered a lottery to get this type of interest on a savings account) and I could run the account with something as little as a single dollar.
In 2006, when I was doing relatively well, thanks to the Saudi Embassy in Singapore, I used this account as a place to park my savings. Unfortunately, I lost focus and allowed myself to whittle down my cash savings to a non-existent level and sometime in 2010; they sent me a note asking me to put something into the account to keep it going. I put five dollars into the account in November, 2010 and left it there.
So, when I visited them last week, I decided to find out how the account was doing. I was told that in the year my five bucks had lain in the account, untouched, I had earned a grand total of a cent in interest payments. OK, this doesn’t sound like a lot of money.
However, the comparison with how I would be treated at my regular bank, the Development Bank of Singapore or DBS was quite astounding.
Let’s start with the amount. Standard Chartered allowed me to keep my account open with a mere five dollars. Had I put this amount in an account with DBS, I would have received a few more nasty notes through the course of the year to remind me to put more money into the account because they would have shut me down. DBS has a policy of charging the customer a fee of two dollars a month for having less than $500 in your savings account. If you have the misfortune of having a current account with them, they’ll charge you a mere $15 for having a balance of less than $10,000 a month.
The argument here is that DBS loses money to maintain accounts with not very much money in them and so they need to pass the losses onto the consumer.
For some reason, the government thinks this is acceptable. Like all banks, DBS borrows money from depositors at a low level of interest and proceeds to lend it out at a higher rate. To anyone outside Singapore, it looks like DBS has a fool proof way of printing money. I get paid some 0.05 percent per annum on my savings account and I get NO interest on my corporate account. The bank then lends out the money I deposit into the accounts at anything ranging from six to 20 percent per annum.
The non-existent interest rates I’m paid for lending money to the bank would not be so bad on its own. However, insult is added to injury when the bank charges are thrown into the equation. I effectively pay the bank for the privilege of lending them money I earn.
My treatment at Standard Chartered and my comparative treatment at DBS is not a question of who would have paid me more. I made one cent out of Standard Chartered and had I kept an account with DBS with five dollars, I would end up owing them money.
The question here is, why do I have to pay DBS for the privilege of lending them money when Standard Chartered does not charge me for the privilege? It cannot be that Standard Chartered has found a way of not losing money on my account while DBS bleeds money every time I have less than $500 in my savings account?
Not everything about Standard Chartered is better than DBS. It’s cheaper to transfer money via DBS. When I first started out with Huong, I helped her to transfer money to Vietnam. Charges at DBS were only S$30 per transaction. By contrast, Standard Chartered charged $100 per transaction. The process at both banks takes about the same amount of paper work, yet one bank charged a premium of $70 extra per transaction.
That’s OK. In a world with free-competition, customers should be allowed to pick and choose which provider they want for various services. I would save with Standard Chartered and transfer money through DBS.
Unfortunately, the world of banking isn’t exactly “free-market” competition. Foreign banks like HSBC, Citi and Standard Chartered are allowed to operate in the local market provided they understand whose market it is. As such, foreign banks that deal with consumers tend to cater to only the very high-end ones and ignore the masses. They are limited in the number of branches they are allowed to operate. Back when I was an intern and Citibank was Citibank NA, rather than Citibank Pte Ltd, we had a grand total of three branches. By contrast, DBS, which is co-incidentally owned by Temasek Holdings, which is in turn owned by the Ministry of Finance, has a mere 100 plus branches across the island.
Yes, Citi, Standard Chartered, HSBC and gang have a larger international network than the local boys. However, within the domestic market, it’s the local boys who have the advantage. Every Singaporean with a savings account started out with a POSB (Post Office Savings Banks – a subsidiary of DBS) account. The local boys have had a head start on taking the local market and in a way; local people have their savings trapped in the local banks. Contrary to what the powers-that-be may tell you, Singapore’s prosperity isn’t built by foreigners pouring their money into the place, it’s built by trapping the savings of the locals and investing it elsewhere.
To be fair, the local banks have realized the importance of overseas growth markets and adapting to deal with them. United Overseas Bank (UOB) is a big player in Thailand. DBS is a big player in Hong Kong. The bank is actively modeling itself on one of the most successful international banks – Citibank. My ex-boss, Eddie Khoo, moved from Citi to DBS before heading to UOB where he runs consumer banking. More recently, DBS hired Piyush Gupta, a former Citibanker to be CEO.
Once they hit overseas markets, our local boys will have to learn to treat customers properly. However, will their love for their customers in say Hong Kong or Thailand translate into love or at least respect for the Singaporean customer?
As much as I would like it to be yes, I don’t think there’s a strong case for optimism. The big Singapore businesses that burnt overseas resort to milking more from their home base – the average Singapore consumer. Word has it that DBS was allowed to take over POSB when It started feeling the heat in the initial days of investing in China. When Temasek Holdings bought shares in the loss making Merrill Lynch, it quietly sold assets in Singapore.
A while back, I actually got into a heated debate with my favourite litigator and his partners. The crux of the argument was, one of their members had proposed that the government take a more active role in giving work to local law firms. I countered that patriotism has never been much of an effective marketing tool. Local consumers will chose price and quality over patriotism.
A year after this incident, I stick my position. As a local Singaporean business, I don’t expect the government to give me preferential treatment. What I do expect, is for the big local enterprises that I rely on like the banks to treat me like a valued customer rather than an automaton they can squeeze whenever they need to cover up for mistakes made elsewhere.
Let’s face it, after comparing the way I’ve been treated by Standard Chartered and the way I’ve been treated by DBS, I’m not thinking about Standard Chartered’s London Listing or Colonial heritage, I’m thinking of ways to move more of what little money I have their way because they give me so much more.
Extend that idea to other things. Why do we choose foreign things over local things? Could it be because the foreigners actually treat the locals with a bit more love and respect than the way we treat each other?
Discovering Standard Chartered again was a wonderful joy that put one of the biggest “hot-button” issues into perspective – that it the issue of foreigners.
Despite having no presence in the UK, Standard Chartered is a British Bank, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange. The bank, along with the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) was a bastion of British Commercial Dominance in the colonies. Standard Chartered, along with HSBC remains the only commercial banks in the Western World that issues currency (Hong Kong Dollar, the other to issue Hong Kong Dollars is the Bank of China) and its presence in emerging markets has helped Standard Chartered remain fairly strong despite the financial crisis (American Express Banks was bought by Standard Chartered).
I became a Standard Chartered customer in 2005, when I started writing for Arab News. The Arabs paid me with a cheque that was to be drawn on a Standard Chartered Bank account. At the time, the account they had on offer paid me a grand total of 1.88 percent (which may not sound like much but in Singapore its considered a lottery to get this type of interest on a savings account) and I could run the account with something as little as a single dollar.
In 2006, when I was doing relatively well, thanks to the Saudi Embassy in Singapore, I used this account as a place to park my savings. Unfortunately, I lost focus and allowed myself to whittle down my cash savings to a non-existent level and sometime in 2010; they sent me a note asking me to put something into the account to keep it going. I put five dollars into the account in November, 2010 and left it there.
So, when I visited them last week, I decided to find out how the account was doing. I was told that in the year my five bucks had lain in the account, untouched, I had earned a grand total of a cent in interest payments. OK, this doesn’t sound like a lot of money.
However, the comparison with how I would be treated at my regular bank, the Development Bank of Singapore or DBS was quite astounding.
Let’s start with the amount. Standard Chartered allowed me to keep my account open with a mere five dollars. Had I put this amount in an account with DBS, I would have received a few more nasty notes through the course of the year to remind me to put more money into the account because they would have shut me down. DBS has a policy of charging the customer a fee of two dollars a month for having less than $500 in your savings account. If you have the misfortune of having a current account with them, they’ll charge you a mere $15 for having a balance of less than $10,000 a month.
The argument here is that DBS loses money to maintain accounts with not very much money in them and so they need to pass the losses onto the consumer.
For some reason, the government thinks this is acceptable. Like all banks, DBS borrows money from depositors at a low level of interest and proceeds to lend it out at a higher rate. To anyone outside Singapore, it looks like DBS has a fool proof way of printing money. I get paid some 0.05 percent per annum on my savings account and I get NO interest on my corporate account. The bank then lends out the money I deposit into the accounts at anything ranging from six to 20 percent per annum.
The non-existent interest rates I’m paid for lending money to the bank would not be so bad on its own. However, insult is added to injury when the bank charges are thrown into the equation. I effectively pay the bank for the privilege of lending them money I earn.
My treatment at Standard Chartered and my comparative treatment at DBS is not a question of who would have paid me more. I made one cent out of Standard Chartered and had I kept an account with DBS with five dollars, I would end up owing them money.
The question here is, why do I have to pay DBS for the privilege of lending them money when Standard Chartered does not charge me for the privilege? It cannot be that Standard Chartered has found a way of not losing money on my account while DBS bleeds money every time I have less than $500 in my savings account?
Not everything about Standard Chartered is better than DBS. It’s cheaper to transfer money via DBS. When I first started out with Huong, I helped her to transfer money to Vietnam. Charges at DBS were only S$30 per transaction. By contrast, Standard Chartered charged $100 per transaction. The process at both banks takes about the same amount of paper work, yet one bank charged a premium of $70 extra per transaction.
That’s OK. In a world with free-competition, customers should be allowed to pick and choose which provider they want for various services. I would save with Standard Chartered and transfer money through DBS.
Unfortunately, the world of banking isn’t exactly “free-market” competition. Foreign banks like HSBC, Citi and Standard Chartered are allowed to operate in the local market provided they understand whose market it is. As such, foreign banks that deal with consumers tend to cater to only the very high-end ones and ignore the masses. They are limited in the number of branches they are allowed to operate. Back when I was an intern and Citibank was Citibank NA, rather than Citibank Pte Ltd, we had a grand total of three branches. By contrast, DBS, which is co-incidentally owned by Temasek Holdings, which is in turn owned by the Ministry of Finance, has a mere 100 plus branches across the island.
Yes, Citi, Standard Chartered, HSBC and gang have a larger international network than the local boys. However, within the domestic market, it’s the local boys who have the advantage. Every Singaporean with a savings account started out with a POSB (Post Office Savings Banks – a subsidiary of DBS) account. The local boys have had a head start on taking the local market and in a way; local people have their savings trapped in the local banks. Contrary to what the powers-that-be may tell you, Singapore’s prosperity isn’t built by foreigners pouring their money into the place, it’s built by trapping the savings of the locals and investing it elsewhere.
To be fair, the local banks have realized the importance of overseas growth markets and adapting to deal with them. United Overseas Bank (UOB) is a big player in Thailand. DBS is a big player in Hong Kong. The bank is actively modeling itself on one of the most successful international banks – Citibank. My ex-boss, Eddie Khoo, moved from Citi to DBS before heading to UOB where he runs consumer banking. More recently, DBS hired Piyush Gupta, a former Citibanker to be CEO.
Once they hit overseas markets, our local boys will have to learn to treat customers properly. However, will their love for their customers in say Hong Kong or Thailand translate into love or at least respect for the Singaporean customer?
As much as I would like it to be yes, I don’t think there’s a strong case for optimism. The big Singapore businesses that burnt overseas resort to milking more from their home base – the average Singapore consumer. Word has it that DBS was allowed to take over POSB when It started feeling the heat in the initial days of investing in China. When Temasek Holdings bought shares in the loss making Merrill Lynch, it quietly sold assets in Singapore.
A while back, I actually got into a heated debate with my favourite litigator and his partners. The crux of the argument was, one of their members had proposed that the government take a more active role in giving work to local law firms. I countered that patriotism has never been much of an effective marketing tool. Local consumers will chose price and quality over patriotism.
A year after this incident, I stick my position. As a local Singaporean business, I don’t expect the government to give me preferential treatment. What I do expect, is for the big local enterprises that I rely on like the banks to treat me like a valued customer rather than an automaton they can squeeze whenever they need to cover up for mistakes made elsewhere.
Let’s face it, after comparing the way I’ve been treated by Standard Chartered and the way I’ve been treated by DBS, I’m not thinking about Standard Chartered’s London Listing or Colonial heritage, I’m thinking of ways to move more of what little money I have their way because they give me so much more.
Extend that idea to other things. Why do we choose foreign things over local things? Could it be because the foreigners actually treat the locals with a bit more love and respect than the way we treat each other?
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Trying to Smell, the Smelly and the Downright Odious
This week has been a week for me to indulge in all things Indian. It started on Good Friday when I started working for the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Alumni Association’s PANIIT APAC 2012 event in Suntec City and it ended last night when I went out with a New Year function for the Nepali Community in Khantipur Restaurant in Little India.
Both these events were an eye-opener into the world of global migration. My Singaporean friends, especially my local Indian friends will undoubtedly hate me for this but being with both communities helps one to understand the issue of “foreigners” much better.
The PANIIT APAC 2012 event was an adrenalin rush. It was a high-powered and high-profile event. The four “stars” were the President of Singapore, the former President of Singapore, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance and the Second Minister of Home Affairs. The only event that I’ve been involved in that had a higher level group of dignitaries was the visit of Crown Prince Sultan to Singapore in 2006.
That, however, was an official state visit, organized by the Saudi and Singapore governments. This event by contrast, was a mere alumni association meeting. What made the Singapore Government provide so many high level dignitaries to grace an alumni association of a university that none of our ministers attended?
The answer is simple – it was about the global shift of economic and social gravity from West to East. The people involved in the PANIIT event were high powered professionals working for multinational corporations like CISCO and Energizer or from the significant Indian IT companies like Polaris or entrepreneurs who had started software companies in Singapore like Optimum Solutions. The Alumni who were invited to speak read like the who’s who of Indian industry. You had people like R.Gopalakrishnan, Director of Tata Sons, Ananath Krishnan, Chief Technology Officer of Tata Consultancy Services and Arjun Malhotra the co-founder and Chairman of HCL and Headstrong. You could say that the guest had influence over companies with a combined revenue equivalent to the GDP of Singapore.
When you look at things this way, the obvious conclusion is that India is rising and Singapore wants to a rising India to be one of the engines of economic growth. The days when Lee Kuan Yew looked upon India has a noisy third-word mess have long gone. With the Western World in in economic malaise, the Singapore government is especially welcome to capital coming from India and Indian professionals bringing their skills to Singapore.
On a personal level, working with this group was an energy rush. You can’t help but feel the energy coming from a room filled with highly educated and successful people. My personal experiences are such that I’ve founded that the Indian Expatriates tend to be the BEST educated and most intellectually stimulating of the groups that I’ve encountered in Singapore. I suspect the well brought up Indians are trained with the same methods that the British used back when the British had an empire (which the Brits neglected through 1960 wishy-washy liberalism).
The IIT crowd would be welcome in any country that they visited. Until this recent event, the event was held either in India or the USA. Despite all the talk about “brining jobs home” in an election year, America is well aware of the benefits of welcoming a bunch of highly educated and well to do people.
While Singapore was pulling out all the stops to welcome the chaps from the IIT Alumni Association, we have been host to people from the other end of the social scale. We don’t admit it but there is an army of barely educated Indian and Bangladeshi workers in Singapore doing all the work that we the people won’t do.
If you make a trip to Ministry of Manpower’s Foreign Manpower Division, you’ll see the way that the Singapore Government views these people – they’d rather not. If you want to be nasty to anyone, it’s always easiest to be nasty to this group. Having sympathy with them is akin to dying of AIDS.
Let’s start with the fact that the average worker is paid something as generous as S$30 a day for a 12-hour work day. They often come home to a bed space, which they pay anything from S$180 to S$300 a day for. If you take into consideration their living space and what they pay, you’ll find that the worker pays more per square foot than most luxury condominiums.
When a worker is injured, he is expected to wait for a period of anything up to 11-weeks before he gets paid. When not working, the guy is not paid and when if he has to audacity to work without permission from the Ministry, he can fined up to S$5,000. In short, the average worker is placed in a damned if you do and damned if you don’t situation.
Despite this, the locals couldn’t give a shit about people in this end of the social scale. Many regard them as a nuisance. We are happy to accept Indian and Bangladeshi workers cleaning up our shit and we think of the work they do as a favour that we do for them. A Bangladeshi worker has a cup of tea at the void deck and it’s a decline of society, a few barrow boys get pissed, beat up a few people and it’s just a minor one-off incident. Talk to enough local Singaporeans about Indian and Bangladeshi workers and they’ll tell you about drunks sleeping on the street. How true is this prejudice?
I do accept that the worker crowd can get rowdy. However, I’ve NEVER seen them get any more rowdy than the Barrow Boys after a few cold ones. I don’t blame them for getting rowdy. If you worked a 12-hour day, six days a week, you would want to let go at least once a week. Contrary to what the media headlines might tell you, this crowd has never been what you’d call a “troublemaking” crowd.
If you look at migrant communities throughout the world, you’ll find that they are generally more law abiding than the natives. I guess you could call it a knowledge that you’ll be on the wrong end of things if the police get involved. As such, these communities develop a system to take care of issues before any one decides to bring in the cops. Whenever tensions rise, a group of guys will bring parties apart to cool things down.
I look at the migrants that I know. I take one of oldest and best friends, Bijay, the Nepali Naan Maker. He came to Singapore more than a decade back. He served his National Service and has worked hard in the food and beverage line. Hang around Bijay or his friends and you’ll find that what they basically want is a small space to work hard and build a life, either with a simple job or by starting a small business. Bijay has settled here and after fathering two- daughters, he’s now about to become a father of a little boy. His wish is simple – to make his boy a more educated version of him. If you look at how Bijay has pulled himself up in the world with limited education, you can imagine how much more someone like him could do with more schooling.
Ironically, the locals who complain about migrants tend to be amongst the biggest causers of social problems. Bijay is a first class character, who is impossible to dislike. By contrast, you have members of the Pundek Family who think nothing of sponging off their friends and family. Macha Pundek was especially good at the job. He had the audacity to ask his former brother-in-law for a $2,000 loan about two-years ago. To-date the said former brother-in-law has been paid back with promises of when he’ll be receiving $10 as well as a request for more money. He mysteriously quits his job whenever the former brother-in-law ask for his own money back.
So let’s look at things this way. We will always want the guys from the IIT crowd. They have the money and they have professional skills. We will not admit it but we need the likes of the Nepali and other South Asian workers. They clean our crap and they do it pretty loyally. Now, ask ourselves, if we need the likes of Macha Pundek who thinks nothing of trying to cheat people into buying him and his equally obnoxious buddies the next round of booze.
Both these events were an eye-opener into the world of global migration. My Singaporean friends, especially my local Indian friends will undoubtedly hate me for this but being with both communities helps one to understand the issue of “foreigners” much better.
The PANIIT APAC 2012 event was an adrenalin rush. It was a high-powered and high-profile event. The four “stars” were the President of Singapore, the former President of Singapore, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance and the Second Minister of Home Affairs. The only event that I’ve been involved in that had a higher level group of dignitaries was the visit of Crown Prince Sultan to Singapore in 2006.
That, however, was an official state visit, organized by the Saudi and Singapore governments. This event by contrast, was a mere alumni association meeting. What made the Singapore Government provide so many high level dignitaries to grace an alumni association of a university that none of our ministers attended?
The answer is simple – it was about the global shift of economic and social gravity from West to East. The people involved in the PANIIT event were high powered professionals working for multinational corporations like CISCO and Energizer or from the significant Indian IT companies like Polaris or entrepreneurs who had started software companies in Singapore like Optimum Solutions. The Alumni who were invited to speak read like the who’s who of Indian industry. You had people like R.Gopalakrishnan, Director of Tata Sons, Ananath Krishnan, Chief Technology Officer of Tata Consultancy Services and Arjun Malhotra the co-founder and Chairman of HCL and Headstrong. You could say that the guest had influence over companies with a combined revenue equivalent to the GDP of Singapore.
When you look at things this way, the obvious conclusion is that India is rising and Singapore wants to a rising India to be one of the engines of economic growth. The days when Lee Kuan Yew looked upon India has a noisy third-word mess have long gone. With the Western World in in economic malaise, the Singapore government is especially welcome to capital coming from India and Indian professionals bringing their skills to Singapore.
On a personal level, working with this group was an energy rush. You can’t help but feel the energy coming from a room filled with highly educated and successful people. My personal experiences are such that I’ve founded that the Indian Expatriates tend to be the BEST educated and most intellectually stimulating of the groups that I’ve encountered in Singapore. I suspect the well brought up Indians are trained with the same methods that the British used back when the British had an empire (which the Brits neglected through 1960 wishy-washy liberalism).
The IIT crowd would be welcome in any country that they visited. Until this recent event, the event was held either in India or the USA. Despite all the talk about “brining jobs home” in an election year, America is well aware of the benefits of welcoming a bunch of highly educated and well to do people.
While Singapore was pulling out all the stops to welcome the chaps from the IIT Alumni Association, we have been host to people from the other end of the social scale. We don’t admit it but there is an army of barely educated Indian and Bangladeshi workers in Singapore doing all the work that we the people won’t do.
If you make a trip to Ministry of Manpower’s Foreign Manpower Division, you’ll see the way that the Singapore Government views these people – they’d rather not. If you want to be nasty to anyone, it’s always easiest to be nasty to this group. Having sympathy with them is akin to dying of AIDS.
Let’s start with the fact that the average worker is paid something as generous as S$30 a day for a 12-hour work day. They often come home to a bed space, which they pay anything from S$180 to S$300 a day for. If you take into consideration their living space and what they pay, you’ll find that the worker pays more per square foot than most luxury condominiums.
When a worker is injured, he is expected to wait for a period of anything up to 11-weeks before he gets paid. When not working, the guy is not paid and when if he has to audacity to work without permission from the Ministry, he can fined up to S$5,000. In short, the average worker is placed in a damned if you do and damned if you don’t situation.
Despite this, the locals couldn’t give a shit about people in this end of the social scale. Many regard them as a nuisance. We are happy to accept Indian and Bangladeshi workers cleaning up our shit and we think of the work they do as a favour that we do for them. A Bangladeshi worker has a cup of tea at the void deck and it’s a decline of society, a few barrow boys get pissed, beat up a few people and it’s just a minor one-off incident. Talk to enough local Singaporeans about Indian and Bangladeshi workers and they’ll tell you about drunks sleeping on the street. How true is this prejudice?
I do accept that the worker crowd can get rowdy. However, I’ve NEVER seen them get any more rowdy than the Barrow Boys after a few cold ones. I don’t blame them for getting rowdy. If you worked a 12-hour day, six days a week, you would want to let go at least once a week. Contrary to what the media headlines might tell you, this crowd has never been what you’d call a “troublemaking” crowd.
If you look at migrant communities throughout the world, you’ll find that they are generally more law abiding than the natives. I guess you could call it a knowledge that you’ll be on the wrong end of things if the police get involved. As such, these communities develop a system to take care of issues before any one decides to bring in the cops. Whenever tensions rise, a group of guys will bring parties apart to cool things down.
I look at the migrants that I know. I take one of oldest and best friends, Bijay, the Nepali Naan Maker. He came to Singapore more than a decade back. He served his National Service and has worked hard in the food and beverage line. Hang around Bijay or his friends and you’ll find that what they basically want is a small space to work hard and build a life, either with a simple job or by starting a small business. Bijay has settled here and after fathering two- daughters, he’s now about to become a father of a little boy. His wish is simple – to make his boy a more educated version of him. If you look at how Bijay has pulled himself up in the world with limited education, you can imagine how much more someone like him could do with more schooling.
Ironically, the locals who complain about migrants tend to be amongst the biggest causers of social problems. Bijay is a first class character, who is impossible to dislike. By contrast, you have members of the Pundek Family who think nothing of sponging off their friends and family. Macha Pundek was especially good at the job. He had the audacity to ask his former brother-in-law for a $2,000 loan about two-years ago. To-date the said former brother-in-law has been paid back with promises of when he’ll be receiving $10 as well as a request for more money. He mysteriously quits his job whenever the former brother-in-law ask for his own money back.
So let’s look at things this way. We will always want the guys from the IIT crowd. They have the money and they have professional skills. We will not admit it but we need the likes of the Nepali and other South Asian workers. They clean our crap and they do it pretty loyally. Now, ask ourselves, if we need the likes of Macha Pundek who thinks nothing of trying to cheat people into buying him and his equally obnoxious buddies the next round of booze.
Monday, April 09, 2012
Who am I?
Thanks to the influx of foreign residents in the last eight-years, Singapore has been going through something of an emotional crisis. Singaporeans of all races and religions have found themselves feeling rather crowded out by people from elsewhere and as far as most of us are concerned, home isn’t feeling like home anymore.
This is particularly true for the Indian and Chinese communities. The local Singaporean Indians are complaining that the Indians from India who are coming to Singapore are a snooty bunch who doesn’t appreciate the local Indian community for its achievements. The Singaporean Chinese complain that the Mainland Chinese are a bunch of ruffians or whores who should be left in the dustbin.
It seems that the people who pledged to become “one united people, regardless of race, language or religion,” have started expressing sentiments that are what you can only politely describe as being a little chauvinistic.
Ironically, the obvious sentiments of xenophobia have produced something that years of government indoctrination failed to do – it’s produced a natural sense of “Singaporeanism.” Local Indians and Chinese have discovered that they have more in common with each other than with the chaps coming out of Mainland China and India. I’ve had local Indians think nothing of complaining to me about how “snooty” Indian Expats are and I’ve had Singaporean Chinese think nothing about cooking pots of curry to show solidarity with their fellow Singaporeans of Indian decent when Mainland Chinese complain about the smell of curry.
Even my mother who has since become German and not lived in Singapore for a good two-decades now, has gotten into the game. We had a major fight where we didn’t speak to each other for a month because she got upset with me because I told her that I had referred to myself as a “Chinaman” on a Facebook thread. She was very upset and told me, “You are SINGAPOREAN of Chinese decent, NOT a Chinaman.”
She also made the point that our family is “Ang Moh [for readers outside Singapore, this is a Hokkien word that means “red beard” and used to refer to ethnic Caucasians] and your great-great-great-grandfather came off the boat and realized that English was the way of the future.” I could actually feel the disappointment every time I make some remark that does not show solidarity with the Western world in terms of my social life or my political views. As my sister once said, “She feels sad that you see yourself as a Chinaman and forgot that you grew up in the West.”
I don’t see what the fuss is all about. What’s the big deal about being a Chinaman rather than a Singaporean of Chinese decent? I also don’t see what the big deal about being “Western” is all about.
Perhaps it’s just me but I don’t see the difficulty in being many things all at once. Why must I be “one” thing or why do I need to owe allegiance to anyone particular culture.” Perhaps it’s my astrological make up (Sagittarius Tiger) but I have a natural aversion to things that demand my exclusive heart and mind – hence one of the reasons why I never turned to fundamentalist Christianity despite the very best efforts of an ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend. The idea of taking spiritual guidance from some White American or someone who took spiritual guidance from a White American is repulsive. Much to the distress of the ex-girlfriend, I found more God in hanging out with her 5-year old son and chatting to him about silly names he had for himself, me and his mother than I did in the service.
When it comes to religion, I am Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Sheikh etc all rolled into one. What logical person would believe that God is bothered by the crappy labels that we place on ourselves?
So, if that’s my view of God, what do people imagine my views of human culture to be like? Why do I have to Western or Eastern? Why can’t I be both? Look, I speak English and I operate in English. I grew up in the Western Education system (England and Singapore has an English-based system). So, I guess you could say I am very “western” in my outlook on life.
You could say that this blog is the least “Asian” thing about me. I don’t see myself as particularly outspoken. I have been known to use tact and diplomacy to get things done. However, I don’t believe in being shy about expressing my opinions for the sake of being shy. There are times when you need to say something so you should say it.
Another “Westernised” or “Buddhist” side of me is that I don’t easily except things because that’s supposed to be the way things are. Asians or at least the East Asians (South Asians are different in this respect. Let’s not forget that the Buddha was a Nepali Prince) tend to accept things as they are because that’s the way things having been. Questioning is not looked upon favourably. You have Confucius to blame for this – he drummed it into the East Asian psyche that life was best when there was order under the benevolent heavenly king, which needless to say, never existed, except in his imagination.
Yet, at the same time, I do not see myself as a Westerner. Even when I lived in England, I never wanted to become an ‘Englishman.’ It was always clear to me that while I lived in England, I would one day leave and be back in Asia, particularly Singapore.
Singapore remains the place where my blood ties are, though these are admittedly thinning out as old relatives die out and younger ones move elsewhere. For all that I’ve complained about Singapore, this remains the only country I have an obligation to defend. My closest friends come from Singapore, namely during my National Service days. These are ties that you don’t ignore easily.
It’s also helped that my professional life has been formed in Singapore. My professional life or at least my value add to the people pay me is the fact that I know Singapore as it is, which means I know the nitty-gritty of how to get things done. Yes, I do have skills. The principles of pitching a story are the same wherever you are. However, the business I’m in requires me to have a network and the network I’ve built up is here. Yes, my clients come from elsewhere but they want to operate here and that’s why I get hired.
I am Singaporean in that I hold a Singapore passport. I function in Singapore and I have family in Singapore. This is the country that I am obliged to defend in a time of war and at the same time this is a country that has given me a rather pleasant home, even if I do spend a lot of time being critical of certain things about this home.
I don’t need the Chinaman or the Englishman to tell me that I am Singaporean. This is the place that I have become most familiar with for better or for worse.
Yet, at the same time, I don’t have a problem being Chinese. I don’t operate in Mandarin or Cantonese as well as I do in English. I’ve never been in China and I do not exactly have a cultural and emotional link with the average Chinaman – that was even when I had a mainland Chinese girlfriend.
Having said that, I’ve always felt most at home whenever I’ve been in a Chinese community. My favourite parts of Western cities happen to be the Chinatowns. There’s a familiarity of things like food, language and a shared sense of being within a larger global community.
I don’t indulge in many of the Chinese cultural symbols. I don’t gamble nor do I listen to Chinese music (I listen to Hindi music and I don’t listen to music in Mandarin). However, I do watch Chinese fighting movies and I do identify with the heroes in Chinese Gung Fu movies, who for the most part are outsiders fighting against something or other. I am attached to Chinese New Year. I don’t have a problem with Mainland China taking over the world.
I am an ethnic Chinese with a Singapore passport, who has made his life in Singapore. I happen to think and express myself in English. I don’t have a problem being of many cultures. I think this is something that people will need to be comfortable with.
I am Tang Li
This is particularly true for the Indian and Chinese communities. The local Singaporean Indians are complaining that the Indians from India who are coming to Singapore are a snooty bunch who doesn’t appreciate the local Indian community for its achievements. The Singaporean Chinese complain that the Mainland Chinese are a bunch of ruffians or whores who should be left in the dustbin.
It seems that the people who pledged to become “one united people, regardless of race, language or religion,” have started expressing sentiments that are what you can only politely describe as being a little chauvinistic.
Ironically, the obvious sentiments of xenophobia have produced something that years of government indoctrination failed to do – it’s produced a natural sense of “Singaporeanism.” Local Indians and Chinese have discovered that they have more in common with each other than with the chaps coming out of Mainland China and India. I’ve had local Indians think nothing of complaining to me about how “snooty” Indian Expats are and I’ve had Singaporean Chinese think nothing about cooking pots of curry to show solidarity with their fellow Singaporeans of Indian decent when Mainland Chinese complain about the smell of curry.
Even my mother who has since become German and not lived in Singapore for a good two-decades now, has gotten into the game. We had a major fight where we didn’t speak to each other for a month because she got upset with me because I told her that I had referred to myself as a “Chinaman” on a Facebook thread. She was very upset and told me, “You are SINGAPOREAN of Chinese decent, NOT a Chinaman.”
She also made the point that our family is “Ang Moh [for readers outside Singapore, this is a Hokkien word that means “red beard” and used to refer to ethnic Caucasians] and your great-great-great-grandfather came off the boat and realized that English was the way of the future.” I could actually feel the disappointment every time I make some remark that does not show solidarity with the Western world in terms of my social life or my political views. As my sister once said, “She feels sad that you see yourself as a Chinaman and forgot that you grew up in the West.”
I don’t see what the fuss is all about. What’s the big deal about being a Chinaman rather than a Singaporean of Chinese decent? I also don’t see what the big deal about being “Western” is all about.
Perhaps it’s just me but I don’t see the difficulty in being many things all at once. Why must I be “one” thing or why do I need to owe allegiance to anyone particular culture.” Perhaps it’s my astrological make up (Sagittarius Tiger) but I have a natural aversion to things that demand my exclusive heart and mind – hence one of the reasons why I never turned to fundamentalist Christianity despite the very best efforts of an ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend. The idea of taking spiritual guidance from some White American or someone who took spiritual guidance from a White American is repulsive. Much to the distress of the ex-girlfriend, I found more God in hanging out with her 5-year old son and chatting to him about silly names he had for himself, me and his mother than I did in the service.
When it comes to religion, I am Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Sheikh etc all rolled into one. What logical person would believe that God is bothered by the crappy labels that we place on ourselves?
So, if that’s my view of God, what do people imagine my views of human culture to be like? Why do I have to Western or Eastern? Why can’t I be both? Look, I speak English and I operate in English. I grew up in the Western Education system (England and Singapore has an English-based system). So, I guess you could say I am very “western” in my outlook on life.
You could say that this blog is the least “Asian” thing about me. I don’t see myself as particularly outspoken. I have been known to use tact and diplomacy to get things done. However, I don’t believe in being shy about expressing my opinions for the sake of being shy. There are times when you need to say something so you should say it.
Another “Westernised” or “Buddhist” side of me is that I don’t easily except things because that’s supposed to be the way things are. Asians or at least the East Asians (South Asians are different in this respect. Let’s not forget that the Buddha was a Nepali Prince) tend to accept things as they are because that’s the way things having been. Questioning is not looked upon favourably. You have Confucius to blame for this – he drummed it into the East Asian psyche that life was best when there was order under the benevolent heavenly king, which needless to say, never existed, except in his imagination.
Yet, at the same time, I do not see myself as a Westerner. Even when I lived in England, I never wanted to become an ‘Englishman.’ It was always clear to me that while I lived in England, I would one day leave and be back in Asia, particularly Singapore.
Singapore remains the place where my blood ties are, though these are admittedly thinning out as old relatives die out and younger ones move elsewhere. For all that I’ve complained about Singapore, this remains the only country I have an obligation to defend. My closest friends come from Singapore, namely during my National Service days. These are ties that you don’t ignore easily.
It’s also helped that my professional life has been formed in Singapore. My professional life or at least my value add to the people pay me is the fact that I know Singapore as it is, which means I know the nitty-gritty of how to get things done. Yes, I do have skills. The principles of pitching a story are the same wherever you are. However, the business I’m in requires me to have a network and the network I’ve built up is here. Yes, my clients come from elsewhere but they want to operate here and that’s why I get hired.
I am Singaporean in that I hold a Singapore passport. I function in Singapore and I have family in Singapore. This is the country that I am obliged to defend in a time of war and at the same time this is a country that has given me a rather pleasant home, even if I do spend a lot of time being critical of certain things about this home.
I don’t need the Chinaman or the Englishman to tell me that I am Singaporean. This is the place that I have become most familiar with for better or for worse.
Yet, at the same time, I don’t have a problem being Chinese. I don’t operate in Mandarin or Cantonese as well as I do in English. I’ve never been in China and I do not exactly have a cultural and emotional link with the average Chinaman – that was even when I had a mainland Chinese girlfriend.
Having said that, I’ve always felt most at home whenever I’ve been in a Chinese community. My favourite parts of Western cities happen to be the Chinatowns. There’s a familiarity of things like food, language and a shared sense of being within a larger global community.
I don’t indulge in many of the Chinese cultural symbols. I don’t gamble nor do I listen to Chinese music (I listen to Hindi music and I don’t listen to music in Mandarin). However, I do watch Chinese fighting movies and I do identify with the heroes in Chinese Gung Fu movies, who for the most part are outsiders fighting against something or other. I am attached to Chinese New Year. I don’t have a problem with Mainland China taking over the world.
I am an ethnic Chinese with a Singapore passport, who has made his life in Singapore. I happen to think and express myself in English. I don’t have a problem being of many cultures. I think this is something that people will need to be comfortable with.
I am Tang Li
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Major Wrongs
One of the nicest things about living in Singapore is that you always have to have faith in the system to inspire you. Just when I thought I was running out of things to blog about, along comes the Young Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC who proudly eats pork aka Thambi Pundek to remind me what’s wrong with Singapore – thus giving me something to blog about.
For some reason he decided to tell me about his national service in the air conditioned office. It seems that a few days ago there was a major who decided to drive through camp gates without going through the proper security channels. To stop the major, the Regimental Policeman (RP) on duty ended up pointing his riffle at the man’s car (as he is expected to under the rules).
Upon seeing a gun pointed at him, the major stepped out of his car, walked up to the RP – grabbed him by the neck and apparently said, “You dare to treat me like a terrorist – it’s you Muslims who are the bloody terrorist.” To his credit, the RP didn’t flinch and called the man a “Chinese Cunt.” The enraged major took this issue up with the camp’s management and the RP has been duly charged and sentenced to do time in the Detention Barracks (DB) – thus prolonging his National Service and probably earned him a criminal record using his gun.
I got upset when he told me this story and I think there were several times when I was ready to throw my cup at him. I pray that this story is not true and he’s fabricating it. However, since I actually served National Service (combat role and combat unit), I believe that this story is plausible and illustrates one of the greatest wrongs with Singapore today –namely, we have now become two societies with two different rules and we have revolting people like the Young Pork Eating Muslim Politician from Paris Ris GRC aka Thambi Pundek, who instead of fighting to make the system better, fight to enforce the status quo.
Guard Duty is one of the most important duties of a junior commander. When you are on duty, you are responsible for the security of the camp. You have to ensure that people entering the camp are the people who should be entering the camp and you have to see that those people who say they’ll leave the camp at a certain time actually do so.
To do this job, guard commanders and the RPs are given certain powers. They can and should stop everyone driving into camp and check that they have the necessary IDs. Both guards and regimental police have the right to search vehicles regardless of who is driving the car. The Guards and RPs have the right to order people out of their cars – at gun point if deemed necessary. Both Camp Guards and RPs are within their rights to shoot a person who does not halt when they are told to do so (theoretically you are supposed to give three warnings and fire a warning shot before you shoot the bugger).
This is generally how things are supposed to be run. In practice, we do give a bit of leeway when executing our duties. For example, many of us tend to be less stringent when checking people from our own unit – ie we know the people who should be coming in and out of the camp. The rule book does say that nobody books into camp from 0000-to-0630. It also does say that the guard commander should be flexible when it comes to anyone with a rank of major and above. The rules about checking ID still apply. In Khatib Camp, where I was stationed, the one person whom you didn’t need to check with the Chief of Artillery whose car was the most recognizable in the camp. When he drove by, you just saluted.
From experiences, the top people (major and above) were usually very nice. I remember stopping the Head Logistics of HQ SA. When he pointed out that his car had a camp pass, I pointed out that the sticker on the car only permitted the car to enter the camp – not the driver. This was a man with class. He looked at me and said, “keep up the good work – you are doing an important job and you should do it by the rules.” What I found to be true in my military experiences, I’ve found to be true in my civilian experiences. The high level people that I now deal with (CEOs, MDs, GMs, MPs, and Ministers etc.) tend to be pleasant and very reasonable.
The shit heads belong to middle management. In the army, this usually means senior members of the Warrant Officer and Specialist Corps and junior officers (usually captains) are the ones who give you the most problems. These are the ones who throw tantrums and threaten you for doing your job. It’s as if they expect you to create a special exemption for them just because they are senior to you. The best way to handle this lot is to your job because … well the rules are on your side.
Being a power drunk shit is not limited to Singapore. I remember reading about a Sergeant-Major in the US military who once was responsible for enforcing speed limits in camp. He points out that there were colonels who would remind him that they outranked him several times. His standard reply was, “I appreciate the fact that you outrank me Sir, but you should also be aware that because you outrank me several times over, you should be even more embarrassed to be in this situation, Sir.”
I’ve not experienced a junior commander in this Singapore military having this much confidence in dealing with their superiors. However, many of us eventually learn to be firm and diplomatic as we mature through our service period. If I look back at my previous experiences, I wish I had been more firm on certain occasions because, well, I never realized my Duty Officers were quite supportive.
My national service period was in the pre-September 11, 2001 period. The military, like organizations took security seriously but not fanatically. These days, things are officially different. Security measures have been stepped up since my day. So you would imagine that people would have become more cooperative when it comes to enforcing basic security measures inside a military camp.
Judging by the way the Young Pork Eating Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC aka Thambi Pundek tells this story, I can’t help but feel that a major wrong has taken place and it shows me that there’s something drastically wrong in the way the system is applied.
Let’s start with the fact that the major did not do through the check points he was supposed to go through. By definition he has already broken the rules.
Then let’s go to the fact that the RP pointed a rifle at his car. Does this action sound drastic? Yes, it does. I don’t recall being in a situation where I had to point a rifle at anyone and I don’t think I’m alone in this. I mean there were times when I was tempted to but it never seemed worth it. Having said all of that, times have changed. This is the post September 9, 2001 world where the mantra is – you can never be too prepared when it comes to enforcing security measures. Let’s add to the fact that as the Young Pork Eating Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC aka Thambi Pundek says, “The RP was acting as directed by Standard Operating Procedures (SOP).” To me, the RP’s actions sounded a little drastic but he was well within his obligations to do what he did.
Let’s look at the Major’s reaction. Yes, it’s not nice to have a gun pointed at you. However, as a senior officer, this particular Major could have addressed the issue calmly and firmly. Instead, he reacted angrily and grabs the RP by the neck. By any military and civil definition, this is assault, which is a felony. I would argue that the RP’s mistake was not to promise to shoot the major for approaching him in what I could only imagine to be an agitated manor.
I look back at my senior officers and I feel I lived in a different era. I remember then Major (now full colonel) Tan Chong Boon, the former CO of 21 SA telling the unit Physical Training Instructor (PTI) that he expected him to be firm in conducting IPPT for officers ie he was not to be intimidated by his superiors into letting them pass with an easier standard. This is leadership – to give your subordinates confidence to do their jobs without being bullied.
Like I said, I hope this is just the Young Pork Eating Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC aka Thambi Pundek being silly. It shocks me that when it comes to this incident, a young full time National Serviceman’s life is going to be ruined just because he did his job according to the letter of the rules.
The Young Pork Eating Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC aka Thambi Pundek proceeded to argue with me. His point was, the RP should have known that you can never win a fight with ones superiors and he should have let the major carry on. His point was simple – serve your national service and don’t rock the boat.
May be he has a point. Why rock the boat? However, if you apply his thought process to this incident and see how it applies to how he views the rest of his life, you can’t help but shudder. This Young Thing is actively endorsing the idea of – One Rule for Some and One Rule for Another.
I can’t fathom it? The RP was punished for doing his job and the major gets off with not so much as a slap on the wrist when he was nearly wrong at every turn. Yes, rank rules in the military. This isn't’t unique to Singapore. However, those with rank are expected to play by the rules and to uphold the rules. They are NOT supposed to break the rules and to endorse rule breaking by punishing those who enforce the rules when they actually do their jobs.
Seriously, how can we call ourselves a “non-corrupt” society when we tolerate these things happening? A major wrong has been committed by anybody’s definition.
For some reason he decided to tell me about his national service in the air conditioned office. It seems that a few days ago there was a major who decided to drive through camp gates without going through the proper security channels. To stop the major, the Regimental Policeman (RP) on duty ended up pointing his riffle at the man’s car (as he is expected to under the rules).
Upon seeing a gun pointed at him, the major stepped out of his car, walked up to the RP – grabbed him by the neck and apparently said, “You dare to treat me like a terrorist – it’s you Muslims who are the bloody terrorist.” To his credit, the RP didn’t flinch and called the man a “Chinese Cunt.” The enraged major took this issue up with the camp’s management and the RP has been duly charged and sentenced to do time in the Detention Barracks (DB) – thus prolonging his National Service and probably earned him a criminal record using his gun.
I got upset when he told me this story and I think there were several times when I was ready to throw my cup at him. I pray that this story is not true and he’s fabricating it. However, since I actually served National Service (combat role and combat unit), I believe that this story is plausible and illustrates one of the greatest wrongs with Singapore today –namely, we have now become two societies with two different rules and we have revolting people like the Young Pork Eating Muslim Politician from Paris Ris GRC aka Thambi Pundek, who instead of fighting to make the system better, fight to enforce the status quo.
Guard Duty is one of the most important duties of a junior commander. When you are on duty, you are responsible for the security of the camp. You have to ensure that people entering the camp are the people who should be entering the camp and you have to see that those people who say they’ll leave the camp at a certain time actually do so.
To do this job, guard commanders and the RPs are given certain powers. They can and should stop everyone driving into camp and check that they have the necessary IDs. Both guards and regimental police have the right to search vehicles regardless of who is driving the car. The Guards and RPs have the right to order people out of their cars – at gun point if deemed necessary. Both Camp Guards and RPs are within their rights to shoot a person who does not halt when they are told to do so (theoretically you are supposed to give three warnings and fire a warning shot before you shoot the bugger).
This is generally how things are supposed to be run. In practice, we do give a bit of leeway when executing our duties. For example, many of us tend to be less stringent when checking people from our own unit – ie we know the people who should be coming in and out of the camp. The rule book does say that nobody books into camp from 0000-to-0630. It also does say that the guard commander should be flexible when it comes to anyone with a rank of major and above. The rules about checking ID still apply. In Khatib Camp, where I was stationed, the one person whom you didn’t need to check with the Chief of Artillery whose car was the most recognizable in the camp. When he drove by, you just saluted.
From experiences, the top people (major and above) were usually very nice. I remember stopping the Head Logistics of HQ SA. When he pointed out that his car had a camp pass, I pointed out that the sticker on the car only permitted the car to enter the camp – not the driver. This was a man with class. He looked at me and said, “keep up the good work – you are doing an important job and you should do it by the rules.” What I found to be true in my military experiences, I’ve found to be true in my civilian experiences. The high level people that I now deal with (CEOs, MDs, GMs, MPs, and Ministers etc.) tend to be pleasant and very reasonable.
The shit heads belong to middle management. In the army, this usually means senior members of the Warrant Officer and Specialist Corps and junior officers (usually captains) are the ones who give you the most problems. These are the ones who throw tantrums and threaten you for doing your job. It’s as if they expect you to create a special exemption for them just because they are senior to you. The best way to handle this lot is to your job because … well the rules are on your side.
Being a power drunk shit is not limited to Singapore. I remember reading about a Sergeant-Major in the US military who once was responsible for enforcing speed limits in camp. He points out that there were colonels who would remind him that they outranked him several times. His standard reply was, “I appreciate the fact that you outrank me Sir, but you should also be aware that because you outrank me several times over, you should be even more embarrassed to be in this situation, Sir.”
I’ve not experienced a junior commander in this Singapore military having this much confidence in dealing with their superiors. However, many of us eventually learn to be firm and diplomatic as we mature through our service period. If I look back at my previous experiences, I wish I had been more firm on certain occasions because, well, I never realized my Duty Officers were quite supportive.
My national service period was in the pre-September 11, 2001 period. The military, like organizations took security seriously but not fanatically. These days, things are officially different. Security measures have been stepped up since my day. So you would imagine that people would have become more cooperative when it comes to enforcing basic security measures inside a military camp.
Judging by the way the Young Pork Eating Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC aka Thambi Pundek tells this story, I can’t help but feel that a major wrong has taken place and it shows me that there’s something drastically wrong in the way the system is applied.
Let’s start with the fact that the major did not do through the check points he was supposed to go through. By definition he has already broken the rules.
Then let’s go to the fact that the RP pointed a rifle at his car. Does this action sound drastic? Yes, it does. I don’t recall being in a situation where I had to point a rifle at anyone and I don’t think I’m alone in this. I mean there were times when I was tempted to but it never seemed worth it. Having said all of that, times have changed. This is the post September 9, 2001 world where the mantra is – you can never be too prepared when it comes to enforcing security measures. Let’s add to the fact that as the Young Pork Eating Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC aka Thambi Pundek says, “The RP was acting as directed by Standard Operating Procedures (SOP).” To me, the RP’s actions sounded a little drastic but he was well within his obligations to do what he did.
Let’s look at the Major’s reaction. Yes, it’s not nice to have a gun pointed at you. However, as a senior officer, this particular Major could have addressed the issue calmly and firmly. Instead, he reacted angrily and grabs the RP by the neck. By any military and civil definition, this is assault, which is a felony. I would argue that the RP’s mistake was not to promise to shoot the major for approaching him in what I could only imagine to be an agitated manor.
I look back at my senior officers and I feel I lived in a different era. I remember then Major (now full colonel) Tan Chong Boon, the former CO of 21 SA telling the unit Physical Training Instructor (PTI) that he expected him to be firm in conducting IPPT for officers ie he was not to be intimidated by his superiors into letting them pass with an easier standard. This is leadership – to give your subordinates confidence to do their jobs without being bullied.
Like I said, I hope this is just the Young Pork Eating Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC aka Thambi Pundek being silly. It shocks me that when it comes to this incident, a young full time National Serviceman’s life is going to be ruined just because he did his job according to the letter of the rules.
The Young Pork Eating Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC aka Thambi Pundek proceeded to argue with me. His point was, the RP should have known that you can never win a fight with ones superiors and he should have let the major carry on. His point was simple – serve your national service and don’t rock the boat.
May be he has a point. Why rock the boat? However, if you apply his thought process to this incident and see how it applies to how he views the rest of his life, you can’t help but shudder. This Young Thing is actively endorsing the idea of – One Rule for Some and One Rule for Another.
I can’t fathom it? The RP was punished for doing his job and the major gets off with not so much as a slap on the wrist when he was nearly wrong at every turn. Yes, rank rules in the military. This isn't’t unique to Singapore. However, those with rank are expected to play by the rules and to uphold the rules. They are NOT supposed to break the rules and to endorse rule breaking by punishing those who enforce the rules when they actually do their jobs.
Seriously, how can we call ourselves a “non-corrupt” society when we tolerate these things happening? A major wrong has been committed by anybody’s definition.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
All at School
There have a few letters in Singapore's Today newspaper talking about our education system. The debate has centred around the fact that despite all the praise that has been heaped on Singapore's achievements in education, we have produced virtually no leaders of global corporations.
This is a rather timely debate. Despite being an economic miracle, Singapore's policy makers are worried. The question amongst a few members of the 'chattering' classes is what exactly is "next" for Singapore? To prepare for what comes next, one has to look at the schools.
Singapore's school system is pretty darn good. We inherited the old British colonial system and instead of making it "wis hy-washy" as the British did in the 60s (the year they invented the comprehensive system), we decided to make ours a little harsher and til this day, we are not making any apologies for it.
On the surface of things, there's no reason for it. Singapore kicks arse in things like global competitive scores for mathematics and science. We have gone from a barely literate population from my grandparents day to total literacy in mine. We are especially good when it comes to exams. Go to any overseas varsity and you'll find that Singaporeans usually top the class - simple, our training gets us geared up for exams in a way that Western schools don't.
In terms of economics, the system has also served us well. Foreign investors do pump in big money into Singapore mainly because we have a pool of highly skilled workers. Both 3M and Alcon built factories in Singapore rather than in cheaper locations around the region because we had a pool of skilled workers that our neighbours did not have.
So, why on earth are we wringing our hands over education? Well, the answer is this simple. Despite all our achievements in education we have produced NO Nobel Prize winners. There is no such thing as a globally renown artist who was educated in the Singapore system. It's not just the multinationals that are run by foreigners. To get ahead in government service, you need to spend a stint of your education elsewhere. All three of our Prime Ministers have had to study elsewhere for a period of time. When Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's closest thing to an intellectual, encouraged Singaporeans to send their kids to our wonderfully good local universities, someone asked him where his daughters were studying. Mr Mahbubani suddenly became very silent on the topic.
A friend of mine said it best - "Every year so many jobs are created. We are told we need so many foreigners are needed to do those jobs. Then you ask, why can't the locals do them. Then, if the locals are not qualified, you have to look at what the locals have in common."
So, here's the question - why isn't the education system producing leaders and why is it even a worry.
As with most things in Singapore, the question lies with basic economics and politics. Back in the early days of independence there was a need to build the country as quickly as possible. The answer in those days was to go against the grain of what post colonial societies were doing and welcome Western and Japanese multinationals to hire people and build the economy. To bring in the multinationals in those days, you simply needed to be cheaper than the home nation. Our secret was to produce an educated and compliant workforce.
Hey presto, we gave the MNCs a pool of workers who were qualified to the do the work and didn't get into the nasty habit of going on strike. Lee Kuan Yew would make darn sure that no interest group could do to him what the miner's did to Ted Heath in the UK. He dealt with trouble makers ruthlessly and rewarded compliance.
Unfortunately times have changed. The rest of Asia has become a reasonable place to deal with and they're advantages in size are starting to count. Put it simply, Singapore will NEVER make things more cheaply than China or Vietnam and they will never service as cheaply as India or the Philippines - and that remains the case even if you were to get every Singaporean worker to work for a token sum instead of a living wage.
Singapore has played up its advantages of being a safe haven. So the multinationals may do their business elsewhere but chances are the headquarters will be in Singapore. Ask any expatriate why they're in Singapore and they'll tell you that life is comfortable - often far more so than in their home country.
However, that still does not make the Singaporean any better off. Yes, we have lots of expats living here and they're spending money on high priced booze. But that doesn't exactly generate a good living for Singaporeans. We, as a population remain in the sandwiched class between expats on top and labourers at the bottom. To make matters more comfortable, the government has been on a drive to reduce our dependency on "foreign labour" at the bottom of the ladder. The top remains stubournely foreign.
In the last decade of living in Singapore, it remains rare to find a Singaporean running the Singapore operations of a multinational. David Tang of DDB remains the only Singaporean running the Singapore office of a multinational. Ed Ng, formerly regional CEO of GE Commercial Finance South East Asia was a unique species who had an American reporting to him. Outside these two, the Singaporean bosses have all been entrepreneurs - Palani Pillai and Lim Sau Hong come to mind.
Part of the reason is cultural. To climb in a multinational, you need to have overseas experience. A good deal of Singaporeans don't like to travel simply because you never know when you get to see family. Both Eddie Khoo, now head of consumer banking for United Overseas Bank and Edmund Koh, President of UBS Singapore, were ex-Citibankers who moved to smaller banks (admittedly in higher positions) for the very simple reason - they climbed as high as they could in Citi Singapore and any higher would have meant relocating elsewhere.
Westerners and now the Indian Expatriates don't have such qualms about moving around. As such, these groups find it easier to move up the international corporate ladder. UL's head in Asia-Pacific is from Kerela and there's Deepak Sharma, Chairman of Citi Private Bank who was an Indian Citizen who now happily resides in Singapore.
However, the desire not to travel isn't the only reason why Singaporeans don't fly high. The sad truth happens to be the fact that Singaporeans simply don't match up for many of the top jobs.
Our system has produced good workers, people who can do the job as well as anyone in the world. However, this is only just one quality required in today's multinational. I think of my ex-boss Monical Alsagoff who would tell us,"It's not the best person for the job who gets the job. It's the person who sells him or herself best who gets the job." Neil French, the former WPP Global Creative Head used to pride himself in his ability to sell himself.
Singaporeans are notoriously bad at self-promotion. You could argue that we are a naturally modest people. However, that's not exactly true either. We are competitive - the local word that comes to mind is Kiasu, Hokkien for scared to lose. We are one of the few places on earth where I know of, where students will deliberately hide reference books in the library to ensure no one else can get that elusive "a"grade. We simply don't like to stand out because our system usually slaps down the chap who tries to stand out. I remember the phrase, "Why you so special," used more than once when I was in National Service. In other places, being "special" is something to be proud of. In Singapore it is to mark yourself out for trouble.
We fear getting into trouble far more than we like success. Yes, it's always good to be careful. Better use a condom before sleeping with that sexy hunk/chick giving you the eye. However, fear of failure tends to breed something rather more worrying than caution - a lack of a sense of ownership.
Think back to Mas Selamat's escape from Whitley Prison. The Home Affairs Minister spent an unhealthy amount of time explaining why it wasn't his fault that a limping man escaped a highly secured facility instead on focusing on a solution. I think back to my National Service days when I stupidly did not check ammunition when taking over the guard room and got slapped by the Battalion Orderly Sergeant for it. The RP Sergeant told me later on, "Too bad you already signed the take over slip, otherwise you could have blamed it on your men."
Somewhere, somehow we are taught that responsibility equals trouble. Best to avoid responsbility and therefore trouble. Til this day, I would not have blamed the men under my command for a mistake I made but I guess that makes me a nut job of sorts.
Being on top means you have to take responsibility for issues that crop up. The rewards are of course greater when you reach the top but so are the risk. America does produce the people who climb to the top because they're willing to answer with their jobs. It doesn't happen in Singapore. Far better to blame foreigners than take the burden of blame onto yourself.
I think of a venture I'm trying to kick start with a friend of mine who is a chef. I believe there's room for him to do some catering on the side. I've unlisted the help of another friend to do up the promotional materials. Her contribution to this venture has been to tell me to seek an older person's instructions on how to do things step-by-step.
It worries me that this is the mentality of a young Singaporean. Yes, the venture has a risk to it. It may not start let alone succeed or fail. It's an idea that I think is worth pursuing and its worth working at. Yes, failure is likely but you never know until you try.
I take the view that you can minimise failure by consulting those who have been down the road before you. However, one has to take ultimate responsibility for ones own actions.
The idea of going into business with someone telling you how to do it step-by-step is a sign that one should not even be in private enterprise. It shows that you have the need to pass the responsbility onto someone else. -It shows that you want to say at the end of the day is "It wasn't me."
Once again, let's compare Wong Kan Seng and the Singapore Government's reaction to Mas Selmat's escape to John McCain's reaction to his election defeat. Who would you follow? Who would you trust. The man who insist on being paid millions and yet denies all responsibility for things that happen. Or would you trust the man who admits to his mistakes and says sorry?
I remember The Young Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC who drinks during the day in Ramadan aka Thambi Pundek saying,"Of course you don't apologise - that's how you keep your job."
Well, the problem is, jobs can be outsourced to someone cheaper or a technology can make what you do obsolete. You either find a way of being responsible for yourself and creating something for yourself or you die waiting for the government to give you things.
Something needs to be done and the right place to start is at home and at school. Children need to be taught that its good to be responsible for your actions. That's how you get better.
The Young Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC aka Thambi Pundek always tells me that we must salute to the "superior culture" of the West. I ask, why do we need to salute a "superior culture" where we can create one that's as good if not better for ourselves. I think that's a question the super geniouses in government should ponder upon
This is a rather timely debate. Despite being an economic miracle, Singapore's policy makers are worried. The question amongst a few members of the 'chattering' classes is what exactly is "next" for Singapore? To prepare for what comes next, one has to look at the schools.
Singapore's school system is pretty darn good. We inherited the old British colonial system and instead of making it "wis hy-washy" as the British did in the 60s (the year they invented the comprehensive system), we decided to make ours a little harsher and til this day, we are not making any apologies for it.
On the surface of things, there's no reason for it. Singapore kicks arse in things like global competitive scores for mathematics and science. We have gone from a barely literate population from my grandparents day to total literacy in mine. We are especially good when it comes to exams. Go to any overseas varsity and you'll find that Singaporeans usually top the class - simple, our training gets us geared up for exams in a way that Western schools don't.
In terms of economics, the system has also served us well. Foreign investors do pump in big money into Singapore mainly because we have a pool of highly skilled workers. Both 3M and Alcon built factories in Singapore rather than in cheaper locations around the region because we had a pool of skilled workers that our neighbours did not have.
So, why on earth are we wringing our hands over education? Well, the answer is this simple. Despite all our achievements in education we have produced NO Nobel Prize winners. There is no such thing as a globally renown artist who was educated in the Singapore system. It's not just the multinationals that are run by foreigners. To get ahead in government service, you need to spend a stint of your education elsewhere. All three of our Prime Ministers have had to study elsewhere for a period of time. When Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's closest thing to an intellectual, encouraged Singaporeans to send their kids to our wonderfully good local universities, someone asked him where his daughters were studying. Mr Mahbubani suddenly became very silent on the topic.
A friend of mine said it best - "Every year so many jobs are created. We are told we need so many foreigners are needed to do those jobs. Then you ask, why can't the locals do them. Then, if the locals are not qualified, you have to look at what the locals have in common."
So, here's the question - why isn't the education system producing leaders and why is it even a worry.
As with most things in Singapore, the question lies with basic economics and politics. Back in the early days of independence there was a need to build the country as quickly as possible. The answer in those days was to go against the grain of what post colonial societies were doing and welcome Western and Japanese multinationals to hire people and build the economy. To bring in the multinationals in those days, you simply needed to be cheaper than the home nation. Our secret was to produce an educated and compliant workforce.
Hey presto, we gave the MNCs a pool of workers who were qualified to the do the work and didn't get into the nasty habit of going on strike. Lee Kuan Yew would make darn sure that no interest group could do to him what the miner's did to Ted Heath in the UK. He dealt with trouble makers ruthlessly and rewarded compliance.
Unfortunately times have changed. The rest of Asia has become a reasonable place to deal with and they're advantages in size are starting to count. Put it simply, Singapore will NEVER make things more cheaply than China or Vietnam and they will never service as cheaply as India or the Philippines - and that remains the case even if you were to get every Singaporean worker to work for a token sum instead of a living wage.
Singapore has played up its advantages of being a safe haven. So the multinationals may do their business elsewhere but chances are the headquarters will be in Singapore. Ask any expatriate why they're in Singapore and they'll tell you that life is comfortable - often far more so than in their home country.
However, that still does not make the Singaporean any better off. Yes, we have lots of expats living here and they're spending money on high priced booze. But that doesn't exactly generate a good living for Singaporeans. We, as a population remain in the sandwiched class between expats on top and labourers at the bottom. To make matters more comfortable, the government has been on a drive to reduce our dependency on "foreign labour" at the bottom of the ladder. The top remains stubournely foreign.
In the last decade of living in Singapore, it remains rare to find a Singaporean running the Singapore operations of a multinational. David Tang of DDB remains the only Singaporean running the Singapore office of a multinational. Ed Ng, formerly regional CEO of GE Commercial Finance South East Asia was a unique species who had an American reporting to him. Outside these two, the Singaporean bosses have all been entrepreneurs - Palani Pillai and Lim Sau Hong come to mind.
Part of the reason is cultural. To climb in a multinational, you need to have overseas experience. A good deal of Singaporeans don't like to travel simply because you never know when you get to see family. Both Eddie Khoo, now head of consumer banking for United Overseas Bank and Edmund Koh, President of UBS Singapore, were ex-Citibankers who moved to smaller banks (admittedly in higher positions) for the very simple reason - they climbed as high as they could in Citi Singapore and any higher would have meant relocating elsewhere.
Westerners and now the Indian Expatriates don't have such qualms about moving around. As such, these groups find it easier to move up the international corporate ladder. UL's head in Asia-Pacific is from Kerela and there's Deepak Sharma, Chairman of Citi Private Bank who was an Indian Citizen who now happily resides in Singapore.
However, the desire not to travel isn't the only reason why Singaporeans don't fly high. The sad truth happens to be the fact that Singaporeans simply don't match up for many of the top jobs.
Our system has produced good workers, people who can do the job as well as anyone in the world. However, this is only just one quality required in today's multinational. I think of my ex-boss Monical Alsagoff who would tell us,"It's not the best person for the job who gets the job. It's the person who sells him or herself best who gets the job." Neil French, the former WPP Global Creative Head used to pride himself in his ability to sell himself.
Singaporeans are notoriously bad at self-promotion. You could argue that we are a naturally modest people. However, that's not exactly true either. We are competitive - the local word that comes to mind is Kiasu, Hokkien for scared to lose. We are one of the few places on earth where I know of, where students will deliberately hide reference books in the library to ensure no one else can get that elusive "a"grade. We simply don't like to stand out because our system usually slaps down the chap who tries to stand out. I remember the phrase, "Why you so special," used more than once when I was in National Service. In other places, being "special" is something to be proud of. In Singapore it is to mark yourself out for trouble.
We fear getting into trouble far more than we like success. Yes, it's always good to be careful. Better use a condom before sleeping with that sexy hunk/chick giving you the eye. However, fear of failure tends to breed something rather more worrying than caution - a lack of a sense of ownership.
Think back to Mas Selamat's escape from Whitley Prison. The Home Affairs Minister spent an unhealthy amount of time explaining why it wasn't his fault that a limping man escaped a highly secured facility instead on focusing on a solution. I think back to my National Service days when I stupidly did not check ammunition when taking over the guard room and got slapped by the Battalion Orderly Sergeant for it. The RP Sergeant told me later on, "Too bad you already signed the take over slip, otherwise you could have blamed it on your men."
Somewhere, somehow we are taught that responsibility equals trouble. Best to avoid responsbility and therefore trouble. Til this day, I would not have blamed the men under my command for a mistake I made but I guess that makes me a nut job of sorts.
Being on top means you have to take responsibility for issues that crop up. The rewards are of course greater when you reach the top but so are the risk. America does produce the people who climb to the top because they're willing to answer with their jobs. It doesn't happen in Singapore. Far better to blame foreigners than take the burden of blame onto yourself.
I think of a venture I'm trying to kick start with a friend of mine who is a chef. I believe there's room for him to do some catering on the side. I've unlisted the help of another friend to do up the promotional materials. Her contribution to this venture has been to tell me to seek an older person's instructions on how to do things step-by-step.
It worries me that this is the mentality of a young Singaporean. Yes, the venture has a risk to it. It may not start let alone succeed or fail. It's an idea that I think is worth pursuing and its worth working at. Yes, failure is likely but you never know until you try.
I take the view that you can minimise failure by consulting those who have been down the road before you. However, one has to take ultimate responsibility for ones own actions.
The idea of going into business with someone telling you how to do it step-by-step is a sign that one should not even be in private enterprise. It shows that you have the need to pass the responsbility onto someone else. -It shows that you want to say at the end of the day is "It wasn't me."
Once again, let's compare Wong Kan Seng and the Singapore Government's reaction to Mas Selmat's escape to John McCain's reaction to his election defeat. Who would you follow? Who would you trust. The man who insist on being paid millions and yet denies all responsibility for things that happen. Or would you trust the man who admits to his mistakes and says sorry?
I remember The Young Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC who drinks during the day in Ramadan aka Thambi Pundek saying,"Of course you don't apologise - that's how you keep your job."
Well, the problem is, jobs can be outsourced to someone cheaper or a technology can make what you do obsolete. You either find a way of being responsible for yourself and creating something for yourself or you die waiting for the government to give you things.
Something needs to be done and the right place to start is at home and at school. Children need to be taught that its good to be responsible for your actions. That's how you get better.
The Young Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC aka Thambi Pundek always tells me that we must salute to the "superior culture" of the West. I ask, why do we need to salute a "superior culture" where we can create one that's as good if not better for ourselves. I think that's a question the super geniouses in government should ponder upon
Saturday, March 10, 2012
The Last Days of Innocence
March 8 2012 was a pretty amazing day. I was on a bus when I bumped into a chap that I hadn't seen since my days as a military recruit. It was quite funny. I sat in my seat, looked at the chap sitting across me and suddenly asked him where he did his basic military training. Then it dawned upon us, we knew each other and we proceeded to talk rot about old times. He couldn't remember my name but he remembered me.
Anyway, it turned out that we live near each other and so we ended up having tea together. I said to him, "BMT was full of shit," and he replied," Be at least we were in the shit together." He was right.
Military training, as anyone who has been through it, is a very demanding excercise. Basic military training in particular is tough because you're moving from the basic life of a civilian to that of a solider. The body has to go through something of a major metamorphosis. For those of us who are used to doing things like waking up at noon, army life starts out as something as a shock when you have to wake up at 0545 and are expected to be bright and energetic.
For me, this was an especially tough time. My body was used to regular bouts of beer and Hagan Daz ice cream. It never occured to me that it was necessary to do things like walk more than ten minutes let alone go for a run at 0600.
For many of us "middle class" boys, the army is also something of a social shock. In Singapore everything depends on your academic qualifications. During the last year of the A-level examinations, parents will do EVERYTHING to spare their children of distractions form getting the all important A-grades. No expense is spared into making sure that the kids have all the time they need to focus on exams. It's not just material needs that are provided for. Parents struggle and sell their souls to ensure that the kids will mix with like minded kids from similar backgrounds - kids who will be focused on their studies.
This is a world away from what basic military training is. Nice middle class kids who have never heard a swear word in their life are suddenly addressed as "chee bye" (Hokkien dialect for cunt) and the funny thing is that is usually meant as a term of affection.
If you're from a particularly religious family, life in the army can be particularly shocking. Imagine moving from an environment where the regular discussions are on Biblical meanings to one where you discuss getting Biblical knowledge of the street hookers in Geylang Lorong whatever? Sensitive souls do have it rough in the initial days of basic military training.
Having said all of that, Basic Military Training was probably my last days of innoncence. For all the "horrible" culture shocks that made the army, this was the one period in my life where the people I met and mixed with were out to help each other.
I remember being physically weak. The physical training was a bitch and part of military idea of training is to pick on the weakest guy. The idea being the others will make life miserable for you and you have every incentive to find the physical strength that you never thought you had.
Funily enough, my platoon mates never allowed me to feel like shit. Each and everyone I knew encouraged me when I was feeling rough. I was one of the few people who lived in a place that didn't start with "Blk xx" and yet I never felt resentment for being the "rich" kid who needed to be taken down a peg or two.
I look back at my experiences during BMT as happy ones because of the people I was with. It's the experience that allows me to have faith in Singaporeans no matter how awful I find many of the local attitudes may be. Somehow, I have faith that young Singaporeans have some genuine goodness somewhere in there.
Ironically, I'm saying all of this on March 9, 2012, the 15th year that has passed since the disaster in New Zealand that killed Ronnie and Yin Tit. Swift Lion was what you'd call one of those defining moments. Attending the funerals of these two kind hearted young men with so much potential whoes lives had been cut short so brutally, brought home the message that we were doing had a consequence. It was heart breaking and til this day I cannot get over the fact that despite the loss of human life, nobody in an official position took responsibility for what happened.
Yet, I can also accept that this was the last moment of innocence that we enjoyed. Army life is funny in that everything is dependent on rank. When you're a recruit, you are basically the shit that people scrape off the bottom of your shoe. When you have rank, people have to be nice to you. However, while privillege comes with rank, you suddenly discover the ugly side of things. The army, whatever anyone tells you is filled with politics and those with a bit of rank and power spend a good portion of their time trying to score points against each other. In short, the army is like nearly every work place -it's a snake pit.
I think by the time Swift Lion took place, I had been acustomed to life in the unit. The political games were part of daily life. Suddenly the accident happened and the reality that we could have been next shocked the living daylights out of us. We, for once, acted as if we were a unit.
It's now 15-years since I've left the army. Life as a one-man show in an industry dominated by big multinationals is tough and you often get to see the nasty side of people and organisations. I remember joking with Zen in her pre-Aric days that we were similar, we got fucked for a living.
I'm admitedly a lot more comfortable now than I was back in the army, but talking about those days gives me some comfort. It reminds me of my lost days of innocence when all I really worried about was doing push ups and having a laugh with friends who didn't care about your background but accepted you for being you.
Anyway, it turned out that we live near each other and so we ended up having tea together. I said to him, "BMT was full of shit," and he replied," Be at least we were in the shit together." He was right.
Military training, as anyone who has been through it, is a very demanding excercise. Basic military training in particular is tough because you're moving from the basic life of a civilian to that of a solider. The body has to go through something of a major metamorphosis. For those of us who are used to doing things like waking up at noon, army life starts out as something as a shock when you have to wake up at 0545 and are expected to be bright and energetic.
For me, this was an especially tough time. My body was used to regular bouts of beer and Hagan Daz ice cream. It never occured to me that it was necessary to do things like walk more than ten minutes let alone go for a run at 0600.
For many of us "middle class" boys, the army is also something of a social shock. In Singapore everything depends on your academic qualifications. During the last year of the A-level examinations, parents will do EVERYTHING to spare their children of distractions form getting the all important A-grades. No expense is spared into making sure that the kids have all the time they need to focus on exams. It's not just material needs that are provided for. Parents struggle and sell their souls to ensure that the kids will mix with like minded kids from similar backgrounds - kids who will be focused on their studies.
This is a world away from what basic military training is. Nice middle class kids who have never heard a swear word in their life are suddenly addressed as "chee bye" (Hokkien dialect for cunt) and the funny thing is that is usually meant as a term of affection.
If you're from a particularly religious family, life in the army can be particularly shocking. Imagine moving from an environment where the regular discussions are on Biblical meanings to one where you discuss getting Biblical knowledge of the street hookers in Geylang Lorong whatever? Sensitive souls do have it rough in the initial days of basic military training.
Having said all of that, Basic Military Training was probably my last days of innoncence. For all the "horrible" culture shocks that made the army, this was the one period in my life where the people I met and mixed with were out to help each other.
I remember being physically weak. The physical training was a bitch and part of military idea of training is to pick on the weakest guy. The idea being the others will make life miserable for you and you have every incentive to find the physical strength that you never thought you had.
Funily enough, my platoon mates never allowed me to feel like shit. Each and everyone I knew encouraged me when I was feeling rough. I was one of the few people who lived in a place that didn't start with "Blk xx" and yet I never felt resentment for being the "rich" kid who needed to be taken down a peg or two.
I look back at my experiences during BMT as happy ones because of the people I was with. It's the experience that allows me to have faith in Singaporeans no matter how awful I find many of the local attitudes may be. Somehow, I have faith that young Singaporeans have some genuine goodness somewhere in there.
Ironically, I'm saying all of this on March 9, 2012, the 15th year that has passed since the disaster in New Zealand that killed Ronnie and Yin Tit. Swift Lion was what you'd call one of those defining moments. Attending the funerals of these two kind hearted young men with so much potential whoes lives had been cut short so brutally, brought home the message that we were doing had a consequence. It was heart breaking and til this day I cannot get over the fact that despite the loss of human life, nobody in an official position took responsibility for what happened.
Yet, I can also accept that this was the last moment of innocence that we enjoyed. Army life is funny in that everything is dependent on rank. When you're a recruit, you are basically the shit that people scrape off the bottom of your shoe. When you have rank, people have to be nice to you. However, while privillege comes with rank, you suddenly discover the ugly side of things. The army, whatever anyone tells you is filled with politics and those with a bit of rank and power spend a good portion of their time trying to score points against each other. In short, the army is like nearly every work place -it's a snake pit.
I think by the time Swift Lion took place, I had been acustomed to life in the unit. The political games were part of daily life. Suddenly the accident happened and the reality that we could have been next shocked the living daylights out of us. We, for once, acted as if we were a unit.
It's now 15-years since I've left the army. Life as a one-man show in an industry dominated by big multinationals is tough and you often get to see the nasty side of people and organisations. I remember joking with Zen in her pre-Aric days that we were similar, we got fucked for a living.
I'm admitedly a lot more comfortable now than I was back in the army, but talking about those days gives me some comfort. It reminds me of my lost days of innocence when all I really worried about was doing push ups and having a laugh with friends who didn't care about your background but accepted you for being you.
Monday, February 27, 2012
The Benefit of Exposed Penises
You have to credit the Young Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC who despises Malays but claims to be instrumental in getting their vote, aka Thambi Pundek to come to the rescue whenever I have writers block. I was until recently unsure about what to write about until he called me up on a Friday. He gleefuly told me, “I think the Worker’s Party are going to get punished by the voters for the immorality of their MP.”
I had to spoil his day by telling him that the rulling People’s Action Party wasn’t exactly in the position to throw stones when it comes to the issue of personal morality or marital fidelity. Singapore has just started 2012, the Year of the Dragon with not one sex scandal but three.
First, we had the head of Civil Defence and the Central Narcotics Bureau doing naughty things with a woman who was supplying IT equipment to their respective departments. Then, not to be outdone, the Member of Parliament for Hougang from the Worker’s Party, Mr Yaw Shin Leong was involved in a scandal over an alleged affair with a married party worker (it seems Mr Yaw has a history of being naughty and at the time of writing, he’s been sacked by his party). Then to top it all off, the police busted an online prostitution ring where not one but 80 civil servants were involved with.
We, the people, have suddenly had something interesting to gossip about. How did the Red Dot with a reputation of being sterile suddenly become a centre of “personal misconduct?”
Let’s start with the obvious. Singapore has never quite been as sterile and squeaky as she makes herself out to be. We are in many ways like Victorian England. Our founding father’s were all educated in the best tradition of English Public Schools and as result emerged steeped in old fashioned Victorian Values. On the whole, this was an exceedingly good thing. The Victorians, as The Economist once pointed out, was the last generation of Britons to with the drive to build a better world and had created a situation where countless of generations could ‘sponge of them.’
It was the Victorians who put the “Great” in Great Britain and we in the colonies should be thankful for the fact that our ‘founding fathers’ were brought up to treasure the values that made ‘Great’ Britain. Say what you like about Lee Kuan Yew and his gang but they believed in hard work and thrift. Singapore has prospered as a result of this and as Singapore faces an impending economic slowdown, we can be greatful for the fact that we have a government which actually has money to pass onto us in times of need.
While Victorian Values helped build up an Empire, they were less successful in building up a society where people could be open and honest about sex. In Victorian Britain, women were not supposed to have even enjoy the act of sex (lie there and think of Mother England) and even most ‘liberal’ of people had to be seen in Church. While putting up a front of ‘public prudishness,’ prostitution was rife. The most famous Prime Minsiter of that era, was William Gladstone, a man who was famous for flaglilating himself whenever he thought he sinned and trawling the red light districts to ‘save’ prostitutes.
If you understand Victorian attitudes towards sex, you’ll get Singapore’s attitude to the subject. On one hand Singapore is filled with good Asian boys and girls who won’t touch their private parts until marriage. On the other , you’ll find plenty of those good Asian boys making sure that the Red District remains recession proof.
Singaporean men, much as our women folk may like to denny it, have the same sex drive as anyone else. Like men elsewhere, we are obsessed by the size of our penises and sometimes our penises end up being bigger than our brains.
Men in positions of power tend to be guilty of having a huge sex drive and it becomes more so in a culture like Singapore’s where power is the be all and end all of nearly everything. The key that excites people here is power and that translates into sex. I remember telling an old friend that I was shocked that former England Captain, Will Carling would leave a beautiful wife over a shag with Princes Diana. His reply was simple – “How many man can say, ‘I shagged the future Queen of England?’”
It shouldn’t surprise us that men in positions of power have slept with women they should not have. As a man, let me tell you, it’s fun when you have women who want to shag the living daylights out of you. It’s a sign that you’re in a position of power. Women, who often derive their social status from the man in their life, there is a thrill in being shagged silly by someone in a position of power.
This is an age old game and it shouldn’t surprise us that things like this happen in Singapore. If the US President can get a blow job in the White House, we should be surprised that the head of the SCDF and CNB are getting a bit of nooky on the side.
What is a change is the fact that these scandals are coming to light. While a few of us might decry this sudden bout of ‘guttter journalism,’ this is in fact a positive step in the right direction. This was particularly evident in the case of the Comissioner of the SCDF and Director CNB. The government thought it control the timing of the release of the story but were beaten to it by Lianhe Wanbao, one of these Chinese language papers.
In the old days, the newspapers would have waited for the government to give them the permission to print the story. It was called “responsible” journalism. Lee Kuan Yew, our founding Prime Minister makes the point that he was never going to allow the press to run the show. His point was simple – “Who elected you?” The idea of a press baron like Rupert Murdoch emerging from Singapore remains an anathema.
The good side of this situation was the fact that the press was never allowed and remains unable to ‘break laws,’ in the same way that it had in the UK with the News of the World bugging politicians and tapping the phones of murder victims. People who unwhittingly end up in the media spot light do have a degree of privacy that they would not have elsewhere. I take the AWARE Saga, which I was involved in back in 2009. The press followed the story religiously. They made the links between various parties. They did not go after people like the children of the parties involved.
The down side of this reverence for the government, was that it allowed people in authority to cover their tracks. I think back of my National Service days when we had live firing. Nobody knew that a good chunk of our ammunition was beyond the use-by date until two-people died. We, the guys on the ground were barred from speaking to the press and the press meekly accepted the Ministry of Defence’s statements for what they were. It was clear to us on the ground that there was negligence in ammunition procurement. More than a decade later, nobody from the defence procurement department has faced even slap on the wrist for what was blatant criminal negligence. The story seems to be it was all the fault of some US based manufacturer who outsourced things to Mainland China.
Today, the press faces competition from websites. Eye balls which only took information from the main stream have other sources of information. Why did the editor of Lianhe Wanbao make the decision to publish the story about the two senior civil servants? Answer is pretty simple –there is a need to come up with a big story before the other news sources do it for you and send you into the dustbins of irrelevance.
Libel laws are necessary. Unlike my fellow bloggers, I’m not going to panic because the Lee family have sent lawyers letters to a few of us. It’s a sign that we as a community as being taken seriously. As bloggers, we should play by similar rules to our bretheren in the Mainstream media.
However, the situation is such that the powers-that-be will find it harder to use libel laws. People have tasted certain freedoms and will not accept those freedoms being removed. Those in power cannot silence things as they like nor can they expect to play by different rules just because they are in power. Look at the recent case of libel letters being sent to the Temasek Review Emeritus, one of Singapore’s most prominent blog sites. Yes, the site removed “offensive” comments but the letters are being discussed online. This would not have happened five years ago. A government official can no longer call up an editor and demand a story be killed without real justification.
Sex scandals may be torrid fun. However, they also show us a few things and I believe the sudden breaking of such stories is positive for the nation at large.
I had to spoil his day by telling him that the rulling People’s Action Party wasn’t exactly in the position to throw stones when it comes to the issue of personal morality or marital fidelity. Singapore has just started 2012, the Year of the Dragon with not one sex scandal but three.
First, we had the head of Civil Defence and the Central Narcotics Bureau doing naughty things with a woman who was supplying IT equipment to their respective departments. Then, not to be outdone, the Member of Parliament for Hougang from the Worker’s Party, Mr Yaw Shin Leong was involved in a scandal over an alleged affair with a married party worker (it seems Mr Yaw has a history of being naughty and at the time of writing, he’s been sacked by his party). Then to top it all off, the police busted an online prostitution ring where not one but 80 civil servants were involved with.
We, the people, have suddenly had something interesting to gossip about. How did the Red Dot with a reputation of being sterile suddenly become a centre of “personal misconduct?”
Let’s start with the obvious. Singapore has never quite been as sterile and squeaky as she makes herself out to be. We are in many ways like Victorian England. Our founding father’s were all educated in the best tradition of English Public Schools and as result emerged steeped in old fashioned Victorian Values. On the whole, this was an exceedingly good thing. The Victorians, as The Economist once pointed out, was the last generation of Britons to with the drive to build a better world and had created a situation where countless of generations could ‘sponge of them.’
It was the Victorians who put the “Great” in Great Britain and we in the colonies should be thankful for the fact that our ‘founding fathers’ were brought up to treasure the values that made ‘Great’ Britain. Say what you like about Lee Kuan Yew and his gang but they believed in hard work and thrift. Singapore has prospered as a result of this and as Singapore faces an impending economic slowdown, we can be greatful for the fact that we have a government which actually has money to pass onto us in times of need.
While Victorian Values helped build up an Empire, they were less successful in building up a society where people could be open and honest about sex. In Victorian Britain, women were not supposed to have even enjoy the act of sex (lie there and think of Mother England) and even most ‘liberal’ of people had to be seen in Church. While putting up a front of ‘public prudishness,’ prostitution was rife. The most famous Prime Minsiter of that era, was William Gladstone, a man who was famous for flaglilating himself whenever he thought he sinned and trawling the red light districts to ‘save’ prostitutes.
If you understand Victorian attitudes towards sex, you’ll get Singapore’s attitude to the subject. On one hand Singapore is filled with good Asian boys and girls who won’t touch their private parts until marriage. On the other , you’ll find plenty of those good Asian boys making sure that the Red District remains recession proof.
Singaporean men, much as our women folk may like to denny it, have the same sex drive as anyone else. Like men elsewhere, we are obsessed by the size of our penises and sometimes our penises end up being bigger than our brains.
Men in positions of power tend to be guilty of having a huge sex drive and it becomes more so in a culture like Singapore’s where power is the be all and end all of nearly everything. The key that excites people here is power and that translates into sex. I remember telling an old friend that I was shocked that former England Captain, Will Carling would leave a beautiful wife over a shag with Princes Diana. His reply was simple – “How many man can say, ‘I shagged the future Queen of England?’”
It shouldn’t surprise us that men in positions of power have slept with women they should not have. As a man, let me tell you, it’s fun when you have women who want to shag the living daylights out of you. It’s a sign that you’re in a position of power. Women, who often derive their social status from the man in their life, there is a thrill in being shagged silly by someone in a position of power.
This is an age old game and it shouldn’t surprise us that things like this happen in Singapore. If the US President can get a blow job in the White House, we should be surprised that the head of the SCDF and CNB are getting a bit of nooky on the side.
What is a change is the fact that these scandals are coming to light. While a few of us might decry this sudden bout of ‘guttter journalism,’ this is in fact a positive step in the right direction. This was particularly evident in the case of the Comissioner of the SCDF and Director CNB. The government thought it control the timing of the release of the story but were beaten to it by Lianhe Wanbao, one of these Chinese language papers.
In the old days, the newspapers would have waited for the government to give them the permission to print the story. It was called “responsible” journalism. Lee Kuan Yew, our founding Prime Minister makes the point that he was never going to allow the press to run the show. His point was simple – “Who elected you?” The idea of a press baron like Rupert Murdoch emerging from Singapore remains an anathema.
The good side of this situation was the fact that the press was never allowed and remains unable to ‘break laws,’ in the same way that it had in the UK with the News of the World bugging politicians and tapping the phones of murder victims. People who unwhittingly end up in the media spot light do have a degree of privacy that they would not have elsewhere. I take the AWARE Saga, which I was involved in back in 2009. The press followed the story religiously. They made the links between various parties. They did not go after people like the children of the parties involved.
The down side of this reverence for the government, was that it allowed people in authority to cover their tracks. I think back of my National Service days when we had live firing. Nobody knew that a good chunk of our ammunition was beyond the use-by date until two-people died. We, the guys on the ground were barred from speaking to the press and the press meekly accepted the Ministry of Defence’s statements for what they were. It was clear to us on the ground that there was negligence in ammunition procurement. More than a decade later, nobody from the defence procurement department has faced even slap on the wrist for what was blatant criminal negligence. The story seems to be it was all the fault of some US based manufacturer who outsourced things to Mainland China.
Today, the press faces competition from websites. Eye balls which only took information from the main stream have other sources of information. Why did the editor of Lianhe Wanbao make the decision to publish the story about the two senior civil servants? Answer is pretty simple –there is a need to come up with a big story before the other news sources do it for you and send you into the dustbins of irrelevance.
Libel laws are necessary. Unlike my fellow bloggers, I’m not going to panic because the Lee family have sent lawyers letters to a few of us. It’s a sign that we as a community as being taken seriously. As bloggers, we should play by similar rules to our bretheren in the Mainstream media.
However, the situation is such that the powers-that-be will find it harder to use libel laws. People have tasted certain freedoms and will not accept those freedoms being removed. Those in power cannot silence things as they like nor can they expect to play by different rules just because they are in power. Look at the recent case of libel letters being sent to the Temasek Review Emeritus, one of Singapore’s most prominent blog sites. Yes, the site removed “offensive” comments but the letters are being discussed online. This would not have happened five years ago. A government official can no longer call up an editor and demand a story be killed without real justification.
Sex scandals may be torrid fun. However, they also show us a few things and I believe the sudden breaking of such stories is positive for the nation at large.
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
For the Love of Blotchy
One of the latest stories going round the internet is the story on how three expatriates assualted a few Singaporeans outside Suntec City in 2011. The rub of the story is not so much the fact that three Pink Blotchies decided to behave a typical Blotchy fashion after a few too many, but the fact that the police proved to be totally incompetent. Somehow, the police decided that they couldn't be arsed to do their job and two out of the three blotchies were allowed to run home and the one who did face the music faced a grand total of three weeks in jail for causing serious bodily hurt to several people. I won't go into the details as the incident has been well doccumented by Andrew Loh, the editor of Public House in his piece - “Minister Teo should explain handling of Suntec City assault case.”
Reactions on the net have been understandably angry. The tollerance and love that Singaporeans have for Pink Blotchies has for the moment been exchanged for the resentment that many feel against forigners in general. There's also been plenty of anger at the way the Singapore Police Force has managed the case. The feeling is that the police simply couldn't be bothered and because the three blotchies came from “Blotchy Land” (New Zealand, Australia and the UK), the government allowed them to flee rather than to avoid a diplomatic row.
My personal feelings are this – the three need to face the full force of the law in Singapore. A crime was comitted here and the perpetrators need to face the music, whatever their nationality. Singapore prides itself in the rule of law and so, we actually need to show that it exist. By allowing the three clowns to flee we have shown that the message is this – there is one law for Pink Blotchies and Elite Singaporeans and another for the Poor and Darkies from elsewhere.
My stance remains this – if the police and the justice system do not do their job and enforce the laws, the people have every right to defend themselves by whatever means. We, the people have a moral obligation to dispense street justice everytime the system lightens the load off some thug who happens to be of a pale complextion. Singaporeans need to stand up for themselves in the same way that they do in other parts of Asia.
Yes,Blotchies are revered in Thailand as much as they are here and perhaps more so. However, the Pink Blotchies understand that there are certain boundaries that they don't cross. Take the example of a couple of drunken German tourist who thought it was fun to rip a Thai Bhat note right where the king's portrait was. The Thai people rightly decided to wack the living day lights out of them and beat them within an inch of their lives. The police allowed it to happen.
I also respect the Turks for not taking shit. Two yobs from Leeds decided that it was fun to use the Turkish flag as toilet paper and they proceeded to do it in public view of people in Istanbul. My gut reaction is not, “Oh, poor things, they were just silly,” it's this - “Don't tread on other people's heritage.” I remember telling an Afghani lady that the two people I respect most on this planet are Afghanis and Vietnamese – the guys who tried to invade them always walked away with a bloody nose.
Having said all of that, I also look back to the way I think the public reaction would have been if the incident took place in the UK, where I spent my formative years.
Funnily enough, I think the three yobs wold have been lynched by White Anglo-Saxons who would have ben enraged of what would have been played out as a “racist” incident. I had two personal incidents and saw one on TV, which gives me tremendous faith in the British people.
The first incident came in my first year of school when someone made a racial remark, which I took to heart. A fight took place. What's interesting about this was one of the students from the year above went to the guy and threatened to wack him if he heard of any racist behaviour towards me.
The second incident came much later in life when I had to serve on an English jury. The jury was filled with White English Working Class people. The case was that of a young Lebanese boy who had been in a scuffle with White English Policemen. Let me tell you, each and every one of my colleagues were on the side of the Lebanese boy. One of them remarked publically, “I'd let him off just for hitting a policeman.”
The third incident that comes to mind was when Shillpa Shetty was racially abused by the late Jade Goody. Channel Four studio was besieged by protest from White English people who were disgusted by the way one of their own had behaved.
I'm not saying that racism does not exist in the West. It clearly does and in horrible forms. Segragation may have been removed from the statuate books in the 60s but it exist in voluntary forms. I think of the wonderful line in “Live and Let Die,” the 1971 Bond movie, which had James Bond entering Harlem - “it's like following a cue ball.” There are some neighbourhoods where White People enter at their peril and there are some neighbourhoods where Blacks don't even think of entering no matter how much money they have.
However, from what I experienced from life in the UK and visiting Europe and the USA, is that skin colour isn't much of a factor. Things like education and social class tend to be more important factors. I take my aversion to your average English football fan. I shudder whenever I think of group of this species gathering and trying to sound intelligent. Then again, I don't think my reaction towards this group is that different from the reaction of people like my good friends Corvin and Vincent, who have been happily living in London.
Generally speaking, Westerners are accepting of foreigners provided the forigners stick to their own space and live quietly. Resentment comes mainly when you come to a country and expect to enjoy the benefits of the social system without putting back. I think I've said this more than once, my stepfather works in a hospital that caters to near Eastern migrants who's only word of German they've learnt is the place for the welfare office. Think of this from the average German's perspective - “I work hard, I pay my taxes and the lot of you come over here and live off my taxes.”
If you are, however, do work and don't try and sponge off the locals, you are left alone. The Old Rogue always tells me, “There is no prejudice against Chinese in America – they refused to take welfare and ran businesses.” Chinese and Vietnamese and South Korean communities do well because they are quiet and entrepreneurial. It takes a generation or two for the kids to look at working in a big company rather than in a laundromat or a restaurant. Yes, these communities have developed fearsome gangsters (notice that when Austrlian biker gangs get out of hand …. they avoid the Vietnamese communities – they know what's good for them), but by and large they coexist with the rest of society.
So, when you get groups of people quietly coexisting peacefully for long enough, they tend to ignore skin colour and look other factors. In such situations you look at decent and awful behaviour for what it is rather than who perpetrates it.
While the nasty racial incidents make the headlines, the West has actually done quite well by being fairly open to immigration.
Things are different in Singapore. We're told that we, the locals have to accept foreigners to drive economic growth. There are however, two classes of foreigners – namely the talents and the workers. The talents are supposed to be the people “we need” and therefore have to welcome with open arms. The workers are the people that we are supposedly doing a favour for by letting them work at starvation wages for the task we don't want to do.
I can accept that foreigners do come with necessary skills and much of the money in Singapore actually comes from elsewhere.
However, if you look at the way things have been communicated, the message is clear – there are several classes of human beings and we, the locals are not the top of the proverbial tree. Imigration policy has been translated into culture.
I look at the way the police look after Geylang. They're all over the place, either in uniform or as plane cloths officers. Geylang is filled with local Singaporeans as well as workers from India, Bangladesh and China. Hence, the assumption is there is going to be trouble at any given moment. By contrast, the police always ensure they are at the other end of the road whenever Orchard Towers gets into full flow – why? Orchard Towers is filled with Pink Blotchies who are saintly people even if they're doing exactly what the darkies in Geylang are doing. I've been with Indian workers and Fillippina girls when they've been cautioned by the police for the crime of sitting outside and having a beer while up the road you've had Pink Blotchies doing exactly the same thing.
One of the ironies of this situation is that foreign workers are amongst the most law abbiding citizens in Singapore. If you follow the statistics provided by Transient Workers Count Too (Twc2), this section of society is statistically the least likely to commit a crime. Yet the police see them as the most threatening to society.
To problem with this policy is that when put into practice, you actually create a situation of having three different laws. There's the laws for the dark people. A law for the locals and then there's a law for the sanctified blotchies. Now, how do you call it rule of law.
My mother took issue with the fact that in the previous posting I had brought up the case of Michael Faye, the American teenage vandal who had spray painted a few cars. I contend that Mr Faye was an expat brat who could take the good things Singapore has to offer but couldn't take the “other” side of Singapore and went squealing to the embassy. My Mum believes that the US government was doing what all governments should do and protecting its citizens.
One of other things that has never been brought up is the fact that Michael Faye was the last diplomatic row that we had with the USA. Suddenly, Singapore has become afriad of of getting into a row with Western countries. I have to ask myself why?
Let's face it, the Western countries are not about to pull out their military or economic presence in Singapore because we hang a few mules. So, why do we need to give people holding American or European passports special treatment in order to avoid a diplomatic row. The diplomats were not going to get expelled because we canned Mr Faye!
If you talk to enough Westerners in their own country, you'll find that they support our right to enforce our laws. During Micael Faye there were many Americans who thought America should have canning. When we hanged an Austrlian for drug trafficking, our news rooms had letters from Australia telling us that we were doing the right thing. I remember one of my English friends saying, “If you can live in Singapore and take money from Singapore, you got to be prepared to face the justice system there. If you don't like it – bugger off.”
So, why has the application of law become different when it comes to Westerners? After Michael Faye, we had a US serviceman punching a Singaporean and when the issue was brought up – the American Ambassador of the day had a field day reminding us how we should be greatful to American servicemen. By contrast, whenever US servicemen misbehaves in Japan, you get the US Ambassador grovelling infront of whatever provincial governor of whichever province where the misdeed took place.
Why can't we have an equal dialogue with the West when it comes to the enforcement of our laws? People invest in Singapore because it has laws to protect everybody rather than laws to protect people who invest differently from those who don't.
I agree with Andrew Loh, the Ministry of Home Affairs has to provide answers. How is it that we can cane, hang, castrate etc a Bangladeshi for going on strike when he hasn't been paid several months wages, yet when three Pink Blotchies beat people up, they're given their passports and allowed to run away. By contrast, when a Nepali guy breaks the nose (beyond surgery) of a Pink Blotchy who assaulted his boss – we deport the guy on the spot – no questions asked.
You can't tell me its because we need one group more than the other. You can't tell me that Western countries invest so much more than Darky Countries (Western countries being in extra need of investment themselves). You can't tell me that Pink Blotchies are harder working (just drop by my Old Neighbourhood in Soho to see Blotchy Industry at its best). You can't tell me that Blotchies are more intelligent (Afirmative Action in the US was designed to keep Asians out of universities in favour of White ones, as much as it was to get Blacks in).
So here's the question – is there a law for Pink Blotchies and a law for other people in Singapore? If there is, there's a good reason why one shouldn't invest in Singapore.
Reactions on the net have been understandably angry. The tollerance and love that Singaporeans have for Pink Blotchies has for the moment been exchanged for the resentment that many feel against forigners in general. There's also been plenty of anger at the way the Singapore Police Force has managed the case. The feeling is that the police simply couldn't be bothered and because the three blotchies came from “Blotchy Land” (New Zealand, Australia and the UK), the government allowed them to flee rather than to avoid a diplomatic row.
My personal feelings are this – the three need to face the full force of the law in Singapore. A crime was comitted here and the perpetrators need to face the music, whatever their nationality. Singapore prides itself in the rule of law and so, we actually need to show that it exist. By allowing the three clowns to flee we have shown that the message is this – there is one law for Pink Blotchies and Elite Singaporeans and another for the Poor and Darkies from elsewhere.
My stance remains this – if the police and the justice system do not do their job and enforce the laws, the people have every right to defend themselves by whatever means. We, the people have a moral obligation to dispense street justice everytime the system lightens the load off some thug who happens to be of a pale complextion. Singaporeans need to stand up for themselves in the same way that they do in other parts of Asia.
Yes,Blotchies are revered in Thailand as much as they are here and perhaps more so. However, the Pink Blotchies understand that there are certain boundaries that they don't cross. Take the example of a couple of drunken German tourist who thought it was fun to rip a Thai Bhat note right where the king's portrait was. The Thai people rightly decided to wack the living day lights out of them and beat them within an inch of their lives. The police allowed it to happen.
I also respect the Turks for not taking shit. Two yobs from Leeds decided that it was fun to use the Turkish flag as toilet paper and they proceeded to do it in public view of people in Istanbul. My gut reaction is not, “Oh, poor things, they were just silly,” it's this - “Don't tread on other people's heritage.” I remember telling an Afghani lady that the two people I respect most on this planet are Afghanis and Vietnamese – the guys who tried to invade them always walked away with a bloody nose.
Having said all of that, I also look back to the way I think the public reaction would have been if the incident took place in the UK, where I spent my formative years.
Funnily enough, I think the three yobs wold have been lynched by White Anglo-Saxons who would have ben enraged of what would have been played out as a “racist” incident. I had two personal incidents and saw one on TV, which gives me tremendous faith in the British people.
The first incident came in my first year of school when someone made a racial remark, which I took to heart. A fight took place. What's interesting about this was one of the students from the year above went to the guy and threatened to wack him if he heard of any racist behaviour towards me.
The second incident came much later in life when I had to serve on an English jury. The jury was filled with White English Working Class people. The case was that of a young Lebanese boy who had been in a scuffle with White English Policemen. Let me tell you, each and every one of my colleagues were on the side of the Lebanese boy. One of them remarked publically, “I'd let him off just for hitting a policeman.”
The third incident that comes to mind was when Shillpa Shetty was racially abused by the late Jade Goody. Channel Four studio was besieged by protest from White English people who were disgusted by the way one of their own had behaved.
I'm not saying that racism does not exist in the West. It clearly does and in horrible forms. Segragation may have been removed from the statuate books in the 60s but it exist in voluntary forms. I think of the wonderful line in “Live and Let Die,” the 1971 Bond movie, which had James Bond entering Harlem - “it's like following a cue ball.” There are some neighbourhoods where White People enter at their peril and there are some neighbourhoods where Blacks don't even think of entering no matter how much money they have.
However, from what I experienced from life in the UK and visiting Europe and the USA, is that skin colour isn't much of a factor. Things like education and social class tend to be more important factors. I take my aversion to your average English football fan. I shudder whenever I think of group of this species gathering and trying to sound intelligent. Then again, I don't think my reaction towards this group is that different from the reaction of people like my good friends Corvin and Vincent, who have been happily living in London.
Generally speaking, Westerners are accepting of foreigners provided the forigners stick to their own space and live quietly. Resentment comes mainly when you come to a country and expect to enjoy the benefits of the social system without putting back. I think I've said this more than once, my stepfather works in a hospital that caters to near Eastern migrants who's only word of German they've learnt is the place for the welfare office. Think of this from the average German's perspective - “I work hard, I pay my taxes and the lot of you come over here and live off my taxes.”
If you are, however, do work and don't try and sponge off the locals, you are left alone. The Old Rogue always tells me, “There is no prejudice against Chinese in America – they refused to take welfare and ran businesses.” Chinese and Vietnamese and South Korean communities do well because they are quiet and entrepreneurial. It takes a generation or two for the kids to look at working in a big company rather than in a laundromat or a restaurant. Yes, these communities have developed fearsome gangsters (notice that when Austrlian biker gangs get out of hand …. they avoid the Vietnamese communities – they know what's good for them), but by and large they coexist with the rest of society.
So, when you get groups of people quietly coexisting peacefully for long enough, they tend to ignore skin colour and look other factors. In such situations you look at decent and awful behaviour for what it is rather than who perpetrates it.
While the nasty racial incidents make the headlines, the West has actually done quite well by being fairly open to immigration.
Things are different in Singapore. We're told that we, the locals have to accept foreigners to drive economic growth. There are however, two classes of foreigners – namely the talents and the workers. The talents are supposed to be the people “we need” and therefore have to welcome with open arms. The workers are the people that we are supposedly doing a favour for by letting them work at starvation wages for the task we don't want to do.
I can accept that foreigners do come with necessary skills and much of the money in Singapore actually comes from elsewhere.
However, if you look at the way things have been communicated, the message is clear – there are several classes of human beings and we, the locals are not the top of the proverbial tree. Imigration policy has been translated into culture.
I look at the way the police look after Geylang. They're all over the place, either in uniform or as plane cloths officers. Geylang is filled with local Singaporeans as well as workers from India, Bangladesh and China. Hence, the assumption is there is going to be trouble at any given moment. By contrast, the police always ensure they are at the other end of the road whenever Orchard Towers gets into full flow – why? Orchard Towers is filled with Pink Blotchies who are saintly people even if they're doing exactly what the darkies in Geylang are doing. I've been with Indian workers and Fillippina girls when they've been cautioned by the police for the crime of sitting outside and having a beer while up the road you've had Pink Blotchies doing exactly the same thing.
One of the ironies of this situation is that foreign workers are amongst the most law abbiding citizens in Singapore. If you follow the statistics provided by Transient Workers Count Too (Twc2), this section of society is statistically the least likely to commit a crime. Yet the police see them as the most threatening to society.
To problem with this policy is that when put into practice, you actually create a situation of having three different laws. There's the laws for the dark people. A law for the locals and then there's a law for the sanctified blotchies. Now, how do you call it rule of law.
My mother took issue with the fact that in the previous posting I had brought up the case of Michael Faye, the American teenage vandal who had spray painted a few cars. I contend that Mr Faye was an expat brat who could take the good things Singapore has to offer but couldn't take the “other” side of Singapore and went squealing to the embassy. My Mum believes that the US government was doing what all governments should do and protecting its citizens.
One of other things that has never been brought up is the fact that Michael Faye was the last diplomatic row that we had with the USA. Suddenly, Singapore has become afriad of of getting into a row with Western countries. I have to ask myself why?
Let's face it, the Western countries are not about to pull out their military or economic presence in Singapore because we hang a few mules. So, why do we need to give people holding American or European passports special treatment in order to avoid a diplomatic row. The diplomats were not going to get expelled because we canned Mr Faye!
If you talk to enough Westerners in their own country, you'll find that they support our right to enforce our laws. During Micael Faye there were many Americans who thought America should have canning. When we hanged an Austrlian for drug trafficking, our news rooms had letters from Australia telling us that we were doing the right thing. I remember one of my English friends saying, “If you can live in Singapore and take money from Singapore, you got to be prepared to face the justice system there. If you don't like it – bugger off.”
So, why has the application of law become different when it comes to Westerners? After Michael Faye, we had a US serviceman punching a Singaporean and when the issue was brought up – the American Ambassador of the day had a field day reminding us how we should be greatful to American servicemen. By contrast, whenever US servicemen misbehaves in Japan, you get the US Ambassador grovelling infront of whatever provincial governor of whichever province where the misdeed took place.
Why can't we have an equal dialogue with the West when it comes to the enforcement of our laws? People invest in Singapore because it has laws to protect everybody rather than laws to protect people who invest differently from those who don't.
I agree with Andrew Loh, the Ministry of Home Affairs has to provide answers. How is it that we can cane, hang, castrate etc a Bangladeshi for going on strike when he hasn't been paid several months wages, yet when three Pink Blotchies beat people up, they're given their passports and allowed to run away. By contrast, when a Nepali guy breaks the nose (beyond surgery) of a Pink Blotchy who assaulted his boss – we deport the guy on the spot – no questions asked.
You can't tell me its because we need one group more than the other. You can't tell me that Western countries invest so much more than Darky Countries (Western countries being in extra need of investment themselves). You can't tell me that Pink Blotchies are harder working (just drop by my Old Neighbourhood in Soho to see Blotchy Industry at its best). You can't tell me that Blotchies are more intelligent (Afirmative Action in the US was designed to keep Asians out of universities in favour of White ones, as much as it was to get Blacks in).
So here's the question – is there a law for Pink Blotchies and a law for other people in Singapore? If there is, there's a good reason why one shouldn't invest in Singapore.
Friday, February 10, 2012
A Question of Faith
My former theology teacher, David Pook died recently. David, who was a decade older than me, had the misfortune of getting cancer and succumbing to it. The event had a surreal feel to it. I hadn’t seen him for nearly a decade and our contact had been limited to Facebook messages. Then, one day, out of the blue he announced he was dying and three days later he was dead. His funeral by all accounts was a tribute to his dedication to the several generations of students that he taught at Churcher’s College and the King’s School Maccesfield. Over 600 people turned out to say goodbye to a man who had been both friend and mentor to so many. His Facebook page remains active as a place where people remember him.
It’s been a long time since I had contact with David and I think our relationship did take a bit of knock when I didn’t read theology at university. I’m probably not the best person to write a tribute to him, except I will say that he, in his theology lessons taught me one of the most important lessons in life - namely the nature of faith.
A-Level Christian theology is an academically demanding subject. In the course of two-years, one has to dissect the Bible and understand every intricacy of how its created. You are required to provide complex arguments over nothing more than a word of Ancient Greek or two. During the two-year period, you get the privilege of examining the very nature of Christ in the study of Christology.
One of the most interesting things about studying theology is the fact that you have to accept the possibility that everything described in the Bible is very possibly just a matter of an ancient way of explaining things. Learned men like Rudolf Bultmann argued logically and persuasively that Jesus was merely an ordinary man - his miracles were merely the way people explained things back when the knowledge of science was rather limited.
As we were doing this, I remember David telling us, “Lad’s, my purpose isn’t to weaken your faith - but to strengthen it.” I didn’t understand him then but in the two decades since I sat for theology exams, I’ve come to understand that some of the best things in life exist in a paradox. The most common paradox that most people deal with is the question of courage. It’s often pointed out that courage is not the inability to feel fear but the ability to carry on doing the necessary despite feeling fear. I’ve learnt that the same is true of faith.
Faith is not the absence of questioning but the ability to continue believing despite constant questioning. It’s the moment where heart and mind meld together and come with the answer. I think David was the example of this - he spent the better part of his life asking questions but he remained a true believer right up to the end.
This lesson about the nature of faith has been crystalised in a decade of living in Singapore. It becomes life this because this is a society where people have been brought up to believe things unquestioningly. The most extreme example of this is the Young Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC who pays for sex but condemns prostitutes as immoral aka Thambi Pundek. However, he’s merely an extreme version of a common trend - people who don’t question and except things based on faith.
People are desperate for something to believe in, whether its in a ruling party or in a religion. Pastor Joseph Prince and his McGod franchise thrive on the desperation of people to believe in something without question.
Both Gina and Joyce, the women who I had the most emotionally intense relationships with, were consistently frustrated with me because I simply could not just believe - I had to question. The Young Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC pays for sex but condemns prostitutes as immoral, aka Thambi Pundek, cannot get over the fact that
I refuse to accept government actions for what they are. On the human level, its important to question, especially when it comes to the topic of government. Do I think the People’s Action Party is good for Singapore? You get the likes of the Young Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC who drinks during Ramadan aka Thambi Pundek desperately labeling me a softy opposition supporter. What he and his ilk see is the fact that I have consistently been critical of government on various issues.
What they fail to see is that I am actually a supporter of the PAP. When I got the chance to vote, I did so in their favour. As a citizen, I am obliged to constantly question things - whether its about the heart of the policy or about the approach and communications method. I believe that the ruling party has done a darn good job and I believe they remain the best people to do that job. With the exception of the Workers Party, I find opposition candidates in Singapore to be a group of sad, vicious little twats. I shudder at the idea of the likes of Kenneth “Aged Toff” Jeyaratnam ever moving into the Istana. So why don’t I just shut up and accept with faith that the PAP are great? Well, I realise they need people to question them.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely and the only way to prevent that is by being prepared to question regardless of the consequences. I also realise that political decisions affect me and unless I don’t question and say something no matter how insignificant, I’m going to get trampled on. Nobody knows what you’re saying or feeling if you don’t say something. I think the same rules apply to God or at least the people who claim to represent him. I believe in the divine and I believe faith is rewarded.
However, faith tends to be mistaken as something you just accept without questioning because ...well....that’s always been the way. As such, you get the likes to Pastor Prince and Reverend Kong He milking their followers for a percentage of their salaries so that they can build bigger and better buildings to house their followers.
My theology is rusty but I don’t recall the passage where Jesus said, “Donate unto my agents so that you will have a bigger and better place to hang out on Sunday.” I do, however, recall the passage where he says, “Sell your possessions and become a follower of mine.” Gina and I used to go through this all the time. I’d constantly ask myself, “Is this God speaking or is this Pastor speaking.” Is anyone surprised that the marriage didn’t last very long?
Faith is based on free will and you can only have free will if you know about the brutal nasty things in life. Jesus was well aware that he was about to meet a nasty end, yet he had faith that the “Father” would raise him from the dead in his full divine glory. He says, “Let your will be done.” Many people forget this. Too often they talk about how they’re going to pray their way to prosperity and the path towards it will be smooth and easy. Well, if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.
Those with faith have doubts. Mother Teresa, regarded as the closest thing we’ve had to a Saint in the last five decades, admitted she had doubts. Yet her faith drove her on and she continued to do what she did in the slums of Calcutta. When was the last time that Joseph Singh ooopppps, I mean Joseph Prince (I forgot he was an ordinary bloke who decided he was royalty) went to anywhere resembling Calcutta?
Seriously, I can sit in the comfort of Suntec and have plenty of faith that God has entitled me to be his agent and enjoy the fruits of 20,000 clowns. It’s a different matter to show up in a hell hole and give of yourself because you believe that God has told you to be there.
Real faith comes when you question, have doubts and yet you carry on because you believe that it is God’s will for you. It is not an entitlement you achieve for attending a rock concert on Sunday.
It’s been a long time since I had contact with David and I think our relationship did take a bit of knock when I didn’t read theology at university. I’m probably not the best person to write a tribute to him, except I will say that he, in his theology lessons taught me one of the most important lessons in life - namely the nature of faith.
A-Level Christian theology is an academically demanding subject. In the course of two-years, one has to dissect the Bible and understand every intricacy of how its created. You are required to provide complex arguments over nothing more than a word of Ancient Greek or two. During the two-year period, you get the privilege of examining the very nature of Christ in the study of Christology.
One of the most interesting things about studying theology is the fact that you have to accept the possibility that everything described in the Bible is very possibly just a matter of an ancient way of explaining things. Learned men like Rudolf Bultmann argued logically and persuasively that Jesus was merely an ordinary man - his miracles were merely the way people explained things back when the knowledge of science was rather limited.
As we were doing this, I remember David telling us, “Lad’s, my purpose isn’t to weaken your faith - but to strengthen it.” I didn’t understand him then but in the two decades since I sat for theology exams, I’ve come to understand that some of the best things in life exist in a paradox. The most common paradox that most people deal with is the question of courage. It’s often pointed out that courage is not the inability to feel fear but the ability to carry on doing the necessary despite feeling fear. I’ve learnt that the same is true of faith.
Faith is not the absence of questioning but the ability to continue believing despite constant questioning. It’s the moment where heart and mind meld together and come with the answer. I think David was the example of this - he spent the better part of his life asking questions but he remained a true believer right up to the end.
This lesson about the nature of faith has been crystalised in a decade of living in Singapore. It becomes life this because this is a society where people have been brought up to believe things unquestioningly. The most extreme example of this is the Young Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC who pays for sex but condemns prostitutes as immoral aka Thambi Pundek. However, he’s merely an extreme version of a common trend - people who don’t question and except things based on faith.
People are desperate for something to believe in, whether its in a ruling party or in a religion. Pastor Joseph Prince and his McGod franchise thrive on the desperation of people to believe in something without question.
Both Gina and Joyce, the women who I had the most emotionally intense relationships with, were consistently frustrated with me because I simply could not just believe - I had to question. The Young Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC pays for sex but condemns prostitutes as immoral, aka Thambi Pundek, cannot get over the fact that
I refuse to accept government actions for what they are. On the human level, its important to question, especially when it comes to the topic of government. Do I think the People’s Action Party is good for Singapore? You get the likes of the Young Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC who drinks during Ramadan aka Thambi Pundek desperately labeling me a softy opposition supporter. What he and his ilk see is the fact that I have consistently been critical of government on various issues.
What they fail to see is that I am actually a supporter of the PAP. When I got the chance to vote, I did so in their favour. As a citizen, I am obliged to constantly question things - whether its about the heart of the policy or about the approach and communications method. I believe that the ruling party has done a darn good job and I believe they remain the best people to do that job. With the exception of the Workers Party, I find opposition candidates in Singapore to be a group of sad, vicious little twats. I shudder at the idea of the likes of Kenneth “Aged Toff” Jeyaratnam ever moving into the Istana. So why don’t I just shut up and accept with faith that the PAP are great? Well, I realise they need people to question them.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely and the only way to prevent that is by being prepared to question regardless of the consequences. I also realise that political decisions affect me and unless I don’t question and say something no matter how insignificant, I’m going to get trampled on. Nobody knows what you’re saying or feeling if you don’t say something. I think the same rules apply to God or at least the people who claim to represent him. I believe in the divine and I believe faith is rewarded.
However, faith tends to be mistaken as something you just accept without questioning because ...well....that’s always been the way. As such, you get the likes to Pastor Prince and Reverend Kong He milking their followers for a percentage of their salaries so that they can build bigger and better buildings to house their followers.
My theology is rusty but I don’t recall the passage where Jesus said, “Donate unto my agents so that you will have a bigger and better place to hang out on Sunday.” I do, however, recall the passage where he says, “Sell your possessions and become a follower of mine.” Gina and I used to go through this all the time. I’d constantly ask myself, “Is this God speaking or is this Pastor speaking.” Is anyone surprised that the marriage didn’t last very long?
Faith is based on free will and you can only have free will if you know about the brutal nasty things in life. Jesus was well aware that he was about to meet a nasty end, yet he had faith that the “Father” would raise him from the dead in his full divine glory. He says, “Let your will be done.” Many people forget this. Too often they talk about how they’re going to pray their way to prosperity and the path towards it will be smooth and easy. Well, if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.
Those with faith have doubts. Mother Teresa, regarded as the closest thing we’ve had to a Saint in the last five decades, admitted she had doubts. Yet her faith drove her on and she continued to do what she did in the slums of Calcutta. When was the last time that Joseph Singh ooopppps, I mean Joseph Prince (I forgot he was an ordinary bloke who decided he was royalty) went to anywhere resembling Calcutta?
Seriously, I can sit in the comfort of Suntec and have plenty of faith that God has entitled me to be his agent and enjoy the fruits of 20,000 clowns. It’s a different matter to show up in a hell hole and give of yourself because you believe that God has told you to be there.
Real faith comes when you question, have doubts and yet you carry on because you believe that it is God’s will for you. It is not an entitlement you achieve for attending a rock concert on Sunday.
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