Blowin' In The Wind

Singapore's uncertain future

Anyone interested in Singapore or thinking of coming or settling here should read Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew’s interview in the International Herald Tribune. He is not even sure if Singapore has a future.

"We have survived so far, 42 years," he says. "Will we survive for another 42? It depends upon world conditions. It doesn't depend on us alone."

This coming from Singapore’s first prime minister -- whose son, Lee Hsien Loong, is now the prime minister –- shows how vulnerable Singapore is. Even the leadership admits the future depends on external factors.

MM Lee has spoken of Singapore’s vulnerability before. But it’s alarming when he says:

“Our armed forces can withstand an attack and inflict damage for two weeks, three weeks, but a siege? (he laughs ),” reports the Herald Tribune.

The Herald Tribune comments:

This sense of vulnerability is Lee's answer to all his critics, to those who say his country is too tightly controlled, that it leashes the press, suppresses free speech, curtails democracy, tramples on dissidents and stunts entrepreneurship and creativity in its citizens.

But I can’t quite agree when MM Lee says Singapore is “ideology-free”.

It’s a small island with a big government which runs on a strange mixture of capitalism and statism. There’s a huge income gap with ministers earning million-dollar salaries on the principle of meritocracy that talent should be rewarded. On the other hand, the state presence can be felt everywhere. Virtually every major Singapore company is government-linked. Even when Singaporeans die, they are subject to government rules. Their organs can be recycled by the state and used in transplants to save the lives of others.

This benevolent omnipotence of the state is the result of the way Singapore developed. Everything from public housing to major local business enterprises had to be created by the government.

Modern Singapore -- "an economic powerhouse with one of the world's highest per capita incomes, high-quality schools, health care and public services" -- is MM Lee’s “creation”, as the Herald Tribune says. He himself is more modest. “I wasn't a loner. I had some very powerful minds working with me,” he says.

But what’s intriguing is why, if the country has such a good education system, the minister’s sons and government scholars go abroad for higher studies. MM Lee says:

"I've got one grandson gone to MIT. Another grandson had been in the American school here (in Singapore). Because he was dyslexic and we then didn't have the teachers to teach him how to overcome or cope with his dyslexia, so he was given exemption to go to the American school. He speaks like an American. He's going to Wharton."

So the latter is continuing his American education. But what about the other? Why go to MIT and not the National University of Singapore? After all, it’s ranked among the best in the world –- or so the newspapers say.

Is it because studying abroad makes one more cosmopolitan? Or is it something to do with the quality of education?

MM Lee himself went to Cambridge. And he is absolutely brilliant.

He is spot on when he says the United States has become so preoccupied with the Middle East that it is neglecting Asia. China’s power is growing, he points out.  And who knows what the consequences of that might be?

The Straits Times praised

Singapore doesn’t have a free press, according to organizations such as Freedom House. But The Straits Times newspaper published by Singapore Press Holdings has one of the most advanced news websites in the world, according to teachers at Ball State University’s College of Communication, Information and Media (CCIM), one of the biggest media colleges in the US.

Stressing the need for “digital convergence” or multimedia news websites which update round the clock, they say:

Media companies in Southeast Asia and Scandinavia have embraced digital convergence most widely as of mid-2005. In Southeast Asia the leaders include Star Publications in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital; the Nation group in Thailand; the Singapore Press Holdings Group, which publishes the prestigious Straits Times newspaper; and the Ming Pao Group in Hong Kong.

I am quoting from the book, Convergent Journalism: An Introduction, edited by Stephen Quinn and Vincent F Filak. Filak teaches at Ball State in Muncie, Indiana, where Quinn also taught in the past.

The BBC, the Guardian and the Financial Times are among the European leaders in digital convergence, they add, along with the Aftenbladet newspaper in Sweden and the Aftenposten in Norway. Interestingly both Aftenbladet and Aftenposten are published by the same Scandinavian media company, Schibsted, with which Singapore Press Holdings will be developing a new local search engine. It will give information exclusively on Singapore.

American pioneers in digital convergence include the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune and several Florida newspapers, according to the book.

But is it possible to compare news sites from around the world? Click on the links and see.

I check the BBC and the Guardian every day, the Washington Post often, see the RSS feeds from the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune occasionally and visit the Straits Times a couple of times a week. Necessity compelled me to stop subscribing to the newspaper, which has a circulation of 388,500. Now for Singapore news I depend on Channel NewsAsia, a Singapore news channel with a free website. The Straits Times online like the New York Times includes “premium” content, available only to subscribers.

The Economist's anti-Indian outburst

The Economist has an anti-Indian article this week. It is urging other nations not to sell nuclear material and technology to India.

The US-India civilian nuclear energy agreement is only the first step to ending India’s isolation in nuclear technology.The 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), which includes the US, still has to ease restrictions on exports to India. India also has to meet International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards. The Economist urges them to block nuclear cooperation with India:

Governments at the NSG and the IAEA that are unhappy with (the US-India deal ) need to find the courage of their convictions, and block it.

It trots out the old argument that nuclear cooperation with India, which has not signed the non-proliferation treaty, will encourage other countries like Iran to develop their own nuclear weapons. It points out:

China, unhappy at America's coddling of India, is exploring more nuclear co-operation with Pakistan — which in turn threatens to match India, should it step up weapons production or test again.

But that’s why India has not signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty -– for its own security. China, with which it fought a border war in 1962, was already a nuclear power when India conducted its first nuclear test in 1974, and Pakistan is also now a nuclear power.

The Economist frets about the dangers of nuclear proliferation. But so far the opposite has been true. There have been no wars between nuclear powers.

Of course, there is the danger of nuclear material falling into the hands of terrorists. But that could happen anywhere.

So why rail against India?

The Economist may say it’s not alone in raising objections. But compare its article with another which appeared in the International Herald Tribune recently. The latter doesn't t urge other nations to continue nuclear sanctions against India.

English prejudices

The fact is, the Economist is deeply prejudiced. It almost invariably finds some reason to criticise countries in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America.

But I wouldn’t call it racist. It’s simply English. It even whinged about the Scottish Gordon Brown for not having the same gift of the gab as Tony Blair, who of course is English.

The Economist prides itself on its “intelligence”. But it has been patently wrong on major issues. It supported the Iraq war. It wanted Clinton impeached. It even declared Blair a better politician than Clinton. How English can you get?

Blame the Brits for the Iraq war?

The White House and the rest of America seem to be divided on whether Iraq could become — or already is — another Vietnam. But they are reaping the whirlwind; the wind was sown by their friends who want to get out of the war: the Brits. The Iraq war may have been unpopular in Britain from the start. But it may be the result of their own divide-and-rule policy, writes Pankaj Mishra in the New Yorker.

Reviewing Indian Summer: The Secret History Of The End Of An Empire by Alex von Tunzelmann, he blames British colonial policy for exploiting religion to keep people divided.

That was the policy of Winston Churchill, according to the book. He encouraged Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Muslim League leader in India. Jinnah opposed Gandhi and Nehru and their freedom movement which he claimed would lead to Muslims living under Hindu rule. He cooperated with the British. As a result, Churchill became “instrumental in creating the world’s first modern Islamic state”, according to the book. Jinnah got his Pakistan from the Partition of India.

Reviewing the book, Pankaj Mishra writes:

Little did Churchill know that his expedient boosting of political Islam would eventually unleash a global jihad engulfing even distant New York and London. The rival nationalisms and politicised religions the British Empire brought into being now clash in an enlarged geopolitical arena…

The review doesn’t go into the Shia-Sunni clashes threatening to tear Iraq apart — after all, the book is about India — but that’s the result of the power structure the British left behind. Iraq, like most of the Gulf, was once controlled by them. And there are similar tensions in other Gulf states too.

The smoking guns of Eng Lit

All working Singaporeans aged up to 50 will have to buy annuities. The government fears they might otherwise run out of savings as people live longer now. But that’s a risk that could have been avoided in another way. The government could have lifted the tobacco tax.

Perish the thought and long live the people? I wholeheartedly agree –- but consider this:

What do the following have in common: Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, T S Eliot, W B Yeats, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Evelyn Waugh, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis?

Every one of them was a writer and a smoker.

The writer, AN Wilson, who makes this point in a Telegraph blog, writes:

Is it mere chance that the lifetime of Sir Walter Raleigh (1552?-1618), who introduced tobacco-smoking to England, was also the time when the great story of English literature really began? Milton -- a smoker -- and Ben Jonson -- a smoker -- ensured that the Elizabethan glory-age was not to be a flash in the pan.

I have been racking my brains to find a single non-smoker among the great English poets or novelists of the 17th, 18th, 19th or 20th centuries. Possibly, Keats had to lay off the pipe tobacco a bit after he developed tuberculosis.

Otherwise, from Swift and Pope to Cowper and Wordsworth, from Byron to Charles Lamb, they were all smokers.

Tennyson… only stopped smoking in order to eat and sleep...

Robert Browning… quickly adapted to the new cigarette craze…

C S Lewis… smoked 60 cigarettes a day between pipes with his friends.

Tolkien was a pipe smoker.

Of course, smoking wasn’t universally approved of even then. Thomas Carlyle’s wife allowed him to smoke only in the kitchen.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey would have been, of course, jailed or halfway-housed in Singapore for opium smoking. So indeed would have been Sherlock Holmes.

But it was almost de rigueur for writers up to the 1960s to be photographed with a cigarette or a pipe. I remember the old Penguin paperbacks with tiny photographs of the authors. Sartre could be seen wreathed in smoke, Camus with a cigarette stuck in his mouth. Kingsley Amis can be seen with a pipe on a Times Literary Supplement cover.

No wonder literature has declined in popularity. It can be so unhealthy.

But apparently writers too are seeing the light and stubbing out. Wilson writes:

Heroic Beryl Bainbridge keeps on smoking for England, but will there be any more writers in the years to come, following in her heroic steps?

Heroic indeed, my wife would say. Not that I would be caught dead with what she sees as a coffin nail. She doesn’t hold with smoking.

All The King's Men

All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

The New York Times called it: “The definitive novel about American politics.” It is seen as a roman a clef, whose hero, Willie Stark, is said to have been based on the Louisiana governor and Senator Huey Long. But I would call All The King’s Men, which won the Pulitzer in 1947, an autobiographical novel where the politics is secondary to the personal element. It is as much about the narrator, Jack Burden, as it is about his “Boss”, Willie Stark.

Of course, there is politics –- and plenty of it –- since Burden is friend, confidant and aide to Willie Stark, a small-town politician who becomes a powerful, populist governor. We see Stark’s rise to power and his transformation from a bumbling idealist to a cynical manipulator who is prepared to sup with the devil to achieve his aim, which is to help the poor and perpetuate his own power.

Naturally he is resented by the old elite, who see their own power and influence slipping away. Conflict is inevitable with dire consequences. 

All The King’s Men is a double tragedy. There is the tragedy of Willie Stark. But what gives the novel poignancy -- and turns it into an oedipal conflict -- is Burden’s story. Working for Stark, he finds himself at odds with his family and friends. He discovers to his pain how little he knew about them. But, just like Oedipus, he doesn’t realise what he has done until it’s too late. Yet even then he doesn’t blame the “Boss” for the tragedy. For this was a secret known only to three people on earth.

There are surprises, ambiguities, very complex emotions at work in this big novel with a memorable cast of characters. It is unpretentious, unliterary, but deeply felt and all the more poetic for that. It may be “the definitive novel about American politics”, but it is also about a young man’s loss of innocence -– and the upright men and beautiful women who populated his world before he went to work for the “Boss” and the scales fell from his eyes. But even when he sees their real selves, that does not make them any less attractive but all too human.

Oh, did I say this novel is set in the South? What is it about the South that produces such moving stories? If there is any moral to the story, it is simply this: Idealism can be destructive; live and let live.

PM Lee shines

Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong just completed his National Day Rally speech which lasted almost one hour and 50 minutes. I don't know why the National Day Rally speech is delivered more than a week after National Day, which was celebrated on August 9, but that's the tradition here. The finest moment, I thought, was when he asked the teachers in the audience to stand up and take a bow. The entire auditorium burst into applause.

PM Lee singled out the teachers for their good work. Singapore is proud of its education system which draws foreign students -- though I think it's a bit overrated when I look at the media. The media lacks the sophistication one finds in the US, Britain or even India. But that's my view. Singapore certainly spends a lot on its eduction system, providing excellent facilities for the students. PM Lee and his Education Minister, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, are genuinely committed to improving education.

Singapore may have a fourth university. While 23 per cent of high school graduates get into Singapore universities currently, the aim is to raise the figure to 30 per cent by 2015, said PM Lee.

Students would also be encouraged to learn a third language: Malay or Chinese. Older Singaporeans know Malay, which was the lingua franca of Singapore in the olden days, he said, but younger Singaporeans don't because English has become the common language.

What he didn't say was, the Speak Mandarin encouraging Chinese Singaporeans to improve their Chinese had also eroded the popularity of Malay. Now the government wants to encourage the Chinese to learn Malay and the others to learn Chinese to bring the various communities closer together. But learning a third language will add to the burden of students.

PM Lee also made major announcements.

• When workers reach the retirement age of 62, they should be offered re-employment up to the age of 65 by their employers under a new law which will come into effect in 2012. The pay may be less and the work different from what they had been doing but they will have to be offered jobs. That sounds good. But the problem is age discrimination persists in Singapore. There has been nothing to stop companies from offering early retirement and severance packages so far in the name of improving productivity and efficiency -- and the counselling they claim to provide may not always seem so to the affected workers. But the government means well.
• PM Lee also announced a one percentage point increase in interest payment for a limited amount in the provident fund -- a retirement savings plan like the US401(k) plan. This would cost the government 700 million Singapore dollars ($458 million) a year, which is equal to the annual government spending on public housing, he said.

Well, the government has deep pockets. Both Temasek Holdings and the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC) -- the two government investment companies with holdings around the world -- have more than $100 billion each. And Singapore had no social security system like the US or the UK until this year. People are encouraged to turn to their own families for support. English-speaking Singapore is still very much an Asian country.

But Singapore can be proud of itself. The development plans PM Lee unveiled -- more parks and recreation facilities and even better public housing designed to look like condominiums -- are really  something to look forward to.

PM Lee spoke well. He looked self-assured and laughed with the audience at his own little jokes. Talking about the need to have more babies to offset the ageing population, he said: "Just do it!" Everybody laughed.

He  should appear  more often on television. But the speeches should be shorter. He went into too much detail. But that's my opinion.

Singapore  media and government agencies tend to be punctilious in their reports and press briefings, dotting every i and crossing every t. Unfortunately, the forest can get lost in the trees.

Windows Mail problem

Microsoft provides virtually no support for Windows Mail which comes with Windows Visa. A friend was having problems permanently deleting messages from the Deleted Items folder. A pop-up box was showing up saying "an unknown error has occurred". Searching for a solution on the Internet brought the bad news that Windows Mail is not compatible with some anti-virus programs. One website said "Norton and McAfee seem to be the worst offenders" and added:

If you do have Norton or McAfee, it will be best to delete your current email account and create it again after you uninstall Norton or McAfee.

The same website, Vistax64.com, shows how to back up mail and reset Windows Mail.

Apparently this is either a rare or an intractable problem because a Google search showed very few solutions to it.

Take the Economist quiz on India

Twelve million people were uprooted  by the Partition riots when India and Pakistan became independent in August 1947. Not the entire Bengal Army rebelled against British rule in the 1857 Indian war of independence -- 7,800 soldiers fought for the British while 131,2000 joined the rebels. In 1901, India had a population of 300 million, of whom 154,000 were British. Now complete the rest of the Indian Independence Quiz in the Economist magazine. I saw it only today, two days after the 6oth anniversary of independence. Get at least 10 out of 12 right and the Economist will acknowledge: "You have the blessings of Saraswati and the memory of an elephant." I got only nine correct and received this consolation: "Pukka. You have not missed your tryst with destiny. And you know what we mean." Ha ha, the Economist is never short of wit and substance.

One Night

Here's Elvis singing another of my favourites, One Night. Reissued in the UK in 2005, it topped the charts. Amazing.

Here's Elvis singing One Night in 1968 in a small studio, jamming with some of his earliest bandmates, surrounded by a small but rapt audience.