Blowin' In The Wind

Burger King apology to Hindus

Burger King has apologized for running an advertisement in Spain that offended the Hindus, reports The Times of India.

The print ad showed the Hindu goddess Lakshmi seated atop a meat sandwich and other foodstuff with a catchphrase, "A snack that's sacred", written in Spanish.

The ad can be seen in a report by ABC 7, which also interviewed a Hindu American Foundation spokesman, who protested against the ad.

India gay sex ban back in court

The Indian court ruling lifting the ban on gay sex is now being contested in the highest court in the land. The Supreme Court hearing begins on July 20.

The Indian Express reports:

The Supreme Court on Thursday issued notice to the Centre (Indian government) on a petition challenging the Delhi High Court judgement legalizing gay sex among the consenting adults.

Globalization hurting workers, says Pope

Pope Benedict XVI has called for a radical rethinking of the global economy, criticizing the growing gap between the rich and the poor. He wants the United Nations reformed to create "a true world authority" that will manage the economy for the common good.

He speaks about the "the damaging effects on the real economy of badly managed and largely speculative financial dealing, large-scale migration of peoples (and) the unregulated exploitation of the earth's resources".

Globalization in its current form is hurting workers and weakening social security, he says. Read the papal encyclical, Caritas In Veritate (Charity In Truth), where he upholds the rights to food and water and "a just wage" and calls for freedom of religion and the "ethical use of technology". He says:

Raffles Hotel, Chowringhee and Death In Venice

Singapore's Raffles Hotel and the Bengali writer Sankar (real name Mani Shankar Mukherjee) both feature in Brick Lane author Monica Ali's excellent essay on hotels and writers. The essay in the British magazine Prospect follows the publication of her hotel-based novel, In The Kitchen, which I am dying to read.

Ali praises Sankar's popular Bengali novel, Chowringhee, inspired by the famous Grand Hotel in Calcutta (Kolkata). This videoclip is from the 1968 Bengali hit film, Chowringhee, based on the novel. I loved both the movie and the novel. Seen singing here is the Bengali movie legend Uttam Kumar, who played the hotel receptionist Sata Bose. The song title Boro Eka Lage means "I feel very lonely".

Another hotel-based story Ali discusses in her essay is Death In Venice by Thomas Mann. It was also made into a movie. This videoclip  is from the 1971 Dirk Bogarde starrer directed by Visconti. The slow art film is as beautiful as Piazza San Marco and the Grand Canal of Venice.

Ali writes:

Writers have had a long and deep association with hotels. New York’s Algonquin and Chelsea hotels, the Savoy in London, Venice’s Hotel des Bains, the Hotel Ambos Mundos in Havana, and the Bangkok Mandarin Oriental and Raffles in Singapore are just a few of the places in which literary history has been created. And, as witnessed by Joseph O’Neill’s 2008 novel Netherland (both written and partly set in the Chelsea Hotel in New York) and my new novel, In the Kitchen, which tells the story of Gabriel Lightfoot, executive head chef at the fictional Imperial Hotel in London, the hotel continues to exert a fascination for authors, not only as facilitator of the creative endeavour but also as a subject of that creativity.

Blog history video

Twelve years after the first self-proclaimed weblog by Jorn Barger, Salon cofounder Scott Rosenberg has come out with a history of blogging -- Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters -- which will be released tomorrow. Rosenberg, who has his own blog, talks of Barger and other early bloggers in this video. The most influential of them was Dave Winer of Scripting News, he says. But the roots of blogging go back to essayists like Montaigne, he adds.

Here's an excerpt from his book, taken from Salon:

Happy Fourth of July

And here's the transcript of President Barack Obama's Fourth of July speech taken from the White House website.

The man who might have been UN chief

Singapore's Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong could have been in the position of the man he is shaking hands with -- UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon.

Maybe the thought did not occur to him when he gave a dinner in honour of the UN chief in Singapore last night. But Mr Goh was seen as a possible successor to the former UN secretary general Kofi Annan three years ago.

Singapore's Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, however, said at the time that Mr Goh was not interested in the job. Singapore's Straits Times newspaper reported in April 2006 that Mr Lee was asked by a reporter: "Rumours have it that Senior Minister Goh Chok is considering taking up the post of the United Nations secretary general. Would you support him?"

Mr Lee replied: "I think you've got to ask him that. All I know is that he is not interested in the job. Answering to five masters and often unable to satisfy two or three at any one time... it is a tough job.

"From what I've understood from him, I think it's not a job that would add to his happy years after office."

The "five masters" Mr Lee sarcastically mentioned are the five permanent Security Council members – all of whom backed Mr Ban in his bid for the post.

South Korea spared no expense to have Mr Ban elected in October 2006. The Times reported days before the election:

The South Koreans have been waging an aggressive campaign on behalf of Ban Ki Moon, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the front-runner to replace Kofi Annan as UN chief at the end of the year. The inducements range from tens of millions of pounds of extra funding for African countries to lucrative trade agreements in Europe...

Mr Ban announced his bid in February and has since been criss-crossing the globe trying to win support. A month later South Korea announced that it would treble its aid budget to Africa to $100 million (£53 million) by 2008… Seoul’s generosity seems to have worked. Yesterday Elly Matango, the Tanzanian Ambassador to Tokyo and Seoul, said that his Government had decided to support Mr Ban.

This month President Roh and Mr Ban headed the most senior South Korean delegation since 1961 to visit Greece, another Security Council member. Overseen by hundreds of South Korean businessmen, the countries signed agreements on trade, tourism and maritime transport.

Now Mr Ban is in Myanmar seeking the release of the the democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.

Interestingly, Mr Goh, also visited Myanmar recently.

I admire Mr Goh -- he would have made a good UN secretary general. With his ability to connect with people, he would have possibly been less low-key than Mr Ban. And he would have been equally diplomatic, a good mediator. There is also his proven skill in crisis management, seeing Singapore through the Asian financial crisis.

But, as Mr Lee said, he did not want the job. A pity. For there is no denying the importance of the United Nations. As the 2006 election showed, countries vie for the honour to fill the UN secretary general's post. The opportunity comes but rarely. There have been only eight UN secretary-generals so far.

Mr Ban is already in the middle of his five-year term. But the next UN chief is unlikely to be an Asian.

India more gay-friendly than Singapore?

My goodness, Indians are voting in favour of same-sex marriage in a Times of India online poll. Add to that the Delhi High Court ruling that same-sex sex between consenting adults is okay, and you are blown away by the change in attitudes. The law against homosexual sex violates fundamental rights, ruled the High Court.

But the Indian government is in no rush to change the law, say news reports.

Speaking as a non-gay, I can understand the government's reluctance to be dragged into another culture war with the religious hardliners already decrying the High Court's ruling.

Still, there is no turning back the tide. Unless the High Court ruling is overturned by the Supreme Court, the law as it stands has been found unconstitutional. So it will have to be changed.

It is certainly outdated. Introduced by the British nearly 150 years ago, it is seldom enforced. I have never heard of any Oscar Wilde-like case in India. If it's not used, what's the point of having it in the law books?

The Times of India reports:

With Delhi High Court legalising gay sex, India on Thursday become the 127th country in the world to decriminalise homosexuality while 80 nations still consider it as an offence.

The process of legal sanction to homosexual acts began in 1989 when Denmark became the first country to grant a status on a par with married couples to same sex partners which was soon followed by other European countries.

Netherlands became the first nation to give full civil marriage rights to gay couples in 2001. Belgium allowed gay marriages in 2003. Spain too legalised full marriages for gay couples in June 2005.

In July 2005, Canada legalised same-sex marriage. New Zealand in 2004 recognised civil union between gay couples as valid and same sex union was recognised in 2005 in South Africa.

I was surprised to find homosexual acts (between males) are still illegal in Singapore. They are legal in Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Indonesia (except in Aceh), East Timor and the Philippines but not in Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and Myanmar, according to Wikipedia.

GayLawNet says:

In October 2007, the Singapore government declared that private, consensual, adult homosexual sex would no longer be prosecuted but that its illegality would remain.

Singapore and foreign talent

After a month in America travelling coast to coast and two weeks in India, it's good to be back in Singapore. America is great and India an emerging giant, but there's something engaging about Singapore.

On the flight to India, I saw Indian undergraduates studying in Singapore who were going home for their summer holidays. In the Indian city of Calcutta (Kolkata), I heard of others fresh out of high school who have been accepted in Singapore universities. Those taking student loans may have to serve a bond and work in Singapore for a few years time to pay off the loans. Some may decide to stay on.

One out of five of Singapore's 4.8 million population is a foreigner – and that's excluding permanent residents. Ethnic diversity has become the norm for the world's major cities. At least 30 percent of the population are immigrants in cities like Vancouver, Auckland, Geneva, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Perth and Sydney. Immigrants make up more than 40 percent of the population in Miami, Amsterdam and Toronto and a staggering 80 percent in Dubai.

The figures are from the book, The Flight Of The Creative Class – The New Global Competition For Talent, by Richard Florida. The book is four years old, published in 2005, but the current global downturn has not yet cut off the flow of people going overseas for work or study. I saw Bangladeshi casino workers in Atlantic City. At Delhi airport, I saw three planes set out for Dubai and Muscat in about half an hour.

Florida's book is relevant to Singapore. He says the same things that we have been hearing from our leaders in Singapore about the need for global talent.

He praises Singapore as one of the "first-tier cities" like New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Chicago, Los Angeles, Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Milan. He writes:

Singapore's government has developed a targeted strategy to spur a more broadly creative economy by investing in core creative clusters, pumping funds into higher education… Its strategy also includes investing heavily in artistic and cultural activity… In the meantime, it has made significant strides towards becoming a ,more open society by allowing gays to work openly in civil service jobs and relaxing its restrictive censorship laws.

Technology, talent and tolerance are essential for growth, he adds.

Not that he thinks the new high-tech economy is an unmixed blessing. It increases the income gap between skilled and unskilled workers, he writes; in America, income gaps are highest in cities like San Jose, New York, Washington DC, Raleigh-Durham, Austin and San Francisco. That is bad for the economy as a whole, he adds, since it restricts upward mobility.

Florida writes:

The creative economy is the Schumpeterian growth engine of our age, and the socioeconomic dynamic it sets in motion is the modern-day equivalent of the divide Roosevelt faced – the growth of two divergent classes: the creative and the service sectors.

He adds:

We need a strategy that is the modern-day equivalent of the New Deal – one that stimulates the creative engine while at the same time extending its benefits to a broad base of people.

Florida, who has taught at George Mason University and Carnegie Mellon University and is now associated with the University of Toronto, also posts his ideas on his blog – Creative Class.

The Singapore Grip

The Singapore Grip by JG Farrell

Anyone who loves Singapore should read The Singapore Grip by JG Farrell. He won the Booker Prize in 1973 for The Siege of Krishnapur about the 1857 War of Indian Independence. The Singapore Grip is also a historical novel, describing Singapore at the time of the Japanese invasion during the Second World War. The book was first published in Britain in 1978 and Farrell died a year later.

The author vividly describes the fighting in what was then Malaya and the fall of Singapore, the burning and the looting, the humiliation of the British, who were outgeneralled and outfought by superior Japanese forces, and the manner in which civilians and soldiers alike tried to escape from the island as the Japanese approached Singapore. The narrative captures the whole spectrum of human behaviour from cowardice and selfishness to selfless courage. There are some stoic heroic figures and a very attractive Eurasian woman who gain your empathy.

But best of all are the descriptions of Singapore before it was devastated by the war – the colonial bungalows at Tanglin, the carnival atmosphere of the Great World, the taxi dancers and the prostitutes, a dying house where the Chinese went or were left by their relatives to die to prevent misfortune at home, the world of the rich colonial businessmen and the relationship between the races. Especially memorable is the description of a plane landing in Singapore. The author gives an aerial view of Singapore as the plane begins its descent – it's marvellous.

I have been reading the book again because I am already beginning to miss Singapore.

I will be away from Singapore for more than a month, returning towards the end of June. This will probably be the last post till then.

So I will end with this – a vivid description of the city I love as it was long ago. These are the opening lines of The Singapore Grip:

The city of Singapore was not built up gradually, the way most cities are, by a natural deposit of commerce on the banks of some river or at a traditional

Image via Wikipedia

confluence of trade routes. It was simply invented one morning early in the nineteenth century by a man looking at a map. "Here," he said to himself, "is where we must have a city, half-way between India and China. This will be the great halting-place on the trade route to the Far East. Mind you, the Dutch will dislike it and Penang won't be pleased, not to mention Malacca." This man's name was Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles: before the war his bronze statue used to stand in Empress Place in a stone alcove like a scallop shell ( he has been moved along now and, turned to stone, occupies a shady spot by the river). He was by no means the lantern-jawed individual you might have expected: indeed he was a rather vague-looking man in a frock coat.