Blowin' In The Wind

Up, up and away, Singapore

Up, up and away, I was tempted to sing when the BBC World Service reported today that the Singapore economy was bouncing back, soaring more than 20 percent between April and June – up for the first time in a year.

But the economic downturn isn't over yet, warned the government. It merely expects the recession to be milder than feared.

That made this 1967 Fifth Dimension hit particularly apt. Just listen to the song.

Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon
Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon
We could float among the stars together, you and I
For we can fly we can fly
Up, up and away.

But then balloons burst, don't they?

Worse, this song was turned into an advertising jingle by TWA, an airline that's gone the way of the dodo.

Still, it's beautiful, like my beautiful Singapore.

Now back to the news.

Lee Kuan Yew, McNamara and the Vietnam war

Singapore's Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew's memoir From Third World To First is worth reading not only because it's a history of modern Singapore told by its first prime minister – whose son now occupies that position – but also because it's quite revealing of him and his family.

Mr Lee recalls his public outburst against the US government when it failed to send a medical specialist he had requested to treat his wife in 1965 as well as episodes like this involving her:

One evening over dinner in Singapore in March 1992, former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt asked me whether China could ever become democratic and observe human rights like the West. Choo, who sat next to Schmidt, laughed outright at the idea of 1.2 billion Chinese, 30 per cent of them illiterate, voting for a president.

But more about that later, for that's not why I picked up this highly absorbing book, published nine years ago.

I wanted Mr Lee's account of the Vietnam war when McNamara died on July 6. The former US defence secretary who served presidents Kennedy and Johnson and escalated the war did not get a hero's send-off.  "Robert McNamara, Architect of a Futile War, Dies at 93," said the headline in the New York Times obituary.

Fifty years of Lee Kuan Yew

It's telling that a Malaysian and not a Singapore newspaper noted Singapore's Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew completed 50 years in office, becoming the world's longest surviving national leader, on June 5. It was on that day 50 years ago he was sworn in as the first prime minister of a self-governing Singapore. He was succeeded in 1990 by his deputy, Goh Chok Tong, who in 2004 handed over power to Mr Lee's son – current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

Singapore has never known a day since the end of British rule when it has not been under the firm and capable leadership of Mr Lee and his People's Action Party. He has led the tiny city state of 4.8 million people to prosperity. From Third World To First is the title of the second volume of his memoirs.

The Star asks:

So why is the image-conscious government so reticent about Lee’s political longevity?

Party insiders say it is because he is bent on avoiding doing anything that will promote a personality cult…

Critics, however, give a different reason. One said the government would rather not mention the subject for fear it would renew calls for him to leave.

In a Yahoo online poll, 53% of Singaporeans said they wanted their founding father to quit politics either immediately or very soon – and that was five years ago…

It is the younger Singaporeans who want him to go. Unlike the previous generation, they are not beholden to him for his contributions to the republic.

Well, he may not be as popular as Nelson Mandela, with whom I contrasted him on Mandela's 90th birthday on July 18 last year. But as I wrote in that post before the economic recession:

His achievements are evident even in the lives and aspirations of ordinary Singaporeans, many of whom have studied abroad, holiday abroad. They may take it for granted and ask how is that different from the lifestyle of people in the Gulf, the South Koreans and the Japanese. Well, the Gulf has oil, the Japanese and the South Koreans make things. What does Singapore produce except a well-educated workforce? It has grown into one of the richest nations in Asia with no other resources at all. And that is proof of the remarkable vision and achievements of the old man.

Lee Kuan Yew on race, equality and foreign talent

I have been reading his memoirs, From Third World To First, and find it quite revealing. He was amazed, he writes, by the views of American professors on race and equality when he visited Harvard in 1968.

Arundhati Roy right about Slumdog

Arundhati Roy is right about Slumdog Millionaire. In an interview with the Observer, she says:

Only her compatriots could have celebrated the victory of Slumdog Millionaire on Oscar night. "The fact that the film - not even an Indian film - won these prizes sent people into orbit. But it is an odd movie for a country to be proud of. What were we celebrating? Child poverty? If it wasn't so tragic it would be comical."

I could not see what was so great about the movie. There have been far better movies made about poverty in India by Indian directors. Satyajit Ray's Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder) is a classic based on the famine in Bengal during the Second World War when people starved to death. The Bengali film won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1973, but never reached an international audience like Slumdog.

I have nothing against anyone highlighting the poverty and corruption in India, but Slumdog is too stylized, too overtly arty, for me. It is garish, which Ray never was. I was surprised it ended up as one of the biggest all-time Oscar winners, winning as many as eight Academy Awards.

It was only a coincidence perhaps that a tale of corruption and poverty in India also won the Man Booker Prize last year.

The truth about the Beatles

I can't wait to read Elijah Wald's How The Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll. The New York Times reviewing this history of popular music says:

While Wald never says in so many words that the Beatles destroyed rock ’n’ roll, he does take a stance several degrees removed from standard-issue Beatles worship. He suggests that their ambitious later work, widely hailed as a step forward for rock, instead helped turn it from a triumphantly mongrel dance music that smashed racial barriers into a rhythmically inert art music made mostly by and for white people.

I love the Beatles, but most of my favourites are from their early days, up to 1966 and 67. Of course, they continued to make great music later. Tracks like Get Back and Ballad Of John And Yoko are among their very best. But I fell in love with the Beatles when I first heard songs like I Want To Hold Your Hand, Help, She Loves You, Ticket To Ride and my favourite – A Hard Day's Night.

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: