Blowin' In The Wind

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.

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.

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.

An absorbing history of India since independence

India After Gandhi: The History Of The World's Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha

Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi: The History Of The World's Largest Democracy is a riveting account of India since independence  in 1947. 

The narrative never flags. Historical figures are brought to life and history re-enacted in its pages. It makes you appreciate the greatness of Gandhi and Nehru as well as India as it is today.

The leaders may have shrunken in stature, the country pulled in different directions by political parties representing various groups and communities, but democracy has deepened, not weakened, says Guha. The coalition governments that have come and gone over the past two decades are a sign that the country today can be governed only by consensus. No one can do another Indira Gandhi.

Image via Wikipedia

She was Nehru's daughter in her secular outlook. Nobody can say she discriminated against any community though she was forced to fight Sikh separatists and sent the army after them into the Golden Temple, their holiest shrine, for which she paid with her life – killed by two of her Sikh bodyguards.

But, apart from their secular outlook, father and daughter had little in common. Nehru respected democracy, the independence of the media and the judiciary. The Congress party in his time was also more independent, run by powerful politicians who did not necessarily listen to him though he was the prime minister and their leader.

Nehru had friends even among his political opponents. Guha writes in absorbing detail about the countless actions taken by Gandhi and Nehru to keep India secular. He makes you admire them simply by describing what they did.

Simon Schama's American history

The American Future: A History by Simon Schama

The American Future is a labour of love by the British historian Simon Schama, who clearly admires America. This is a loving exploration of American history highlighting the dreams and ideals that created the country and continue to animate it.

Schama also notes the darker currents -- of racism, for example, that led to segregation, xenophobia and colonial adventures like the occupation of the Philippines during which US forces tortured Filipino freedom fighters with impunity.

But America has never lacked voices condemning prejudice and inhumanity. From the abolitionists fighting against slavery to Mark Twain's condemnation of the Philippines adventure to the Freedom Riders and other civil rights workers, America has never been short of idealism and tolerance.

This is the America that Schama celebrates. The book begins with an eyewitness account of Obama's victory in Iowa.

Schama describes the joyous scene. It did not happen overnight. He describes how a grizzled white farmer who had once supported Kennedy campaigned for Obama – and how a high school senior seeing the big group of Obama supporters on the caucus floor switched his support from Hillary Clinton to Obama. 

Schama catches the wave of American idealism that periodically throws up a Roosevelt, a Kennedy, an Obama.

Civil War

The idealism takes its toll. Schama describes the bitterness and enormous cost of the Civil War.

Image via Wikipedia

The Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, DC, where more than 300,000 people are buried, is a memorial to fallen heroes.

But it was once home to the Confederate general Robert E Lee. He was the son-in-law of George Washington's adopted grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, who built the house.

It was turned into a graveyard by Lee's former friend, Montgomery C Meigs, a fellow West Pointer and engineer who had helped build the Capitol building before the war.

Meigs, who served as the quartermaster-general of the Union army, could not forgive Lee for joining the rebels. Turning it into a graveyard made the house uninhabitable, writes Schama.

Meigs' own son, who died in the war, was buried there – and so was he, long after the war.

Schama also writes about the black churches and black colleges as well as white pastors who took up their cause. We encounter heroic abolitionists who went from town to town, braving mobs and speaking against slavery.

Carol Ann Duffy: The first woman poet laureate

Carol Ann Duffy became the first woman poet laureate today. She was considered a frontrunner for the post in 1999 following Ted Hughes' death in October 1998. But she lost out to Andrew Motion then amid speculation that Tony Blair had decided that Middle England was not yet ready for a lesbian laureate, says the Times.

She was reluctant herself at the time to take up the role given her status as a mother in a lesbian relationship with the Scottish poet Jackie Kay, says the Guardian. Now that relationship is over, her daughter is a teenager and she is "really thrilled" to get the job. She succeeds Andrew Motion who is stepping down after a 10-year term unlike previous laureates, who served for life.

"I look on it as a recognition of the great woman poets we have writing now," Duffy told Radio 4's Women's Hour in her first interview after becoming the poet laureate. "I've decided to accept it for that reason." Hear her Women's Hour interview, where she reads her poems, or watch her speaking on the BBC's Newsnight programme.

She told the writer Jeanette Winterson in an earlier interview: "I’m not a lesbian poet, whatever that is. If I am a lesbian icon and a role model, that’s great, but if it is a word that is used to reduce me, then you have to ask why someone would want to reduce me? I never think about it. I don’t care about it. I define myself as a poet and as a mother – that’s all."

Gordon Brown was quick to congratulate the new poet laureate. She was born in Glasgow like him but raised in England. Duffy, who is four years younger than Brown, will be 54 on December 23.

She plans to donate her yearly stipend of £5,750 to the Poetry Society to fund a new poetry prize for the best annual collection.

The Guardian says:

The first woman to be considered for the laureateship was Elizabeth Barrett Browning in 1850, when William Wordsworth died, but Tennyson was chosen in her stead. Forty-two years later, Christina Rossetti was overlooked on Tennyson's death, when rather than appoint a woman the position was left vacant until Alfred Austin – viewed today as one of the worst ever laureates – was appointed.

Unlike Andrew Motion, who was involved with the Poetry Archive, and his predecessor Ted Hughes, Carol Ann Duffy has quite a number of poems on the internet. The most popular are the ones taught at school apparently – Havisham, Elvis's Twin Sister, Anne Hathaway, We Remember Your Childhood Well, Before You Were Mine (all here).

I especially like this poem I found on the Guardian. It's from her collection, Rapture. This is exactly how I feel about my wife.

The Name
By Carol Ann Duffy

When did your name
change from a proper noun
to a charm?

Its three vowels
like jewels
on the thread of my breath.

Its consonants
brushing my mouth
like a kiss.

I love your name.
I say it again and again
in this summer rain.

I see it,
discreet in the alphabet,
like a wish.

I pray it
into the night
till its letters are light.

I hear your name
rhyming, rhyming,
rhyming with everything.

A New York minute with Billy Collins

The Singapore River isn't the Hudson
But it has a homely charm of its own,
The Botanic Gardens no Central Park
But a tranquil, sylvan landmark
Well worth a visit or two.
Life in Singapore is nothing to rue
Unless you make much ado
About the Straits Times
Being no New York Times.
Then you're in the wrong time zone.

Yes, there's a 12-hour difference between Singapore time and Eastern Standard Time. Midnight in Singapore is midday in New York.

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But you don't have to be in New York to appreciate the poems of Billy Collins. Though this one is called Eastern Standard Time, and specifically addressed to people in his time zone, you appreciate the humour and homely details even if, like me, you are on Singapore time.

 Eastern Standard Time
By Billy Collins

Poetry speaks to all people, it is said,
but here I would like to address
only those in my own time zone,
this proper slice of longitude
that runs from pole to snowy pole,
down the globe from Montreal to Bogota

Oh, fellow inhabitants of this singular band,
sitting up in your many beds this morning --
the sun falling through the windows
and casting a shadow on the sundial --
consider those in other timezones who cannot hear these words,

They are not slipping into a bathrobe as we are,
or following the smell of coffee in a timely fashion.

Rather, they are at work already,
leaning on copy machines,
hammering nails into a house-frame.

They are not swallowing a vitamin like us,
rather they are smoking a cigarette under a half-moon,
even jumping around on a dance floor,
or just now sliding under the covers,
pulling down the little chains on their bed lamps.