The Bridging Budget

Budget Day is probably one of the most significant days in the political calendar for most countries in the Commonwealth. It’s a time when even the most politically apathetic citizen becomes glued to the media watching events in parliament. Why? This is the one day in the political calendar when you get to find out how your personal finances might be affected by the government. The Finance Minister (Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK) gives a report on national finances and you get find out who ends up paying more or less taxes and who gets what subsidy.

Singapore’s Budget has just been announced. The Finance Minister, Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam , a highly regarded economist (high enough for the IMF to make him chairman of the   International Monetary and Financial Committee), delivered a two-hour speech outlining the state of government finances and how he was going to manage the finances for everyone’s benefit.

What was particularly striking about this year’s budget was the fact that it seemed so obviously aimed at political issues. Generally speaking, politics in Singapore is a very technocratic affair. Election results are obvious and politicians, to use a PAP phrase, have been focused on doing “What’s right instead of what’s popular?” It’s argued that Ministers can afford to take the “long-term” view and things like immediate voter emotions are of very little concern.

Well, if this budget was anything to go by, things have changed. Mr Tharman’s budget was directly aimed at addressing “hot-button” political issues. Issues like the supply of foreign workers and growing income inequality were addressed in the budget.

Most strikingly was the announcement that he was going to raise property taxes on “investment” property – that is the property that only the mega-rich can afford. While the tax itself is not high or at least high enough to make the mega-rich squeal, the very announcement that he was going to tax “wealth” rather than “income” and that it was “fair” was earth shattering.

 The Singapore Government has taken great pains to send out the “right” message to the super-rich. We've spent the last decade selling ourselves as a place that welcomes the super-rich and a place that’s immune from populist measures of wanting to tax the rich out of existence. Singapore takes pride in welcoming billionaires from around the world. The Singapore Government is very tax friendly (I've never had a tax bill of more than $800 a year on an income of a shade over $40 grand and I have the whole year to settle my tax bill). Not only does it sell itself to the rich, the government also makes it a point to tell the population that being a playground for the rich is exceedingly beneficial.

So, its earth shattering for a Singapore Finance Minister to talk passionately and firmly about raising a tax on wealth and arguing that it’s the fair thing to do. He even went as far as to say that this was not something that could be avoided with efficient tax planning.

So, why is Mr Tharman going down this road? Well, the answer is politics. Talk to enough Singaporeans (I’m included) and most of us will inevitably tell you that we find that the cost of living is becoming ridiculously expensive. The public sentiment is such it believes that the government is rolling out the red carpet for the superrich and the expense of the ordinary wage earner.

It’s clear that Mr Tharman has read the ground well and he’s doing the politically astute thing by making a visible effort to do something about the ‘concerns of the people.’ He’s even defied various pressure groups – namely businesses or employers. The “foreign worker levy” is being raised significantly. This is something businesses are against. However, instead of caving into the demands of employers, the finance minister of the world’s most employer friendly country has proceeded to carry on his course.

All this sounds very good to me as an ordinary pleb. I don’t think I’m going to be able to afford a house in Singapore anytime soon. However, I am assured of the fact that my restaurant worker persona is going to stay employed for quite some time. Suddenly, a job that has traditionally been shunned by people with any sense (low wages and long hours) is going to look a bit more attractive.

While I am happy with Mr Tharman’s efforts and gestures, I wonder who is going to ultimately benefit. Will things actually turn out for the better?

I take the newly announced “Wage Credit Scheme.” This is a scheme that is meant to encourage employers to raise wages, particularly of the lower income group. The idea behind it is deceptively simple. If an employer raises a monthly wage, the government will pick up 40 percent of the tab. So if an employer raises a wage by S$200 a month, the government will give that employer S$80 a month for the next three-years. (http://www.singaporebudget.gov.sg/budget_2013/pc.html)

While this should provide an incentive for employers and employee’s to become more ‘productive’ on paper, the question remains, is it enough to work on the ground.

Let’s take the issue of the “jobs credit” scheme, which was announced in the 2009 budget. The idea behind this scheme was to encourage companies to keep jobs instead of outsourcing them or sacking workers. The scheme involved providing a 12% cash grant on the first $2,500 of each month’s wages for each employee on the CPF payroll (http://www.mof.gov.sg/budget_2009/key_initiatives/jobs.html)

Well, I don’t doubt that some jobs were saved. However, there were companies that simply didn’t know how to work the scheme. Take the SMRT Corporation as an example. Back in November, 2012, the SMRT Corporation got a nasty slap in the face when 100 of its bus drivers from China went on strike to protest against low pay.

The drivers were duly arrested and the system went into over drive about how the drivers had disrupted our social harmony and so on.

However, the online media decided to talk about the low wages that the SMRT Corporation was paying the bus drivers. The question of why can’t give equal pay for equal work was raised (An issue which the trade union leader promptly described as being “more complicated than that). Then the more crucial question of why we needed to hire bus drivers from China and elsewhere instead of hiring Singaporeans was raised.

The SMRT Corporation proceeded to talk about the high cost of hiring Singaporeans or the fact that Singaporeans were not interested in the wages that were being offered. The corporation also went onto talk about how it was losing money on its bus services, thanks to high wages and diesel prices.

This was an interesting claim to make. The SMRT Corporation has a virtual monopoly on a service that everyone has to use.  The company controls valuable real estate and has vast sources of income. How can it have insufficient funds to pay Singaporeans half way decent wages?

More interestingly, the SMRT Corporation has been a happy recipient of “jobs credit” vouchers.  If you look through the summary reports of their financial performance from 2009 – 2011, you’ll see that the company received this grant from the government. In the 2011 report, it even goes as far as to state that it’s wage cost went up because of “lower jobs credit.”  (http://smrt.com.sg/Portals/0/PDFs/About%20SMRT/Investor%20Relations/Annual%20Report/2011_SR.pdf)

So, here’s an interesting question. What happened to all that “jobs credit” grant? Not only does the corporation make monopoly providers profits, it also receives a subsidy from the tax payer.  That subsidy is given on the understanding that the company will not sack people and keep Singaporeans in a job.

So, how is it that the company has no money to hire more Singaporeans, particularly those at the lower end of the social ladder?

The government has come up with another scheme to help businesses improve productivity and get working. One has to question whether some of our biggest government owned companies will keep in line with the government’s objectives.  

Some Thing About Names

One of the first things that Westerners have to adjust to when moving to a Chinese-dominated society is dealing with names. There are cultural differences when dealing with names.

For a start, the Chinese start with the family name while in the West, the family name follows the given (Christian) name. For example, Tang and not Li is my surname. However, many Chinese, particularly the Western educated ones are fairly flexible with their names when dealing with Westerners. Many take on Western names. Lee Kuan Yew (Family name is Lee), Singapore’s founding Prime Minister goes by “Harry Lee” when he’s with friends and family.

Many Chinese also reverse their names so as to not confuse Westerners. One of Asia’s most prominent film directors went from being “Lee Ang” to “Ang Lee.” When I lived in the West, I was “Li Tang” (It took several years to accept that I had to reverse my name – mum said I had to be flexible so the Westerners wouldn’t get confused – I didn’t see why I had to reverse my name in the West when Westerners don’t do the same in Asia. However, I’ve adjusted and I accept my Western friends and family calling me “Li Tang” because that’s who I’ve been to them for so many years.). When I moved back to Singapore I became “Tang Li” (I’ve had to bite my lip from screaming abusive terms at business partners who have called me “Li Tang” at client meetings. – They’re Asian and we live in Asia.)

The other thing that stumps Westerners when dealing with Asian names is their pronunciation.  Chinese names are tough as many of the names break the rules of English. The example that comes to mind is “NG” (how do you pronounce something with no vowels.) If Chinese names are tough for Westerners, Indian and Southeast Asian ones are worse.

What I’ve just described is what you’d call the material that provides you with enough material for a slapstick comedy based on cultural misunderstandings. There easy ways to get round these issues.

There is, however, a more serious issue when dealing with names – namely the issue of trying to figure out relationships between various parties. While the Western world has a seeming number of surnames, the Asian one seems fairly limited. I suspect that many Westerners suspect that we’re highly inbred because you find that there are lots of people walking around any given Asian city with the same surname.

I think of how it’s considered quite a rare event for Grandma Millie (Step Dad Lee’s mother) to marry a man with the same surname. By contrast, in my father’s family we’ve had two generations of Tang’s marrying Wong’s (Grandpa and Grandma and one of my uncle’s married a Wong). If there seems to be lack of Chinese surnames, there seem to be even less of them in Vietnam – the place was filled with “Nguyen’s” and “Vu’s.”

Well, we aren’t that inbred. With Chinese names, a lot of it tends to be found in the way a name is “romanised.” Had to explain to step granny Joan (step mother Nora’s mother) that my family “Tang” was not related to the “Tang Emperors,” even though the names are spelt the same in English. The Chinese character for my family name is different from the ancient emperors. If you use the ‘pinyin’ of spelling my family name it would be closer to “Deng” I have an Aunt who lives in the USA. She has ‘pinyinized’ her family name to “Deng.” By contrast the rest of us are still on the Wade Giles form of Romanizing our name – hence we remain ‘Tang.’

So, I guess when you understand things this way, you’ll find that Asians are not as inbred as one might initially imagine.

Time to Go

The Chinese Year of the Snake has started out with a bang. The Vatican announced that Pope Benedict XVI would be resigning on February, 2013. His Holiness will be the first Pope in 600 years to voluntarily resign and the world’s 450 million Catholics will have to look for a new Pope.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger who became Benedict XVI was a theological conservative. You can say that his conservative views coloured his Papacy. He was hit hard by events. The scandal involving the abuse of children by priest will undoubtedly mar his time as head of the Catholic Church. Then there were controversial moments – quoting a Byzantine Emperor’s remarks about Islam and pardoning a Bishop who openly denied the existence of the Holocaust come to mind.

Much will be said about his time as head of the world’s largest Christian Denomination in the years to come. For me, I would rather focus on one of the most crucial acts of his Papacy – his resignation and the reasons for it.

In his statement, the Pope said, “I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.” In other words – he was too old to carry on. You have to applaud him for this single sentence for several important reasons.

Let’s start with the fact that he’s admitting that he’s human and suffering from the consequences of age. You might argue that there’s no big deal here. However, he’s doing so from a position of power (As well as being revered by 450 million Catholics around the world, the Pope is considered a Head of State by International Law). History is littered with examples of old men in positions of power who forgot that they were human and prone to declining with age. Such men have done great things in their younger days and then undone their good work by hanging onto power when their time was up. Mao comes to mind as one of these figures. Thankfully for the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI is not going to be one of these men.

Giving up “office” isn’t exactly easy, especially when “office” grants you lots of power and very nice trappings. As mentioned earlier, people who have these offices often try to hang onto them until they need to be forcibly removed. The obsession of holding onto office ends up becoming so powerful that the person trying to hold on ends up damaging the “office” and the people that the “office” was supposed to serve.

Say what you like about this Pope but his act of resignation allows the Catholic Church the chance to choose a new leader, who may or may not be the right person to lead the Church in the next era. This Pope has admitted that he doesn't have the strength to do it and keeping him would only prolong the status quo. A new leader provides the Church with a chance to have a breath of ‘proverbial’ fresh air.

There is no guarantee that the next Pope will be drastically different from the current one. The Conclave of Cardinals selects one of their own and most of them have been brought up in the same traditions. However, who’s to say that the next Pope won’t have the energy required for the task ahead.  

Resigning has also helped ensure that the Church and the office of the Papacy will be separated from the man of Joseph Ratzinger. While the Papacy has survived its incumbents for nearly two thousand years, things are different in the age of the internet. The “office” like many others has come under constant scrutiny and people see and view “offices” by the people who fill them. Our expectations of the office are tied to the people.

Let’s just look back at Benedict XVI’s predecessor, John-Paul II. He was Pope for so long that he ended up personifying the office. It was so much so that everyone ended up associating the office of the Papacy with an old man who was practically drooling during every liturgy.

Benedict XVI by contrast will be leaving the Papacy while he’s still relatively healthy. It’s rare for Pope’s to do so. The last Pope who resigned did so 600 years ago. Pope’s tend to die in office. Perhaps this was fine when people didn’t live for a long time and didn’t have to perform in front of the TV or internet channels.

You might argue that the Papacy is a different institution from say the US Presidency. As such, it’s OK to keep a man in the same position for eternity. However, Papacy is a position of leadership. The Pope is a Head of State and there is a case that you should have Pope’s who are healthy and strong.

Benedict XVI may have made mistakes as Pope. However, the decision to admit his frailty and give up office is not one of them. This act of voluntary resignation may be the act that brings the Papacy into the modern age.

It’s Unpopular Speech that Needs Defending – Jessie Ventura, former Governor of Minnesota and Wrestler

There’s not been much happening on the career development front so in between my nights at Bruno’s (I still have bills to pay and Chinese New Year is round the corner), I’ve been trawling Youtube. In between getting my music fix, I’ve become a fan of speeches and interviews like people Congressman Dr Ron Paul and Jessie Ventura, the former Governor of Minnesota and wrestler. Both these men are often written off as part of the lunatic fringe by the mainstream Western Media. However, if you listen to them being interviewed by the likes of Fox News, you’ll find that both men make sense and more often than not end up running rings around their interviewers.

I’ve been particularly intrigued by Mr Ventura. I suppose the man appeals to me because he’s had quite an unconventional career. He’s been a Navy SEAL, bodyguard, wrestler, actor and the Governor of Minnesota.  Mr Ventura is a big man with a gruff voice. He looks more at home in a log cabin than he does in front of the books he’s authored.

Yet, despite all that, Mr Ventura is an intelligent man who makes a valid point. If you look at the interviews he was involved in that discuss the September 11, 2001 tragedy, you’ll find that Mr Ventura makes valuable points. He argues that the Bush II Administration lied to get America into a war and suggests that the attacks on the ‘Twin Towers’ was an ‘inside’ job.

These views aren’t exactly popular. If you watch the interviews that he gives, you’ll find the interviewers getting as emotional as they accuse him of being. When Mr Ventura suggests that the Twin Towers were blown up from within rather than crashed by the planes, you’ll find that the interviewers always yell, “How can you say that?”

Mr Ventura’s reply is inevitably, “I can because the constitution allows me to – popular speech does not need defending, it’s unpopular speech that needs to be protected.”

If you leave Mr Ventura’s thoughts about the September 11, 2001 attacks, you’ll realize that Mr Ventura has a point. If a society claims to value freedom of speech, it has to protect ‘unpopular’ speech as much as it allows ‘popular’ speech. If we claim that “Freedom of Speech” is ‘sacrosanct’ we have to put up with the fact that what is often said is …..well, garbage that you might not agree with. You work on the principle of “I hate what you say but I’ll defend your right to say it.”

When you look at things in this light, you’ll realize that Mr Ventura is performing a very important service for countries like America, which claim that it defends the right to “free speech” as sacrosanct.

Let’s face it, there is truth in the saying, “birds of a feather flock together.” Human beings will form groups with people they tend to agree with the most. I take myself as an example. The friends that I have made share many similarities to me. While we do have individual differences, we tend to share a common dislike for conventional wisdom. Like me, many of my friends have developed off-beat career paths, away from the accepted wisdom that it’s best to be under a big brand name company. Somehow or other, this strong similarity between us helps overcome whatever differences that we may have.

This desire to group together with ‘like-minded’ people tends to be the seed of culture formation. Mythologies about certain historical events develop because groups of people agree on certain things about the event and sooner or later everyone accepts things as conventional wisdom.

On the surface there’s nothing wrong with the development of conventional wisdom. However, there is a point when things become worrying – that is the point when the mythology of an event becomes sacred and it becomes a sacrilege to challenge conventional wisdom.

The first area where this is worrying is that this goes against the very concept of ‘freedom of speech.’ If you argue that ‘Freedom of Speech’ is sacrosanct, it does not mean that you only tolerate ‘Acceptable’ speech because you have to draw the line of “who” makes the decision of what is acceptable and what is not. Belief in “freedom of speech” means that you have to be prepared to be offended. You can then either ignore the speech that offended you or you can accept the points the other side made or you can refute the other side’s views with your own.

Then you have to look at the fact that when you make something sacred to the point of not being able to be challenged, you run the risk of closing all possibility to the fact that you may have been wrong and you also run the risk of killing ALL forms of innovation.

Let’s start with the killing of innovation. What is innovation other than the challenging of ‘conventional’ wisdom? Four centuries ago, it was conventional wisdom that the world was flat and the Sun evolved around the earth. Challenging those concepts was punishable by some horrible torture. Now, if you look at the history innovation, you’ll find that humankind only started making lots of progress in a hurry once the likes of Galileo and Copernicus challenged that conventional wisdom, paid the price for it and were proved right. 

The good creature comforts that most of us enjoy today have its foundation in the fact that people dared to challenge ‘conventional’ wisdom.

The other worry is that when you make something so sacred that it cannot be challenged, you hide the fact that the creators of the ‘mythology’ might have less than benign motives for creating the mythology in the first place.

Say what you like about Mr Ventura’s arguments about September, 11, 2001, but he has a point when he says that “Governments do lie.” He cites the “Gulf of Tonkin” incident which brought the US into conflict with Vietnam. Mr Ventura points out that this was a lie and 58,000 Americans of his generation died. His logic is not faulty when he points out that if the government lied over the “Gulf of Tonkin,” it is capable of lying over September 11, 2001.

In many ways historical events have proved Mr Ventura right. The Bush II Administration rushed into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the case of Iraq, the Administration sold the mythology that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and was a financier of the terrorist who attacked the ‘Twin Towers.’ Needless to say these two assertions have since been proved false.

Now, this comes from the American government, which is considered a relatively benign government. Can you imagine what less benign governments would do, especially if they had a public which was less questioning about the mythologies they created?

I think of Europe where it is illegal to question the “Holocaust.” If you want to go to jail, all you need to do is to make a public suggestion that the gas chambers at “Auschwitz” never existed.

Now, we can accept that this is an ugly incident in human, especially European history. However, has it made things any better for the parties involved?

Unfortunately, the answer seems to be no. As one Israeli media personality points out – “It’s a trick we always use and it always works – when someone in Europe is critical of us, we bring up the Holocaust.” We have asituation where the Europeans allow themselves to be blackmailed by Israel andEurope loses any credibility as being a force of good in the Middle East.  

So, what can we do? Well, we start by accepting that freedom of speech involves allowing the airing of views that might offend us. Then we have to accept that censorship is not the solution. The solution is to counter it with more free speech – you make a point and we’ll make ours with evidence. When you act like that and trust the majority of people to behave rationally, you become more credible. People can be converted if you listen and engage rather than try bully boy gangster techniques, which will only backfire.

  

Motivations

You have to credit the Young Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC who drinks in the Middle of Ramadan aka Thambi Pundek to provide the inspiration for the first blog post of 2013. A few nights ago he called me out to discuss an upcoming by-election.

If you can believe the Young Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC who drinks in the Middle of Ramadan aka Thambi Pundek, it seems that the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) is actually worried about losing a seat. The root of the Party’s worries can be summed up in three letters – AIM. Since the my fellow bloggers, particularly Andrew Loh of Public House and Alex Au of Yawning Bread, have covered the story, I’m going to avoid going into details. I will however, repeat the point that the ruling party’s reputation for honesty and transparency has taken something of a battering.

The Young Muslim Politician who fornicates with Prostitutes in Penang from Pasir Ris GRC aka Thambi Pundek was particularly keen to push me for ‘dirt’ on Andrew. In his words, Andrew is officially the ‘most powerful blogger’ in Singapore. He’s been trying to find out more about Andrew for several months. In one of those sessions of trying to find out more about Andrew, he asked, “Where does Andrew get his funds from? He’s officially unemployed. Why does he do it? There must be something there?”

I've always remembered that saying because it sums up one prominent fact about the powers-that-be. They simply don’t understand people who are motivated by something other than money and power.

If you look at the way Singapore operates, you’ll realize that the powers-that-be have been exceptionally good at using power and money to keep people in order. The scholarship system is a good example. Bright young things who might otherwise become trouble makers are given the chance to live an exceedingly cushy life. After a few years of living the good life, the best and brightest have no interest in over throwing the status quo – in fact they have every reason to preserve it.

On the surface of things, this is a brilliant way to get things done. As much as Singaporeans might bitch and moan about life, we’re not about to start a revolution in the manner of what happened in Tunisia and Egypt. Life is sufficiently comfortable either for ourselves or our loved ones to stop us from going onto the streets.

This is something that the powers-that-be have counted on for the last four decades. 

However, things are starting to change. The internet has given a voice to people who care about issues for the issues sake.

I think of guys like Andrew Loh and Alex Au, who have become part of an alternative voice to the mainstream in Singapore. Neither of them is making a lot of money nor are they about to win political office anytime soon. Yet, they continue to do what they do and have gained a sizeable following and reputation as a voice in Singapore. Why do they do what they do?

While I won’t call myself a close friend of either man, I know them well enough to say that both are motivated to things other than the material.

I think of my one meeting with Alex. I asked him how one could monetize one’s blog. He told me “don’t.” His reason was simple, if the blog became a commercial vehicle, I’d be beholden to commercial interest. If you think about it – he’s not wrong. Just ask yourself when you last read an article in a newspaper that was critical of one of the major advertisers.

Yawning Bread has no advertising. It’s free and accessible to anyone with an internet connection. The content is exceedingly sharp and the analysis is authentic and honest. The blog continues to be widely read.

Let’s face it; there are people who believe in something other than the almighty dollar. These people are hard to manage because they are motivated by something other than the obvious. Yet, in a funny way, these are the very people that can make things happen. People may disagree with Alex and Andrew but they respect them for their authenticity. These are the people who can change minds.

Instead of trying to bully or buy these people, surely the powers-that-be should be thinking of ways to work with them. 

The Energy in New Ends

It’s been a relatively funny year and I've managed to end it feeling rather pleased with myself. Didn’t win the lottery and my financial prospects are not startling. However, I found a plan of sorts and stuck to it reasonably well enough to see results at the end of the year.

Events on the global front gave the blogger in me lots of talk about. The USA had an election and American voters, thankfully made the right choice. The world economy is in a mess and they voters decided not to hand it to someone from the group that was responsible for the mess in the first place.

Here, at home, in Singapore, the ‘gossip writer’ in me had lots of fun. This was the year of sex-scandals. It started off with the head of the Singapore Civil Defense and Central Narcotics Bureau stepping down because of a sex scandal. At the end of the year, the Speaker of Parliament has resigned over an extra-marital affair. In between you had a host of senior civil servants and prominent members of society being arrested for soliciting sex with underage prostitutes.  You could say that the proverbial worms are coming out of the can. For me, I’d like to think that these scandals are a sign of the powerful being held to account and Singapore deciding to be the country it pledges to be rather than the one with unspoken caveats – i.e. “regardless of race, language or religion (provided you have lots of money in your bank account)”

On the family front I had to say goodbye to my Dad’s oldest brother. Uncle Richard was in many ways the original maverick – the uneducated Chinatown Boy who made good. Unfortunately he forgot that it wasn’t just about making money – you had to keep the stuff and more worryingly he abused his body. His passing was a relief in as much as it was the end of his physical suffering. As much as I regard the passing of a sick old man as a blessing, I will also miss a much loved uncle.

However, there were some good beginnings too. Max, my younger brother has started his career in real-estate. He’s become more studious and both he and Caitlan look like they’re settling down into a very stable life together. My other siblings are also managing well. Tara has started her own photography studio in London and Christopher fully integrated into university life.

There was a big birthday party for me this year. Lee, my stepfather turned 80 and I made it to Washington State to spend time with him. He is thankfully healthy and his mind is still buzzing. However, it sometimes hard to be the decent stepson I’d like to be in as much as, I think it was hard for him to accept that it was now my turn to buy the good lunches.

It was also good to catch up with my stepsister, Carol and her family. I’m particularly happy that I got to attend the wedding of my step nephew, Brennon and his lovely wife, Chava, who is now pregnant. I think they’re going to make a very beautiful baby……

As for me, there was something of a transition of sorts. Joyce, the girl who had been such a central part of my life two-years ago left for China. In a way it was a relief. Although my relationship with her was exceedingly passionate, it was, as they say, a little too hot for most people to handle. She couldn't handle “us” and life in Singapore. I hope she’s finding some sense of balance in China. We still trade the odd email and thankfully she’s gracious enough to send me photos of Yooga once in a while. This little boy is a gem and I pray, that somehow, despite the adversities he faces, he’ll grow into a man that the world will admire, though I have to remember what he once told his mother at the age of four, “I’m NOT GOD, I DON’T know everything.”

Just as Joyce and Yooga left my life, Thuy, the little girl who showed me what it was like to live for something greater than myself, reentered it. The seven-year old girl I knew six-years ago is now a teenager of 13.

It’s taken a bit of getting used to each other again. I got to remember that she’s almost a grown woman and I have to respect that but at the same time she’s not quite a grown woman yet and the worries that one has for a small child remain. She’s also adjusting to me too and in between the usual teasing, she is acknowledging that I might be a force of good in her life.

You could say that this is God’s way of making me pay for all my past nonsense with the opposite sex. However, it’s a task that I take on with some amount of pride and someone remarked that having Thuy in my life has brought out the unknown “Responsible” Tang Li.

In terms of work, the highlight will undoubtedly be the PANIIT Conference, which took place in April, 2012. The conference brought together a host of some of the most prominent people in Indian industry and it allowed me to better understand the transformation of a giant country that was once known as backwater of contentious people.  While the vast majority of Indians live below the poverty line, there is a vast number who are educated and well to do. The group at IIT is on their way up and doing so in a hurry. This group is rich with ideas and some of them are now shifting their attention to giving back to where they came from, something which can only be good for India. For me, working with them was exhilarating and I’m grateful to continued friendship of Supriyo Sircar, CEO of Polaris Asia-Pacific and the new friendships with people like Amrit Barman from SAP, Dhruv Jain from Energizer and Mr KV Rao from Tata Power. I’m grateful for having had the chance to meet the likes of Mr R.Gopalakrishnan, Executive Director of Tata Sons and Arjun Mahlotra, one of the founders of Hindustan Computers (HCL) and Headstrong.

The other high point came from an industry that my family seems to be drawn to – the Singapore International Photography Festival (SIPF). I am grateful to Mr Glenn Lim, Director 20twenty PR for inviting me to work with him for the three months of launching a festival that brought renown photographers like Stuart Franklin (he who shot the famous photo of the man defying the tank at Tiananmen Square) to not just display their works but to mentor aspiring photographers. There is talent in Singapore and it’s good that we’re looking to and learning from the world.

I also seem to have found a knack with picking up litigation support jobs. This year, I found myself supporting Mr PN Balji in a job that involved a trade mark dispute between the founding members of Ku Te Da. As the trial is still ongoing (lawyers are currently working on submissions) I won’t say much other than the fact that Singapore’s court rooms are a source of stories that are worth telling.

While I remain a media relations consultant, I’m also putting a foot in what could be a career change or a pension plan. I've been spending my weekends helping at a restaurant called Bruno’s. It’s an Italian Restaurant that serves exceedingly good food. I’m currently working as service staff and while the pay is not great, I am enjoying meeting people. Being part of the blue collar work force also helps me to better understand issues that I care about.

On the flip side it’s also good for my health. I've never been one for the gym so a job that keeps me on my feet has been good form of exercise. My blood pressure has lowered and I've managed to shed a few kilos.

While I've called Singapore home for the last decade, this is a year that I've also started to look at the region as an alternative for me. After many day-trips to Johor, I have now set up a fixed-deposit and savings account there. Malaysia has issues but it’s the most obvious place for Singaporeans to expand to. Both Singapore and Malaysia complement each other.  I don’t know how things will be but Malaysia has a certain amount of space that Singapore doesn't have and JB is close enough to provide one with extra space.

Vietnam is also interesting. Although it is still a third world country, it is dynamic and filled with a certain type of energy. After one trip I’d like to go back again and with a plan of sorts.

I don’t know what 2013 will bring. I just hope that I can grow what little I've managed to gain in 2012. There will undoubtedly be challenges but as always, I've come to accept that these are things to be relished and I hope that I remain healthy and able to grab the chances that I get in 2013. 

The World’s Grubbiest Baby and the Joys of Grubbiness

The week I spent in rural Vietnam has given me a new best friend. He is the smart half’s grand-nephew. He is also the world’s grubbiest baby.

In the day I got to hang out with him, he managed to turn his white shirt black. He refused my help to blow his snotty nose (though my t-shirt turned out to be quite attractive for that purpose when he decided to do it himself) and he was quite happy to feast on something or other that was on the floor. He also enjoyed rolling in mud. What I’ve described takes a little getting used to. My friends who have become parents would be stunned and might be trying to call some authority or other.

I would urge everyone to stop and appreciate the Grubby Baby. He is a well-adjusted two-year old. He was not intimidated by dogs even though many of them were bigger than him and he had no problem meeting people, including strangers. He was also exceedingly robust. He slept throughout the night and went to day care without any hassle. In short he wasn't any worse off than kids who had a nanny to follow them all over the place preventing them from stepping a toe on sanitized floor.

Grubby Baby reminds me of a conversation I had with one of the prominent ophthalmologist who had been to India. He listed all the things that the Indian hospital had done which would get the doctors barred had they been in anywhere else but India. However, at the end of the conversation he made a valuable point, namely, “The infection rates are not higher than they are here.”

 I have to ask – “Have we become so sanitized that we’re unable to handle the world as it really is?” Yes, I believe modern science and knowledge about hygiene have worked wonders. Things like rates of infant mortality have gone down and people are living longer and healthier lives thanks to modern science. Today there is no reason to die of diseases that were once considered fatal. We should be thankful for all these things and we should push our quest for knowledge even further.

However, the conversation with the good doctor and befriending Grubby Baby has given me the belief that there’s a need to expose our young to some of the rougher things that nature provides. There is enough science out there to show that the human body has a way of adjusting to its natural environment. There is evidence to show that people from the developing world develop antibodies that people in the developed world simply don’t have.

I guess the point is that the body develops resilience because it needs to. Someone from the third world develops antibodies that someone from the developed world doesn’t have because the person from the third world needs to. The saying that “necessity is the mother of innovation” also applies to nature and medical science.

As a society we pursue comfort and convenience. However, I think of the nutritionist, Dr Udo Erasmus who said, “Whenever someone tells you something is convenient you better run away from it – life isn’t meant to be convenient.”

His point was simple; you need to struggle for the best things in life. The human condition becomes stronger whenever it has to go through struggle. I look at the Grubby Baby and his happy robust smile. He’s gotten that way because he’s had to survive through the things nature throws at him. He’s happy to deal with dogs and people because they are part of his natural environment. The standard joke with a friend of mine is that if we placed the Grubby Baby (age two) in a boxing ring with the Young Pork Eating Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC aka Thambi Pundek (age 22), Grubby Baby would end up humiliating him. Grubby Baby can deal with nature and has struggled while the Young Pork Eating Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC aka Thambi Pundek has spent his life avoiding every possible struggle that life might throw at him.

Now I take the value of struggle even further. I look at Vietnam and the energy of the people. These are the people who threw of the yoke of French Colonial rule and then proceeded to see the back of the Americans despite having several tons of bombs dropped on them. If that was not enough, they then gave the Mainland Chinese a very bloody nose when their giant neighbor decided to invade. Now that the focus has moved from fighting wars to economic development, you find that the Vietnamese are doing good things. In the few days I didn’t see a single beggar on the streets of Hanoi. Instead of begging, people were finding all sorts of ways to make a living – for example, every corner of Hanoi is a food stall.

Like the Grubby Baby, these are people who have been exposed to nature, which is exceedingly beautiful and exceedingly brutal at the same time. These are people who understand that you have to survive on your own and somehow you have to get creative.

I think back to the strike by the SMRT’s Mainland Chinese and the government reaction of “Why Take Things into Your Own Hands when there are Proper Channels.” The Singapore Government and Singapore people have become too used to dealing with political and legal machinery that has made both parties conveniently oblivious to the realities of nature. The Mainland Chinese and other Asians are used to dealing with the realities of nature.

When I read comments by Singaporeans on how the PRC Chinese should have known better and accepted the conditions they were given, I shudder. We have become a people who have lost our human instincts to defend ourselves and become reliant on the system to get it right. Ask your average Singaporean about the struggle that people like Tibetans and Palestinians go through and you’ll find them grossly unsympathetic. There is no empathy for people who believe in struggle and they’re dismissed as people who are too stupid to understand they’re place in the system. This is unnatural.

Well, now we’re dealing with people who expect life to be a struggle. Yes they can take punishment that most of us can’t. However, they've reached the point where they cannot accept being abused and so they’re acting to stop it. This is unfortunately for Middle Class Singapore a reality and part of human nature.

The tough half is determined to move away from her roots. I’m conflicted because as much as I see her appreciation for safety and cleanliness, I also believe that she outclasses most people because she’s had to struggle. I think that if we get round to children, I’d like them to spend their early childhood as grubby babies rather than artificially sanitized ones.   

Who Gives a Shit, they’re Just Human

It’s been a week since I've come back from Vietnam and as things would have it, I've been given plenty to write about. If you were superstitious, you could say that the dragon (it’s the Chinese Year of the Dragon) has decided to swipe its tail to reveal the ugly side of the place I've called home.

I’m generally quite happy in Singapore. Anyone who’s lived here can tell you that the place has gotten plenty of the important things right. I will never tire telling people that Singapore is what a city should be – clean, green and rich. In terms of our basic facilities and amenities, we’re as good; if not better off than most places on earth (I’m comparing Singapore with developed cities in the USA and Europe). I do value things like the safety.

What gets to me about living in Singapore is the attitude of my fellow countrymen towards the less fortunate, particularly if the less fortunate happen to be dark and come from other parts of Asia. I've been living here for over a decade now and I should be immune to these things by now, but I’m not. You might argue that it’s a character flaw of mine but I get very upset whenever I come across the attitudes of Singaporeans towards “other Asians.”

Like with most things in Singapore, the ‘omnipotent’ government needs to bear a chunk of the responsibility for the development of this attitude. The government calls it being pragmatic. I would call it being a racist bully. We are currently killing ourselves to welcome ‘Western Bankers’ into the island. I've got nothing against Westerners per se, some of my best friends and family are. I've also got nothing against financiers per se.

What I do object to is how the group that brought us the “sub-prime” crisis is being billed as ‘heroic’ and ‘necessary’ for ordinary people. When three of them assaulted ordinary people, the police decided it was best to let them go and a few decided to defend them on the internet. The actions of the powers-that-be have sent a clear message – certain people need to be venerated.

Just as official policy venerates one group, it denigrates another. Try being Indian, Bangladeshi, Vietnamese, Pilipino or Mainland Chinese.  These groups work in the so called ‘dirty’ jobs that the locals won’t do and instead of making it easier for this lot to either make a living, official policy does the opposite. Just as we kill ourselves to welcome Western Bankers, we proudly sent gun boats to turn away Vietnamese boat people fleeing a war in the 70s and nearly 40 years later, we’re doing exactly the same thing. The government proudly denied entry to Vietnamese vessel that had the misfortune to rescue 40 Rohingaya’s fleeing genocide in their native Burma.

Perhaps the politicians are seeing something that I don’t see here but who we show compassion to seem grossly wrong. When Westerners who have been screwed out of their homes decide to turn on the bankers who screwed them, we rush to show compassion to the bankers. When people flee being imminent slaughter, we decide that they’re not worthy of our compassion. Not sure where the logic in that comes from.

Anyway, we've always known that politicians are an interesting lot. What gets to me is the attitude that people show towards the less fortunate.

Thankfully someone else has expressed outrage in another blog (http://limpehft.blogspot.sg/2012/12/heartless-government-heartless-people.html) and I’m not going to list out the attitudes that people have.

What I will say is that it necessary to make voices like the mentioned blogger more available and to turn youthful outrage into something more sustainable. It gets to me when you have a picture of people struggling to survive and the response, which is best summed up as, “Oh, they’re so dirty, they’ll affect my nice comfortable life.”  I think of Andrew Loh, publisher of Publichouse.sg,  who wrote a piece about the appalling living conditions on yahoo (http://sg.news.yahoo.com/blogs/singaporescene/leave-tough-talk-aside-110105229.html) and had responses that were as immature as “Wah, you want to hire a maid for them ah”

What gets to me is that many of the commentators are not stupid or uneducated. Most are middle-class working professionals. So, I have to ask myself if being educated is really all that it’s cracked up to be. It’s like we've become so sanitized that we've forgotten what it is like to be human.

I think of my week in rural Vietnam with the other half’s family. People didn't have the facilities that we have. Yet they all had enough to eat and people helped each other. There was a sense of humanity there.

I’ll be honest here. I had internet withdrawal symptoms and I needed to get back to trying to work. I did miss modern amenities.

Yet, a day after settling back into modern amenities, I started missing rural Vietnam. The place energized me. I couldn’t place my finger on what it was that made me feel so energized after the place.  I've now figured it out. People over there have retained some sense of humanity. It’s something that we need to regain. 

Aren't You Luck that We Shit on You?

Singapore has just seen its first major industrial action in 26-years. On Monday, 26 November, 2012, 100 bus drivers from the Singapore Mass Rapid Transport Corporation (SMRT) decided to stop work in protest over their pay and working conditions. As expected, bus services were affected and the SMRT was left scrambling to find a way of dealing with the situation.

The great and the good have weighed in on the issue. The Powers-That-Be have been stunned. Singapore has prided itself in being “strike-free.” The official stand is, “This is illegal criminal activity and we cannot condone it – there are proper channels to air your grievances and you cannot take things into your own hands.” There is of course the other shock in that this ‘strike’ is led by Mainland Chinese – a group the government has led into the country in the belief that they’d be so grateful to be let into Singapore that they’d be even more docile than the local population.

What’s particularly interesting is the fact that a great number of comments in the online and mainstream media have been echoing this sentiment. One lady has gone as far as to call them “thugs” and accusing them of trying to hold the nation hostage. It seems that the government has managed to find itself on the right side of the backlash against its very own policy to open the flood gates to foreign labour.

Unfortunately, everyone seems to be missing the point here. The question that should be asked is – “What is it that made 100 Mainland Chinese strike?” Let’s face it, the Chinese are known as sturdy migrants who are able to take an enormous amount of rubbish that most other groups won’t take. Today’s migrants from Mainland China don’t come from the thriving metropolises of Beijing and Shanghai. A very large portion of them come from rural areas are untouched by the economic growth driving China. What you give them should be better than what they’re used to.

It turns out that the group was protesting against the fact that they were getting a vastly inferior deal to their Malaysian counterparts. According to the statistics released by SMRT an average Chinese driver was getting a good $400 a month less than his Malaysian counterpart. When the SMRT Corporation increased the pay of Malaysian drivers, it didn’t for the ones from China. A few have argued that the pay differential is not as great as it seems since the company subsidized the accommodation of the Chinamen by $270 a month per person. Unfortunately what it didn’t factor into the equation was the fact that the Chinamen worked vastly longer hours in return for their miniscule pay rise. Furthermore, the Malaysian drivers were hired as permanent staff, thus enjoying job security and regular pay increments, which the guys from China did not get (the guys from China are hired on a two-year contract).

Let’s face it, there is no rational way of looking at the comparison and realizing that the Chinese guys were getting a raw deal – raw enough for them to do something about it. Who is at fault? Whatever way you look at it, the SMRT Corporation has failed in basic communications and labour relations. Let’s just look at some issues here.

Are Chinese Bus Drivers Inferior to Malaysian Ones?

Some Singapore Chinese Graduate lady wrote on the Today News paper’s online portal that Chinese should have asked why they were getting paid less instead of complaining about it. The lady in question went as far as to suggest that the lower pay was due to inferior language skills of the Chinese bus drivers

Let’s start with the obvious; this isn’t the only time that people have complained about the lack of English language skills by people from China. Most of the complaints have come from the service sector. So given that complaints about the language skills of PRC nationals is not exactly new, why did the SMRT hire PRC drivers whose language skills may not have been up to par? As a business, it is surely in the interest of the company to ensure that the people it hires can communicate with their customers.

The Second Point is that the key element of driving a bus is driving skills rather than language skills. Yes, you do need to communicate basic messages to passengers – ie you got to be able to advise people on certain routs but other than that your job as a bus driver is to drive well and safely. Nobody has shown any evidence what so ever that  PRC drivers were inferior in this crucial aspect of the job to their Malaysian and dare I say, Singaporean counterparts.

So, how exactly were the PRC chaps inferior to the other nationalities to the extent that it justified being paid less money than their counterparts for doing the same job?

China is a developing country; its citizens can afford to live on less – The Pittance they Earn here is a Fortune Where they Come From 

Yes, China is developing and its people have lived on less than most. However, this argument doesn’t exactly hold water. Contrary to what many Singaporeans might like to think, migrants do bring their families over and often have to support them.

Furthermore, while what one earns in one country might seem like a fortune in another, the fact remains that most of us have to live in the country that they work in. I remember that when I lived in England, it felt like earning a salary in England would make me a rich man – everything penny earned in England would be three times what it was in Singapore.  Unfortunately that changed when I had to pay bills in pounds.

So while one might comment about how people from China, India, and Bangladesh etc are earning a fortune when converted into their native currencies, they forget that our foreign labourers have to live in Singapore and pay their respective bills in Singapore dollars. What they do send back home has to be at a cost of denying themselves.

The closest anyone has to earning a strong currency and spending in a weaker one are the Malaysians who live in Johor Bahru. The distance between Singapore and Johor is reachable by train and bus. It is possible to live in Johor and work in Singapore – earning Singapore dollars and spending Ringitt is possible. It’s a different story for the chaps from Mainland China. They can’t take a bus back to China every night and spend their hard earned Singapore dollars in Chinese Yuan.

There are Official Channels they should not have taken things into their own hands.

Yes, there are official channels. Workers in Singapore can always go to their HR departments and if the HR departments don’t listen there is always the regulatory authority, which in this case is the Ministry of Manpower. If you are really desperate you can bring it to the courts.

While the system is wonderfully transparent on paper, there is a major flow – going through it requires time and money. Lawyers for one have never been known to be cheap and going through any government ministry requires time. 

While the Ministry of Manpower is considered effective in what it does, it still takes 11-weeks to investigate claims made by workers against employers. While it might not seem like much time to the bureaucratic machinery, this is a lot of time for a worker, particularly the ones at the bottom of the rung who have to feed themselves and are often forced to stay in accommodation provided by the very employer they are making a complaint against.

Do you expect the economically disadvantaged to rush through the system? Rightly or wrongly, the poor, particularly those from one-party systems, don’t expect to get a fair deal.

Unfortunately, the Singapore system hasn’t exactly made itself known to be particularly ‘labour-friendly.’ Let’s face it; abusing your foreign domestic worker is less of a crime than libel against politicians. Our system has allowed a contractor to keep his workers in conditions so harsh that one of them died from chicken pox. Despite repeated calls to the police, nobody did anything until someone died and when that happened, the courts slapped the contractor in question with a mere $10,000 fine.

Contrary to what Singaporeans might believe, such stories do get around the migrant communities. The system brags about how our courts work for settling commercial disputes. While other system’s might show that the small man can win in the courts once in a while, Singapore doesn’t bother to announce those victories.

So, while the powers –that-be might talk about going through official channels, we need to look at how ordinary people perceive the system. If desperate people do not believe they have a fair chance of dealing with the system, isn’t logical that they will look to get what they perceive to be justice outside the system?

The Law Says You Have to Give Two Weeks’ Notice to Strike

Yes, this is technically and legally true. However, anyone who expects people to follow this rule when they perceive the system to be against them is living in lalala land. Sun Tzu argued that surprise was one of the key elements of victory.

The Times Have Changed

Let’s face it, the bus drivers broke the letter of the law and they will have to face the music. However, sweeping this incident under the proverbial carpet would be a gross mistake. Whatever one might think of this "strike" the point is, the Chinese Bus Drivers have made people notice them and pay attention to their complaint. While one might bleat on about how they should have gone through the "proper channels," we have to ask ourselves if we'd even know about the pay discrepancy between Chinese and Malaysian Bus Drivers. Would we even know about dormitories? 

Strikes can harm an economy. Let's look at the militant unions who crippled the UK economy in the 70s as an example of what not to accept. 

However, no strikes are not necessarily an example of healthy industrial relations. Workers keep quiet because they need their jobs. Businesses do benefit with lower cost, including labour cost. However, there's a point when people will not except being treated unfairly or when you pay them at such levels where they are barely surviving. Just as people don't choose to be suicide bombers as a career choice, people don't go to work to strike for the sake of it. 

So, SMRT and Singapore Inc needs to treat this as a wake up call to do something about bringing the management of industrial relations into the current era. The days when workers are willing to accept minimal wages as being good for society are long gone. 

Thankful on Thanksgiving

My American friends and family have just celebrated Thanksgiving, a festival that has its roots in the old European festival. Some of attributed the American festival to going as far back as 1621 when the first immigrants were arriving in the new world. There is a ‘legend’ of sorts that states that this was the one time the new arrivals and the indigenous Indians shared a meal together.

While I don’t celebrate Thanksgiving personally, I believe that there are things that the world should be thankful for. For a start, the world remains a fairly decent place because America remains the world’s superpower. Despite the economic crisis and the often bitter partisanship of her politicians, America on the whole has remained a force of good. Say what you like about America’s political system but it has held fairly steady and the current crop of politicians are being forced by voters to look at domestic issues instead of looking for foreign adventures to distract themselves.

For all the problems of the American economy, the country remains the hot bed of innovation. While the system may at times seem unfair and even destructive, it has constantly produced companies and people who have come up with the things that make our future. While America’s military strength may have been sapped by the lack of funding and overambitious overseas ventures, the power of ideas generated by American universities is shaping the world. The rise of tomorrow’s superpowers, China and India, can attribute to American Universities (As a friend of mine who was at University of Southern California pointed out – mechanical engineering courses at USC are filled with Mainland Chinese and software engineering courses are filled with Indians).

America has its problems and American policy, as anyone who’s dealt with the Middle East will tell you, has done plenty of harm. However, I remain with Douglas Hurd, Britain’s former Foreign Secretary, when he describes America as the “most benevolent superpower in history.” On the balance of things, America has been a force of good.

For me, my reasons to be thankful to the USA are more personal. Although I’ve career success with American companies like Citibank and GE, my reasons to be thankful to the USA are more personal – it’s family. The two Americans who come to mind are my stepfather, Lee (Mum’s second husband) and my step-grandmother, Joan (mother of my dad’s second wife).

Both Lee and Joan never thought of me as anything less than their own. To Lee, I was as good to him as his own flesh and blood sons. He’d always make it a point to ensure that I would never have anything less than my sister, Tara his natural daughter. There was a long stretch of my life where having Lee around was taken for granted as breathing and I know the same is true for him. When I do get a chance to speak to him, he tells me that I’ll always be the 13-year old boy he once knew and raised as his own.

Joan was the other reason why I am thankful to the USA. She took me as her own grandson and one of the last great memories I have of being in the US was visiting her in Chicago. She would quiz me about politics in Singapore and the UK as well as my views on the global economy. One of the most touching things she did was to keep every email that I sent to her when I was at university and to compile it into a small book. Not only did she take me as her grandson, she took my friend Joe on as well.  She was more than happy to be an interviewee for one of his early videos.

I’m probably very different from what either Joan or Lee expected of me. It was Joan who planted the seed of a dream I once had of getting an MBA at Northwestern. Lee feels that I have the potential for great spirituality.

However, both have left one major impression on me – the understanding that family is more than a question of flesh and blood. Family is more than a question of skin colour or ideology. Many of my friends wonder why I’ve put my heart into both Thuy and Yooga instead of focusing on having my own flesh and blood.  I think the answer is I’ve seen both these kids as mine regardless of the lack of a biological connection. With Yooga, I worry that his mother’s instability will affect him. With Thuy returning to my life as a young woman, I worry that every inappropriate adventure I had with the opposite sex will come back to haunt her.

Yet, I’m thankful for all the worries and responsibilities I’ve taken on. It’s like when people question me as to why I’m so passionate about wanting to do things for Yooga or Thuy because they’re not my flesh and blood, I wonder what my life would have been like if Lee had taken the same position with me. I believe my life would be the poorer for it.

I went to see Lee this summer. It was his 80th birthday and he made the point to the family that seeing me was the only wish he had. The process of going to see Lee in Washington State (Port Townsend) also meant I got to see my stepsister, Carol and her family.

The last time I saw them was 14-years ago. Her kids, my step nieces and nephews were children, just like me. The youngest of her kids, Brennon and Mikaela, were still small enough to jump into my arms and get hugged. Well, I returned to the USA to find Mikaela a mother of a two-year old boy and I arrived in time to see Brennon married off to my new found ex-step-niece Chava. Time has passed. We’ve made monumental life changes. There’s been an absence of over a decade. Yet the feeling of being welcomed by family remains the same.

I am also thankful that the USA has been good to my brother Max. Funny, when we were children (well, I’m quite a bit older, so I was a kid and he a baby), the expectation was that I would be the studious one and Max the rebel. Things have turned out quite differently. I have, as they say, become the bastard in the family, the type who gives his own parents nightmares. Max has turned out quite differently. A steady girlfriend in the shape of Caitlan has, I believe, brought out the best in him and he’s found a form of contentment that seems to elude most of us.

Say what you like about America and American politics. Say what you like about the mess of the American economy or the mess of its Middle Eastern policies. The country is the place that blessed me with a family beyond flesh and blood. It’s blessed my flesh and blood – it for this reason that I am thankful onThanksgiving day.

Can you blame them?

I spent my early Sunday morning attending a book launch by a prominent member of Singapore’s local community. The man in question was a former CID officer who, thanks to his attraction to gold had earned himself the name “Mr Gold Finger.”

Mr Gold Finger has been out of the police force and is now a sprightly 70-year old. Upon retirement, the man decided to devote his life to his community. He is an active member of both the Singapore Indian DevelopmentAssociation (SINDA) and the Little India Shop Keepers Association (LISHA). Mr Gold Finger is also the former father-in-law of Bijay, the Nepali Naan Maker or the Nice Guy who Finishes First.

Despite his devotion to his community, Mr Gold Finger taken a few knocks on the personal front. His eldest daughter died of cancer and his second daughter has since moved to Belfast taking along with her his much loved granddaughter. The worst thing to afflict Mr Gold Finger is the fact that his DNA runs through his eldest son – Macha Pundek (Bother-in-law Cunt). Macha at the age of 44 has found a wonderful career – he’s waiting for Mr Gold Finger to meet his maker in the hope that he inherits his wealth.

Being revolted by the site of Macha Pudek is as easy as being drawn to his father. Macha Pundek dresses like a rapper. He’s shaved his head clean and wears sunglasses indoors. He has the usual baggy trousers and somewhere in there I believe he really believes he’s a music producer of “Gangsta Rap.” While he may look the part, Macha Pundek has forgotten one of the key elements of being a music producer – you’re actually required to do some work.

At yesterday’s event, I saw the pride Mr Gold Finger had in his community. The man has written a book on the commonalities between Confucius and Thelluvar, a Tamil sage. His latest book told the story of his life. It was filled with family photos, photos of his travels and photos with the great and the good of Singapore, including our former President, Mr SR Nathan.

Then I had the misfortune of running into Macha Pundek. A greater misfortune followed – Macha Pundek actually recognized me and said hello. Yech……He was there strutting around like a peacock and this time he had company. He had a friend, who I think worked for a debt collection company. The giveaway was that he surrounded himself with nasty looking people (the type who have tattoos on their faces) swaggering around in black leather jackets.

I felt bad for Mr Gold Finger. Here you are trying to show the community that you’ve devoted your life to that you are a highly respectable man. Then, along comes your low-life scum of a son with his equally distasteful group of friends, swaggering around on your parade.

How else could you describe the situation other than to say – SHIT! Well, I guess you could say it’s ironic. Macha Pundek is walking around with people from a debt collection company while he has borrowed money he has no intention of returning (He currently owes his former brother-in-law and his late sister over $10,000).

Really, when you see Macha Pundek swaggering around, you have to worry about the state of the local Tamil Community. I mean this community has produced excellent people. Our current finance minister and deputy Prime Minister is actually brilliant enough to be recognized internationally. I’ve liked every journalist that I’ve had to deal with from the Tamil Media. I even had a very sweet former Tamil employee who made a point of doing special for me on my 37^th birthday.

Unfortunately, the community has an infestation of the likes of Macha Pundek.  In what passes off as his mind, Macha like other members of his family (Annek and Thambi) believes he’s part of the social elite. Macha like Thambi (Younger Brother) cannot sit in the outdoor shade for more than three minutes before running into the air conditioning.

Macha Pundek is highly allergic to work. Despite being healthy and certified sane, Macha has does not have the ability to do simple jobs like driving a taxi driver (he’ll brag about how he once threw out a passenger who didn’t have 75 cents change). He even found the job of being a watchman in a school to be taxing (4-hours a day of which only 2 were required for him to move more than an inch).

As a result, Macha Pundek has an interesting dilemma. He can’t afford to hang out where he believes he’s entitled to.  So, he has a simple solution – he’s tries to mooch of everyone else. Don’t ask him to sit down by the void deck for a drink – apparently that’s low class or rather that’s what Indian workers from India do. You got to take him to no less than Harry’s Bar and when you do, you will not only be footing the bill for him, you’ll be footing the bill for his entire family.

Like all members of the Pundek clan, Macha has a curious relationship with the group from India. He hates Indian expatriates. He describes them as “Proud Cocksuckers who don’t know their place in life.” At the same time he despises Indian labourers and can’t shit on them fast enough.

Can you blame the highly educated Indian expats for not wanting to associate with him? I think of what a Senior VP at prominent IT firm said – “Other than a few religious rites – THEY are definitely Singaporean while WE are Indian.”  I suspect that the poor bastard must have run into one Macha Pundek clone too many.   

You’ll find that it’s the likes of Macha who has the most to complain about when it comes to foreigners. They’re living the life that he believes he is entitled to. Unfortunately for Macha and the rest of the PundekClan both the Indian Expatriates and the Indian Labourers do this thing called “work.” The labourer group in particular is prone to doing things like carrying heavy things in the hot sun and they’re still there while the rest of us are heading home to get our feet rubbed.

So, how can we make life in Singapore better for everyone? Perhaps the key here is to focus on key word “productivity.” We should make it a point to welcome people who are productive and want to earn a wage of sorts. We should also export the likes of Macha Pundek. I believe that North Korea might have a use for him – they could clone him and inflict him on the South. That would do more damage than a few nukes and the entire Korean War.

Or perhaps he and his ilk have a use in Somalia. You could carve Macha and the rest of the Pundek clan up and feed lots of people for quite some time.

Either way, the case for exporting local duds is overwhelming. Stopping labourers from entering upsets businesses even if the government thinks it makes people happy. It’s a short term solution. Exporting Macha Pundek and his ilk would be far more productive.

   

Thinking!

I had the privilege of attending the “Third China-India-Singapore Dialogue on Higher Education” on the 8^th of November, 2012. The event involved leading academics and administrators from China, India and Singapore discussing what they saw as the future of higher education in Singapore.

The star at the event was Mr Ngiam Tong Dow one of Singapore’s most prominent former civil servants. 

You could say that Mr Ngiam was in the thick of things during the creation of the Singapore Miracle. He was Permanent Secretary in the key ministries of Finance and Trade as well as in the Prime Minister’s Office. Mr Ngiam was also the Chairman of the Economic Development Board - thus making him the chief salesman for Singapore to multinationals.

What makes Mr Ngiam is a rare creature in Singapore – he’s an intelligent and credible critic. Mr Ngiam utilizes public forums to criticize many government policies without saying anything critical about particular members of the establishment. Unlike the ‘rabid dogs’ on blogosphere, Mr Ngiam does not make it a point to attack the government for the sake of it – you will, for example, never find Mr Ngiam kissing trees in public or hurling vulgarities at people.

So, when you take all these facts about Mr Ngiam into consideration, you have to take what he says rather seriously. One of Mr Ngiam’s pet peeves is the fact that he believes that our economic planners haven’t done enough to encourage Singaporeans to use their brains. In yesterday’s forum, Mr Ngiam declared that he did not like casinos because they only provided ‘second tier’ jobs and Singapore, he argued, was selling itself short.

I’m glad he said what he did at the forum. Singapore talks a lot about how we only have “human resources” and we brag about how much we’ve developed it. Yet, despite all the rhetoric, Singapore claims that it has very little talent to get things done – hence the need to import talent. Why is that so?

The main culprit here has to be government policy and the inability of the establishment to accept that the successful game plan of the 1960s may not necessarily work in the current century. Despite investing heavily in education, Singaporeans remain shockingly clueless about many things. My favourite example is the way many Singaporeans think Sikh’s come from Bengal as well as believing that Saudi Arabia is a part of Dubai. You might argue that this is a small matter but it’s not. These basic facts don’t require a college degree. One merely has to look at a map to realize that there’s a distance between Punjab and Bengal or that Saudi Arabia is many times larger than Dubai.

I think of former Bloomberg Columnist, Any Mukherjee, who once lectured a group of journalism students. His only remark about the students after the fact was that they were “Curiously uncurious.” Like Mr Mukherjee, the government should be curious as to how it could educate a population into not being bothered to glance at a map before dealing with people from elsewhere.

Instead, the government seems content to produce people like The Young Muslim Politician Who Drinks During a Ramadan Day from Pasir Ris GRC aka Thambi Pundek. This young clown is currently very upset because I’ve told him that he has to compete for good jobs with people like a client of mine, who happens to be an Indian National. He’s asking me what this client of mine can do that an NUS Graduate can’t do. Well, unfortunately if you take The Young Muslim Politician Who Drinks Alcohol during a Ramadan Day from Paris Ris GRC aka Thambi Pundek as an example, the answer is simple. The Indian National can think.

To be fair to Singapore’s established universities they have NOT admitted the Young Muslim Politician who Drinks Alcohol during Ramadan aka Thambi Pundek (apparently he’s at some Singapore based Monash campus) and they’re recognizing the need to teach subjects that train the mind. One of the professors from the National University of Singapore (NUS) proudly told the audience that NUS is ramping up its teaching of liberal arts, humanities and social sciences. They’ve found that while employers haven’t specifically asked for liberal arts graduates, they’re asking for people with the skills that liberal arts training provides – critical thinking.

This is a rather belated but welcome move. Simply put, in the 1960s people were told to send their best and brightest to work for the government or a multinational. In these organisations things were simple. The civil service was led by a handful of bright thinkers (educated elsewhere) who controlled the drones (educated at home). In the multinationals, the head of would always be some barrow boy from elsewhere.

Well, this economic model is becoming less relevant. The multinationals now have a choice when operating in Asia. The hot markets these days are China and India and they have alternative gateways to Singapore. So, we need a new game plan and people trained in the old ways of doing things need to reinvent and readjust their thinking.

Unfortunately, the powers-that-be don’t always seem to get it. Singapore has been trying to reinvent itself as a Monaco of sorts – the rich of the world are invited to Singapore to have fun and the population is supposed to make do as service providers to the entertain the rich and famous.

This strategy has a slight flaw – the rich can always bugger off to elsewhere when they’re bored. Your indigenous population has a habit of getting uppity when house prices go up. How do you figure things out?

I’m with Ngiam when he argues that we need to look at developing brains. 

Singapore is small and it lacks the muscle of China, India or even neighbouring Malaysia. The only thing we have going for us is our brains.

There’s some hope here. We managed to produce Sim Wong Hoo of Creative Technology – the man who gave us the sound blaster and allowed Steve Jobs to plagerise his technology into the iTune. We've borrowed Olivia Lum from Malaysia and she’s reinvented water.

Unfortunately, both Mr Sim and Ms Lum seem to be the exception rather than the rule. What can be done? Well, it’s encouraging to hear people at NUS like Professor Lilly Kong, Vice President of University and Global Relations at NUS talk about encouraging creativity and critical thinking.

However, training alone is not enough. Having a brain has to be lucrative. Singapore has wonderful intellectual protection laws. However, there’s very little market for intellectual property. In the media industry there are only two established media houses that regard publishing anyone not on their payroll as a favour to that person. In the R&D sector, there are wonderful government funded research labs…..unfortunately the government holds owns you and therefore your intellectual property. Hence you have very little commercialization of R&D

This has to change. Civil Servants need to lose the fear of letting go. Entrepreneurs should be allowed to look for innovations that could produce things that can be commercialized. The economy should welcome invented in Singapore as much as professes to accept made Singapore.

Mr Ngiam is right and he needs to go further to encourage greater competition for products of innovation. It’s all very well teaching people how to think but they also need to get paid to think.