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.

Chinese agents?

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) is virtually acting as China’s agent, promoting China’s –- not India’s –- interests, writes B Raman, a former Indian official, on the Rediffusion website. It’s a serious allegation, but the party does send delegations to China and maintains relations with the Chinese communist party. Now it is protesting against India’s nuclear energy deal with the US. It is openly against closer Indo-US relations which, as it happens, are also opposed by China. As Raman writes:

For the last two months, the Chinese authorities have been expressing their concern over reports that India has joined hands with the US, Japan and Australia to counter the growing Chinese naval power in the region.

The Indian communists have traditionally drawn inspiration from foreign leaders. The Communist Party of India (CPI) split up in 1962. The CPI continued to follow the Soviet line and received Soviet funds while the breakaway CPI(M) supported the Chinese communist party and its leader, Mao Zedong. Now both the CPI and the CPI (M) are opposing the nuclear deal, united in their anti-Americanism.

I remember when US military aircraft arrived for a joint exercise at an Indian air base in the communist-ruled state of West Bengal in November 2005, the state’s CPI (M) chief minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, protested vehemently. India could cooperate militarily with Russia or any other country in the world but not with the US, he said.

Now I can’t imagine the scholarly, cultured, incorruptible chief minister of West Bengal as a Chinese agent. But some of his party members have been busy helping the Chinese.

Raman recalls one incident last year:

A Chinese company had won a contract for the construction of a gas pipeline from the Godavari area in Andhra Pradesh. It wanted to bring about 1,000 Chinese engineers to work in the project. The ministry of home affairs was not issuing visas to the Chinese engineers. It asked why it was necessary for the Chinese company to bring in so many engineers when unemployed Indian engineers were available.

There was also a paper prepared by the National Security Council Secretariat of the Prime Minister's Office suggesting that proposals for foreign investments in sensitive sectors such as telecommunications from China, Pakistan and Bangladesh should be subjected to a special security vetting.

Sitaram Yechury of the CPI-M, allegedly at the instance of the Chinese embassy in New Delhi, raised a big hue and cry about it and literally forced the Government of India to order the issue of visas to the Chinese engineers and to drop the proposal for a special security vetting for Chinese investment proposals in sensitive sectors.

The communists could pressure the government because the ruling coalition depends on communist support. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's Congress party won only 145 seats in the last general election in 2004. The communists have about 60 seats, the opposition nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 138 seats while independents and regional parties have the rest in a House of 542.

But Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has finally stood up to the communists. He has challenged them to withdraw support to the government if they are opposed to the nuclear energy deal.

Yes, the government could fall if the communists withdraw their support. But a country should be not be held to ransom by a political party whose views echo those of a foreign power.

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.

Communists, cool it

The Indian communists –- the Marxists in parliament, not the Maoist insurgents -- are all sound and fury. When it comes to the crunch, they are likely to chicken out. Kudos to Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh for calling their bluff. He challenged them to withdraw their support if they were dead set against his nuclear agreement with the US. That could bring down the Congress government. But it seems they are not prepared to go so far. Veteran Communist Party of India (Marxist) –- CPI(M) –- leader and former West Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu said:

We do not want to topple the government as it would pave the way for the communal BJP to come to power.

Trust an old man -– Basu is 93 –- to show some sense. It would not help the communists at all to bring down the government and pave the way for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to come to power. There’s no love lost between them. The BJP wants the communists to make common cause with them and oppose the deal. But that would be like the Stalin-Hitler pact and as short-lived. They would be at each other’s throats in no time.

The communists are better off supporting the Congress government which is secular and left-of-centre and therefore closer to them. The prime minister knows that; that’s why he dared them to withdraw their support.

It’s time Manmohan Singh put the communists in their place. There are only about 60 communist members of parliament in a House of 542. But they wield disproportionate influence because the ruling Congress party needs all the support it can get: it won only 145 seats in the last election, in 2004. The BJP won 135. Independents and regional parties won the rest.

The communists and the BJP should really stuff their opposition to the nuclear deal. They are claiming it’s a sellout to the US. But don’t they realise it gives India acceptance as a nuclear power? Isn’t India better off getting closer to the US? The IT boom India is enjoying now wouldn’t have been possible without outsourcing and US investments. Even the communist-ruled state of West Bengal is wooing US firms.

The communists are making a big deal about an independent foreign policy and friendship with countries like Iran. Yes, antagonising a fuel-rich country like Iran could hurt India which needs all the energy it can get. But India needs the US far more. Just imagine if the US companies took their business elsewhere. Indian prosperity would vanish in a puff of smoke. We would be back to Indira Gandhi’s time. Look at all the flourishing Asian economies: Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong. All of them owe their prosperity to the US.

How many Indians work in or do business with Cuba, Venezuela or all those other countries dear to the communists? Even their own family members are more likely to go to the US. As for what Iran has to offer, it might be worth reading this article in the Washington Post. But, of course, it’s an American newspaper.

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.

That's All Right (Mama)

Here's Elvis singing another of his earliest classics, That's All Right (Mama), recorded on the Sun label in 1954.

Little Sister

Here is Elvis Presley singing Little Sister -- another of my favourites -- in the studio. He recorded the song in the RCA Nashville studios on June 26, 1961, along with another great hit, (Marie's The Name Of) His Latest Flame. I love that too. Two great hits on one day. Wow! This video must have been recorded much later. Still, it's Elvis in the studio singing one of his hits.

Heartbreak Hotel

Here is Elvis at his youthful best singing one of his greatest songs: Heartbreak Hotel. Just look at him! No wonder fans went wild.

Teddy Bear

Teddy Bear is one of my favourite Elvis songs as my wife knows. I have tried to serenade her with this song in my off-key voice. (I couldn't carry a tune to save my life. Nor do I behave or look like my King.) I saw this movie too -- Loving You -- with my parents at the Metro cinema in Calcutta (Kolkata) during my school days. (My mum also loves Elvis.) But I didn't remember Teddy Bear was from Loving You. I always associated the movie with its slow title song. I saw the film in the original black and white.

Jailhouse Rock

The BBC reminded me today is Elvis Presley's 30th death anniversary. How could I forget? He is the King. I love the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, Simon and Garfunkel -- the usual suspects -- and a few others too: the Beach Boys, the Grateful Dead, the Everly Brothers, Fats Domino ... oh, let's stop counting and let the music roll on. But it all began with Elvis Presley. My mother loves Elvis Presley too. That's how I became a Presley fan. I remember seeing Jailhouse Rock with my parents at the Metro cinema in my school days in Calcutta in the Sixties. Here's Elvis singing the title song in the movie.

Singapore, India and Pakistan

Who says one can't run with the hares and hunt with the hounds? Look at Singapore landing plum deals in both India and Pakistan.

Gwadar port in Pakistan's troubled Balochistan province is expected to become fully operational next month, Pakistan's Dawn newspaper reported today. The port will be run by the Singapore Government-linked port operator, PSA International, which used to be known as the Port of Singapore Authority. It won the contract in December last year after Dubai Ports World (DP World) dropped out of the race.

DP World decided not to bid for Gwadar after India's National Security Council expressed security concerns. DP World operates two major terminals in India -- Cochin and Visakhapatnam. But so does PSA International. It operates terminals in Chennai and Tuticorin and is building another terminal at Hazira in Surat, Gujarat, which is expected to be operational in 2009. And yet it has been free to go ahead and operate Gwadar port unlike DP World.

Ports involve national security. The US Congress last year blocked a deal under which DP World would have taken over the ports of New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans and Miami.

Gwadar has strategic importance. It will be the second deep-water port in Pakistan, at the entrance of the Persian Gulf on the Arabian Sea and about 460 km west of the other port, Karachi. It is vital for both Pakistan and China, which provided $198 million for the $248 million port project and another $200 million towards building a highway connecting the port with Karachi.

China benefits in two ways. Gwadar provides a transit terminal for crude-oil imports from Iran and Africa to China's Xinjiang region. And, from Gwadar, China can also monitor US naval activity in the Persian Gulf and Indian activity in the Arabian Sea. It was the arrival of US forces in Afghanistan -- at China's doorstep -- in late 2001 that nudged Beijing to step up its involvement in the Gwadar project, reported Asia Times. In March 2002, Chinese vice premier Wu Bangguo laid the foundation for Gwadar port.

Pakistan also gains economically and militarily. India's blockade of Karachi hit Pakistan hard during the 1971 Bangladesh war. Gwadar is much farther away from India than Karachi.

China's involvement in Gwadar set off alarm bells in India and the US, reported the Asia Times in 2005. A Pentagon report described it as part of a Chinese strategy to project its power overseas, the website said and added: 

For India, China-Pakistan collaboration at Gwadar and China's presence in the Arabian Sea heightens its feeling of encirclement by China from all sides.

God grant peace to the world. May there be no tension between India and China and Pakistan. Relations seem all right now. But what if there is another war? Will the Singapore port operator then be allowed to continue operating terminals in India and Pakistan?

India and Singapore enjoy strong ties, Singapore Minister of State for Trade and Industry S Iswaran said yesterday. Indian companies now form the fourth largest foreign contingent in Singapore, with more than 2,500 registered companies spanning diverse industries from IT services, education to logistics and manufacturing. Singapore Government-linked Temasek Holdings and its subsidiaries have been buying stakes in Indian companies such as ICICI Bank, Bharti Group and Mahindra and Mahindra. It's the inevitable result of globalisation bringing economies closer together.

I am not against the Singapore port operator controlling terminals in both India and Pakistan. Political tensions have not prevented Taiwanese and American companies from investing in China. Such economic ties may be a deterrent against war.

My son comes home

My son is home again. He arrived in Calcutta (Kolkata) from his college in America on Wednesday morning. This is when students start returning to college in America for the start of a new term. When freshmen go to college for the first time, just like my son did two years ago after passing out of high school in Calcutta. But he won’t be spending this term in his college. He will be flying to London instead to spend three months at a university in England. The new term there begins in October. He will be in Calcutta till then. His college like most US colleges allows students to study abroad, so he applied for a place in England and got it.

My wife, who teaches at a college in Calcutta, is elated to have him home again. I wonder when I will be able to fly home from Singapore to see them myself. My wife visited me in Singapore in June. But I haven’t seen my son since summer last year when he came home for his summer holidays. We chatted online almost every day when he was in America and I saw him sometimes on his webcam, but we haven’t met for a long time.

I have been speaking to him and his mum every day on the phone since he arrived in Calcutta. Though he has brought his laptop with him, we don’t have a broadband connection at our home in Calcutta. My wife doesn’t even have a computer. So we can only chat on the phone. I used to call her too when I chatted online with our son so she could talk to us at the same time. Now she can pamper him to her heart’s content. She had to subscribe to ESPN and the other sports channels: he wanted to tune into them the moment he arrived home. In fact, one reason he wants to go to England is to see Manchester United, he claims.

He has grown very thin, said my wife. I suspect it’s partly because she doesn’t allow him to eat beef, which seems to be a staple at his college. During the current holidays, which he spent at his college on a research project, he was living on microwaved meals and fast food. No wonder he is thin. But he claims it’s because he works out at the gym. My wife said he wants to cut down on potatoes, he has become diet-conscious, she said. No, he said, he regularly eats mashed potatoes and French fries.

A friend drove him from his college to the airport on Monday last week. He took a flight to New York. From New York he flew to Calcutta by Emirates. His last trip was on British Airways. These are the only two airlines flying from the East Coast to Calcutta. Had he flown Air India, he would have had to clear Customs and immigration in Mumbai (Bombay) before taking a domestic flight to Calcutta.

He spoke to his mum on his mobile phone at every stop throughout his journey. He called her

• When he left college
• When he reached the local airport
• When he boarded the Emirates flight at JFK
• When the plane stopped over at Hamburg
• When he changed planes at Dubai

He was thrilled with Emirates. “Mum, there are more than 100 channels on this plane!” Those were his very first words when he called her after boarding the flight, said my wife. He was impressed with the facilities at Dubai airport too. Unlike JFK and Heathrow, it has free Wi-fi connections, he told me.

I will call him later this evening. I miss him and his mum.

Singapore search engine

“Watch out Google, here comes SPH Search”. That’s the headline on The Straits Times website hyping up the news that its publisher, Singapore Press Holdings, is developing a search engine. In the glut of search engines already crawling the Internet, it will be just another Johnny come lately. But, bravo, SPH, for going where few newspapers have gone before. The New York Times, the Guardian, The Times, the Washington Post are content with site search engines. SPH aims to take on Google, nothing less.

I am touched by the David versus Goliath angle. The Straits Times, Singapore's leading newspaper, has a 385,000-plus circulation. Google gets millions of hits every day. But David won. SPH fancies its chances too. It says so in the report:

A new online search engine being developed by Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) aims to be the first port of call for people anywhere in the world who want content about Singapore.

SPH will launch the service next year, which aims to supplant the big names of Google and Yahoo as the prime tool to source local information.

So, it will be like the Taliban, fighting not for global supremacy but for one piece of territory: Singapore.

It could succeed. Google is not the number one search engine in China or Russia. They have their own. A local search engine could click in Singapore too. And who knows Singapore better than The Straits Times?

Why I will stick to Google

The Straits Times is solid, accurate, its credibility unimpeachable as a source of official information. But it’s also regarded as an official mouthpiece and not a newspaper like the Guardian or the New York Times.

The question naturally arises, just what kind of information can we expect from a search engine developed by the publishers of The Straits Times? It wants to be “the first port of call for people anywhere in the world who want content about Singapore”. But there’s content about Singapore that never appears in The Straits Times. Could we expect to get such content from its search engine? The Straits Times report isn’t very reassuring:

SPH Search chairman Elsie Chua said a Singapore-based Web index will let users search 'very localised content'. She added: 'We will want to make sure such content is accurate, updated and relevant for Singaporeans to use.'

“Accurate”, “relevant for Singaporeans to use” – it looks like this will be just like The Straits Times. I will stick to Google, thank you.

SPH is going into the business with a prestigious European media group: Schibsted publishes Aftenposten in Norway and Aftenbladet in Sweden. Both are leading papers like The Straits Times.

The Business Times isn't a blog

And why, oh why, did I see the Business Times report on SPH Search only when I checked Google Blogs? I found it has a circulation of 29,000 when I checked the SPH website. Still, it's a newspaper like The Straits Times and shouldn't be lumped with the blogs.

National Day spectacular

Singapore celebrated 42 years of independence today. The celebration could have been right out of a James Bond film. The huge floating platform on Marina Bay where soldiers, police officers, civil defence workers and various other groups paraded looked like something out of a Bond movie when shown from the air on television. The movie effect was heightened by the action that followed, as navy and coast guard boats churned up the waters in high-speed mock chases and jet fighters buzzed past city skyscrapers in close formation before peeling off in different directions and helicopters skimmed the bay.

Singapore always puts on a good show on National Day. But no less impressive than the show was the old man himself -- Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first prime minister and current Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s father. Dressed in white, with his white hair, he looked like an old lion as he impassively watched the proceedings, no doubt recalling previous National Day parades and how Singapore has prospered under his leadership.

The growing income gap

I missed the prime minister’s National Day message telecast yesterday. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong spoke from the top floor of the National Library building, I read in Today. The scene must have been rich in symbolism. The prime minister, a government scholar with a first from Cambridge, addressing the nation from the National Library, speaking about globalisation and the knowledge economy.

He spoke about growing prosperity and low unemployment but expressed concern over the widening income gap between the rich and the poor. That happens with globalisation, Today quoted him as saying.

I wonder if he thinks his own government has widened the gap by sanctioning huge pay rises for ministers and civil servants. His own pay went up from 2.5 million Singapore dollars last year to 3.1 million Singapore dollars ($2 million) this year, the government-linked Channel News Asia reported in April. That’s five times the salary of President Bush, who earns $400,000 a year. Even the average Singapore minister, earning 1.9 million Singapore dollars ($1.25 million), is paid more than the US president, reported the International Herald Tribune. PM Lee, to his credit, pledged to donate the pay hike to charity.

'Globalisation not to blame'

Globalisation need not inevitably increase income gaps, according to the latest report from the Asian Development Bank. Wealth gaps have increased in China, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Cambodia -- but narrowed in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, reported the BBC quoting the bank. Look at the bank’s own report; it says:

"... the development experience of Asia’s newly industrialising economies—especially Korea and Taipei,China—among others, has revealed that a rapid rise in inequality is not an inevitable result of high economic growth".

Only China shows more disparity

The report shows the richest 20 percent earn 9.7 times as much as the poorest 20 percent in Singapore. That's the second highest income gap in Asia, exceeded only by China and matched only by Hong Kong, according to the economic indicators published in the report. But it also shows no one in Singapore lives in abject poverty on less than $1 a day. It's impossible to live on less than $1 a day in Singapore. Even a cup of coffee costs more than 50 cents in the humblest hawker stall.

Murdoch is good news ... for some

One of the most read stories in the London Times yesterday was “The US debates Hillary’s cleavage”.Will the Times’ owner Rupert Murdoch next sex up the Wall Street Journal? That’s certainly been his style ever since he put the topless Page 3 girls in the Sun back in the 1970s, making it the world's biggest selling English daily with a circulation of more than three million -- a million more than the Journal.

His getting hold of the Journal could be good news not just for the lads. It will also remove a thorn in the flesh of some governments. Murdoch is sweet on Asia. Think of his wife who is half his age. And how he pulled BBC News from his Star TV satellite channel in China to be in the good books of Beijing.

The Far Eastern Economic Review, another Dow Jones publication like the Journal, is being sued for defamation by Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and his father, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, for an article published in July last year. I can’t recall any similar run-ins with a Murdoch paper.

A Murdoch Wall Street Journal could be good news also for online news junkies. Murdoch websites tend to be free, as I wrote in an earlier post. I didn’t know then he himself had spoken about making the online Journal free. That I read later on the Chicago Tribune website. As I wrote earlier, he wants more traffic.

But not even the Journal can give him the one thing he doesn't have. He will still be No 2 in the US newspaper market, trailing the market leader USA Today.

Murdoch’s Midas touch seems to fail him when it comes to quality papers. The Times is yet to show a profit since he bought it in 1982. The Daily Telegraph is still the biggest selling quality newspaper in Britain with a circulation of more than 900,000.The Times is No 2 with more than 650,000 and the Guardian third with 380,000-plus. And the good thing about all three is we can read them online for free. Let's hope Murdoch frees the Journal as well.

Antonioni and Bergman

Peers to the end. It’s hard to believe Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni both died on the same day. I saw Bergman’s Seventh Seal at a Calcutta (Kolkata) film club long ago and still remember the Dance of Death, where eerie medieval figures dance across a vast emptiness. And who can forget the opening scene where the knight (Max von Sydow) sits down for a game of chess with robed and hooded Death? It’s amazing how haunting it is, this black and white film made in the 1950s.

We in Calcutta used to compare Bergman with Satyajit Ray, who was no less poetic and atmospheric  -- and to my mind -- even greater as a filmmaker. But the man to read on Bergman is Richard Corliss, on the Time magazine website.

Bergman was one of the greatest filmmakers, but Antonioni defined a generation. For a baby boomer like me, it’s impossible to forget Blowup and Zabriskie Point. Blowup (1966) caught the excitement of Swinging London while Zabriskie Point (1970) was about late 1960s America. It had music by Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead. But while they can be heard on the soundtrack of Zabriskie Point, the Yardbirds can be seen at a gig in Blowup. Here is the scene where they perform at a London club. I have posted it on this blog before.  But Antonioni’s death gives it a fresh resonance. Here’s the sound -- and the look -- of the Sixties. Jeff Beck smashes his guitar while Jimmy Page happily plays on and singer Keith Relf belts out great rock'n'roll.