Whole Brain Thinking

OK, time for training again, and another fluffy course to make up the training hours so that we can fulfill another fucking corporate KPI.

This course is not that meaningless but at the heart of it is some overlong exposition of some idea that’s taken too seriously, taken too far. This is “Whole Brain Thinking”. Basically what it means is that they simplistically take 4 modes of using your left and right brain. You have 4 quadrants, and the personality test divides how much you use these 4 modes of thinking. They are:

The blue portion (left brain, cerebral)
The scientist who is always analysing, weighing up stuff, the rational-logical part.

The green portion (left brain, limbic)
The studious, conscientious part, which organises information into very

The red portion (right brain, limbic)
The emotional touchy feely part

The yellow portion (right brain, cerebral)
The imaginative, intuition part, which does a lot of leaps of logic.

So it was fun when at first I told them that I was a maths major, and then they concluded that I was a blue portion. Well it turned out that I primarily use the yellow portion, and a bit of the blue portion (that makes me more intensely cerebral than limbic, which means I’m primarily a thinker not a doer.) Then I’m fairly strong with red, and a little limp when it comes to the green.

I’m not surprised. I know that I’m good at blue because of my talent in maths. I’m also good at red because I have artistic talent. And given that blue and red are in opposite quadrants, I’m probably also good at one other aspect, and that is yellow, because it allows a person to see the whole picture, and probably you need holistic thinking in order to be able to switch between opposite modes of thinking.

But I’m concerned about my lack of green. This probably means that I should never ever touch operations. It probably also means that I have a good chance at being a success in life at anything other than operations. This is very interesting. In fact it means that I’m also fairly suspect as an engineer but don’t tell anybody I said that.

I’m thinking about other people I have to work with. I know that Monty Burns is either OK with the green portion and hopeless with the blue (or was that the other way around?) And he’s definitely crap at the yellow portion as well.

It is estimated that 70% of people use 2 of the zones, 20% use 3 of the zones, 7% use only 1 zone (and people in this category have an unfortunate tendency to piss off all those around them). The lucky few, the 3% who use all 4 zones, usually end up as leaders of men. If I were slightly stronger with red, I would be able to count myself as 3 quadrants.

The instructor did have a few interesting stories to tell. She did say that Singapore is very good and pumping out blue people, and to a lesser extent, green people. Yellow people have it tough in Singapore. I suppose that it’s quite ironic that they call it yellow people since most East Asian cultures are generally unfriendly towards yellow people. This is one major reason why I do not entirely approve of my own culture - I don’t give a fuck about people who say I’m being disloyal, the bare fact is that I often have to choose between being true to myself and being true to my culture. There is always a conflict.

The irony is that in my formative years I was brought up in a place which is yellow friendly. Most of my education were in yellow friendly places. But NS and work were not yellow friendly.

I know that the nail that sticks out will be hammered down but this nail intends to fight back. What usually happens is that when people pick on me I roll with the punches a little while, be very quiet, and try to sniff out their weak points, and then if there’s a way I kick them around a little bit here and there. This is nothing personal but yellow people need a lot of free space so too bad for you if you’re in the way. I can’t really help it but yellow people are rabble rousers. There’s really no point being always submissive, it’s no way to live your life. You have a role to play in society and you just have to do what you have to do. And anyhow the point of being yellow is that you can always find a way out because yellow is also the colour of cunning.

There are other ways of doing things - I think about Gorbachev, who came up in a very repressive and conformist society, and he still very artfully tried to effect a revolution from within. If you study history he gets most of the credit for overthrowing the Soviet system. He’s a person who managed to be a rebel, and yet do it without pissing too many people off. (Yes, he pissed off a lot of people, but that was later, after the USSR collapsed.) But I don’t have as many skills as he does. And you know, at the end of the day it wasn’t a happy ending for him. It wasn’t entirely his fault but Russia became a much more fucked up place after the end of the USSR, the life expectancy dropped by 10 years because everybody was drinking themselves to death. Russia is now ruled by the mafia.

The methodology of using user evaluations to assess whether the trainer gets to continue teaching is inherently flawed because it tilts the balance towards fluffy pseudo-psychological feel-good bimbonic stuff, and people who run one-size-fits-all management programs which have dubious relevance to the organisation can get away with charging really profitable admission fees. I sometimes wonder: is it very much more expensive to get your own guys to run some training themselves?

We haven’t had training programs that address problems that are specific to our company. That will change in due course.

I suppose Singaporean companies are very paranoid that people will find out about their modus operandi, to the extent that I have heard someone fairly senior on my organisation decrying the need to have somebody build an information portal that will be used by both ourselves and our customers. He complained that other companies will just bare a shoulder or two while we will strip naked in front of them and dance around. Be that as it may, if you want external consultants to effect real change in your organisation, you have to take it all off so that he can impregnate you isn’t it?

Below the Belt

Just noticed that in the recent issue of 8 Days Felicia Chin made a public statement that she "has not had plastic surgery on the upper half of her body". What the f does that mean? First it is useful to conclude that you could rub 10 gallons of bust firming cream into your tits until they become harder than steel, and it still wouldn't count as plastic surgery. And secondly what sort of plastic surgery is going on below the belt? I'm thinking of PTP, which incidently stands for "Pussy Tightening Procedure".

Reader

Hi folks, another fucking GP essay from me again.

Nat suggested that I go watch “The Reader” because you get a lot of Kate Winslet fucking in that movie. Now I have watched a lot of art movies in my time, not as much as some people, but quite a few. For a long time I have watched movies so that I could learn more about art, learn more about life from them. Then I transcended even that and thought, the truest test of a movie is what your personal reactions are towards that movie. It shouldn’t even be about a critic telling you what is art. It is something that you must viscerally experience for yourself.

Now what is the point here? The bottom line is, having watched so many movies for the right reasons, I reserve the right to watch a movie for no other purpose than to watch Kate Winslet fucking.

I suppose I have to blog about it a bit more nowadays because these days I hardly ever watch movies anymore.

Most of the reviews will tell you that this is an above average movie, with one great performance (Winslet’s, and she won a handful of acting prizes for this one) and it was adapted from a great novel.

Movie reviews have to be gingerly written: they must answer the essential question: “is this movie worth watching?” without giving away the plot details. So this is not a review but rather something that talks about what the movie is all about. So for those of you who intend to watch the movie but haven’t done so yet you won’t need to be reading this.

For the rest of you, there’s this German guy, born after the war. He’s 16 and he meets this nice bust conductor – sorry I meant bus conductor, and she takes him home. He’s sick. Then he brings her flowers. They meet and fuck. Then while she’s his lover, she insists that he read to her. They are lovers for a while. One day, she is promoted to have an office job. She is ashamed to admit that she is illiterate, and then she leaves town, ending her affair with the teenager in the process.

Later on, he’s a law student and he attends a seminar. It’s about the war crimes, tribunal, and there, he sees Kate Winslet being charged for being a concentration camp guard. It is torture for him to watch, because he still loves her. She is the only person among the defendants to admit that a book that was written about her was true. There are not a lot of things that you do as a concentration camp guard that counts as murder. But there was one incident, which involves a death march. The concentration camp inmates are locked up in the church for a night. Then one night, during a bombing raid, the church is set on fire. The inmates are burnt to death, except for the mother and daughter who survive to write the book, and press charges against the concentration camp guards.

The rest of the defendants pin all the blame on her, and insist that a report that was written about the incident was written by her. She is identified as the leader of the guards and gets 20 years instead of the 4 given to all the other guards.

In the last part of the movie, while she is in jail, the lawyer (he’s a lawyer now) makes recordings of books, and mails them to her in jail. Through the recordings, and comparing them with the words on a book that she borrows from the library, she

The book was published in 1995, which was the 50th anniversary of VE day. (That’s “victory in Europe”). I think that people are still getting around what happened during that war.

In that war, we discovered 2 horrible new developments in the history of man. From the holocaust, we found out that 20th century technology has enabled us to commit murder on a scale that is simply awe-inspiring. The holocaust in which 11 million people died, was murder committed in a very systematic fashion. The second nasty surprise is nuclear weapons, which can kill on an ever larger scale than the holocaust. Why bother to kill 11 million people over 4 years when you only need 4 seconds nowadays?

So at that time, the Holocaust was presented as an utterly unique event in mankind. In part, this view was put forward by Zionists who saw this as an utterly unique way to establish the state of Israel. One of the stated purposes of a homeland for the Jewish people was that you needed a place to house all the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Many Arabs were not that happy to be chased out of their own homeland, and the establishment of Israel in 1948 has caused a lot of unhappiness in that region ever since.

So much of this movie had been about how the Germans deal with the issue of guilt. You can contrast their attitude with the Japanese – we’re still waiting for them to get back to us and I think they’re smart enough to realize that if they can stall for time long enough for most of the war generation to be dead or dying, they never ever have to apologise because it’s all “overtaken by events”. I suppose that it’s German culture that people are very direct and forthright, so it was probably more possible that they would choose to examine these issues. But I digress.

This movie therefore is not entirely about Kate Winslet fucking, although I have to admit that it is a great selling point. It is about war guilt, and how the survivors deal with it. I read somewhere that a lot of people are outraged at the movie, because Kate Winslet is more concerned about her illiteracy rather than the fact that she killed a lot of people. This is the sort of movie which raises such controversial questions that nobody finds it remarkable that a 15 year old boy is fucking a 30 something woman.

But what of it? Would you be ashamed? We all are ashamed of something. Some deep dark secret. My parents are a little ashamed that they never got as much schooling as I did. I’m ashamed that I suck at Chinese. These are the sort of issues that are on-going rather than about what happened some time in the past. That’s the difference between her illiteracy and her being a concentration camp guard.

It’s true that Hannah is one of the more morally ambivalent people in the movie. On one hand she was a Nazi, although not a very high ranking one, and subsequently, not one who made a lot of decisions. She could just say that she was taking orders. Her testimony was a little more forthright than the rest of the defendants because she was possibly less able to understand the full implications of what the concentration camp was all about. People had to die, because “there were new ones coming in all the time”. So she was a classic taker of orders.

But you have to balance that against – here’s this nice woman who took a boy home because he was sick. If you wanted a black and white version of the concentration camp guard as the ultimate embodiment of evil, that would be extremely inconvenient.

Then in the trial it was mentioned that Kate Winslet would just pick a few of the more sickly people, and ask them to read to her. And then after that they typically ended up getting chosen for extermination. I supposed she really liked being read stories to. I would consider this to be a neutral thing – what does it matter since you’re always going to kill X number of people, whether those are the ones that you interact with on a more human level?

Another thing is that in the movie, the anti-Nazis were all painted in a fairly negative light. A classmate of the law student accused him of being soft and wondered why he was always staring at Kate Winslet. He did bring up a good point: so much of this happened every where, in every stratum of German society, because the Nazis were everywhere. And yet only Kate Winslet and her gang of camp guards were identified, and only then because some of the victims wrote a book.

As for the centerpiece of the charges against the camp guards – the locking the prisoners into a church while they burnt to death inside – the judge actually offers her a reason to say that she was scared of what the prisoners would do to her if she released them. But she just said that there would be chaos everywhere and she couldn’t let that happen. A more honest answer but her priorities look extremely lop-sided now.

It is very difficult to judge what people would have done in the heat of the moment. The person responsible for murder in this case is not Kate Winslet but the allied pilot who dropped the bomb. Clearly this is not a pre-meditated case of murder and it is not first degree murder. So Kate Winslet turns at the judge “What would you have done?” The judge does not answer. He is not there to answer questions. But it is a valid question, one that casts a shadow over the rest of the movie.

I suppose that a lot of Kate Winslet’s dumbness comes from her illiteracy. No doubt she’s great at fucking, but I would attribute a lot of her illogical behaviour to simply her being quite confused. I would guess she likes order, and likes wearing uniforms.

The lawyer was probably appalled that she would rather hide her illiteracy from other people than to reduce her sentence and deny that she was the author of a certain report. So there he almost wanted to come forward and say that he knows that she is illiterate and could not possibly have authored that report. But he steps back in the end and does nothing.

I always felt that this is a metaphor for what the rank and file of the Nazis were like. They were not especially evil people, rather they were just unable or unwilling to stand up to evil. They were moral cowards like him. He had plenty of other reasons not to reveal that she was illiterate. One was that she was ashamed of it. Another was that it was after all her own decision to make and she already made it. A third reasons is that he wanted to keep his affair with her a secret. Or he wasn’t prepared to face her again. Whatever it is, the parallels with the moral failure of being a Nazi is striking. This act of not interfering with her decision to condemn herself to 20 years in prison is one of the most important acts of the film, and influences a lot of things that take place later in the lawyer's life. Why is he a cold person? Why did he feel guilty and send her audio tapes of literature? Why did he feel very awkward about meeting her in person?

The other aspect of the movie was the secrets. The love affair was a secret. I know from first hand experience that when you keep secrets from people it really alienates you from them. There was so much about how, when the lawyer as a young boy got home after having lost his virginity 1 hour ago, he was looking at his family one by one, and he just couldn’t tell them anything. It probably made him very emotionally distant from his family, if he wasn't already that way. Was his family close? They were strict, to say the least. But they stuck together. He just wasn't able to form close relationships, which is why in the end he got divorced, and spends much of his older life going from 1 lover to another.

The scene where he finally meets Hannah is also very interesting. They finally meet in the prison canteen. Remember that the last time they met face to face they were still fucking each other. Now she's 60. The meeting is a little cold, and there is little joy left. He's talking about making arrangements for her.

She's fairly unrepentant about her actions during the war. She said one line which makes the movie quite controversial. “I have learnt that the dead are already dead”. She had also learnt how to read. Well good for her! I think in a way she never really understood what being a Nazi was all about. So many people don't think about it in terms of right and wrong. To her, she was just given instructions, and she was doing a job.

Later on, just before she is to be released, and when we're thinking, "how is she going to adapt to this new world?" She hangs herself. The book makes it clear that after reading about the Holocaust she starts to think more about, and is being tormented about her role in it. But it's more ambiguous in the movie. She says that she knows all about the dead. She has been both a prisoner and a guard. Is she a helpless person who stumbles through her life, and acquiesces to all the forces around her, or is she a moral agent?

There is a case to be made for her being a helpless person. She joined the prison guard because she was just looking for a job. She had an affair with the lawyer because she could tell he had a crush on her. She couldn't read and write, and she's shut away from most human civilisation as a result. (It is very difficult for anybody to understand what it's like to be illiterate. Most people think this is trivial but it's not.) She's not educated enough to make the same moral judgements that other people make when they are condemning her. She was the only prison guard to not understand, like the other prison guards on trial, that she should not have confessed to anything.

As for whether she was the ringleader of the guards, it is possible. She is a capable person, and it's not inconceivable that she was promoted to leader. But would they have made an illiterate person a leader? But I think we are meant to believe that the 200 who died in the church were locked in as the result of a collective decision.

The thing about the war, and the holocaust is to realise that while most people could have resisted evil, it is not easy for anybody at all. It was difficult enough getting by, and it would have taken great strength, courage, resources, wealth - everything - not to be a bad person in that war.

The other thing is that her stint as a guard took up maybe 1 or 2 years of her life. That's 1 or 2 years in an otherwise unremarkable and completely ordinary life. When you put somebody in jail, you are punishing a person. OK, she did evil things and they should be punished. But there are other reasons for putting people in jail that are not justified. You put a person in jail so that society can be safe from them. Hannah was a perfectly normal member of society in peacetime. There's no need to lock her away. OK, she fucks 15 year old boys, but 15 year old is not that young, 16 is legal in this country. The other rationale of prison is rehabilitation. Normal people leading normal lives don't need rehabilitation. There's very little reason for her to be in jail.

She was in jail, in lieu of all the other people who did equally horrible things, and went unpunished, because one of the victims wrote a book. It is OK to demand justice and the war crimes trials were good things. But they still distribute justice inequally, and we can still say that Hannah was unlucky.

Still, before she hangs herself, she bequeaths her life savings to the victim who wrote the book. It's for the lawyer to confront the victim who put her in jail.

The last scene is also very jarring. The lawyer takes the tin, and gives it to the Jewish daughter. And for a while it seems to her that he’s there to ask for absolution, and treats him with disdain. She has done well for herself, is ostentatiously wealthy, and has an apartment on Manhattan’s west side. For those who have never been to New York – it costs a shit load of money to live there. The hall is tastefully decorated with plenty of expensive art pieces. She’s done quite well for herself. Then she takes the attitude of a lot of former survivors of her generation, and refuses to forgive the Nazis. Very self-righteously, she lectures that “there is nothing good that comes out of being in a concentration camp. There is nothing that a concentration camp can teach you. It is not college.”

But later on, when she realizes that she is receiving the entire life savings of somebody who has just spent 20 years in jail, her attitude softens, and she finds that he’s not here to seek forgiveness. And after all, she put Kate Winslet in jail for 20 years. $7000 is just loose change to her, and she sets up a foundation to promote literacy. After all, she said it herself, and this is the moral of the story for “The Reader”: there is nothing that a concentration camp can teach you. It bears no resemblance to life elsewhere. There is no meaning to it. So stop being vindictive about the past and lay it to rest. Kate Winslet legacy to her also included a tin that contained the money, the sort of tin that the Jewish victim used to play with as a child. You could say that Kate Winslet, who took her normal life away from her is giving it back to her in that form of the tin. So the Jewish victim does the right thing and places the tin on the mantelpiece next to a picture of all her relatives who were exterminated in the Holocaust.

I think there are a lot of people who criticized this movie for “not realizing the gravity of Kate Winslet being a concentration camp guard”. They are missing the whole point of the story. The whole point is to chip away at the edifice and the “standard interpretation” of war guilt, and what to do with it when it’s over. The war didn’t last very long. The amount of time I’ve worked at my present job is equivalent to almost 2 Japanese occupations of Singapore. Kate Winslet worked as a concentration camp guard for not very long, and it’s not a large part of her life. We are surprised that she thinks that her lack of literacy is a larger problem but if we bother to put ourselves in her shoes we shouldn’t be.

Let's put it this way. If you threw me into jail, but gave me a pile of books to read - maybe I'm only saying this because I know nothing about jail - I wouldn't mind it at all. A monk's life, a bookworm's life, that was the life I led in America and in Singapore. There is almost no difference, it is normal. To be in there, but not be able to read - that would have been torture.

OK, so the contrast is artificial. One is a Nazi, who because of her role in the rank and file, rots in jail for 20 years. The other is a victim who has suffered greatly in her childhood, but has lived a great and fulfilling life thereafter. Who has lived the better life? Who has suffered more? The victim has done well, ironically from the publishing proceeds from selling her story. What does this tell you about real life, the life that goes on long after the war ends, where all the rules are different?

Some people have complained that the movie does not show any war scenes, and we only know about the war through what we already know elsewhere. This is an attempt to whitewash the past. But I think this is a refreshing point of view. We gain nothing by holding on to the past. In a way the past is inexorably separated from the present. Some people say that the past isn't over, it isn't even past. Fair enough, but on the other hand, why don't you want to get on with life?

My initial impression of the Jewish victim was repulsion, but now I feel that her attitude - I do not accept the money because that would mean absolution - is more or less correct. She allows him to set up a fund to promote literacy, although it is true that all Jews are literate.

The bad news, guys, is that the Holocaust is not a unique event in human history. We haven’t had a war on the scale of WWII since then but plenty of horrible things have taken place. We have had the Vietnam wars. The Congo wars. The Rwanda genocide. Cambodia. East Timor. It’s really ridiculous to call the Holocaust unique. It’s taking place over and over again. It’s a really unhealthy attitude to just call it incomprehensible, and then ban all attempts to analyse or comprehend the scale of what happened. This shut-the-fuck-up attitude is partly an attempt to put forward a standard interpretation of the Holocaust and not ever have it questioned. The Israelis have managed to get away with a disproportionate amount of violence against the Palestinians because many legitimate questions are swept away under the aegis of “do you dare question the sanctity of the Holocaust? Do you dare deny the centuries of Anti-Semitism?”

What I think is this: the real lessons of the Holocaust have not been learnt. The lessons that have been learnt are the wrong ones. We hold on to our stereotypical ideas about it - that it is a unique and unsurpassed event, that it is improper to rationalise and speak about it, improper to try and understand it. That is all wrong. That prevents us from learning the real lessons. It's not a one off that happened to Jewish people in the past. America, who has been most insistent about having the "proper" attitude towards the Holocaust had the power to prevent at least 1 of those mass murders from taking place, but it didn't. It took 50 years for there to be an international justice tribunal. They are - only now - trying the members of the Khmer Rouge for genocide. Now that is not a simple matter and it is a significant achievement, but there is so much more that could have been done.

What did the holocaust teach mankind about handling genocide before it happens? Not very much. What does it teach mankind about handling genocide after it happens? Not very much either. Japan still does not apologise. Turkey still denies that it mass murdered the Armenians. East Timor is still in a shitty state. There are still problems in Kosovo. Saddam Hussein still used chemical weapons on the Kurds.

Anyway I found a quote from the actual novel itself. It is worth reading:

"What should our second generation have done, what should it do with the knowledge of the horrors of the extermination of the Jews? We should not believe we can comprehend the incomprehensible, we may not compare the incomparable, we may not inquire because to make the horrors an object of inquiry is to make the horrors an object of discussion, even if the horrors themselves are not questioned, instead of accepting them as something in the face of which we can only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt. Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame and guilt? To what purpose?"

About Kate Winslet, I suppose this is the third movie that I’ve watched that features her fucking. The first was Titanic, the second was “Little Children”. If I watch “Revolutionary Road” then I suppose there will be a fourth. Winslet had a more impressive front during “Titanic”. Maybe I will watch Revolutionary Road.

Suicide

I saw a New Paper headline, “this hunk is a Government Scholar” on the New Paper. A few days later, I saw another headline where a scholar, ostensibly because of the failed pursuit of a girl from China, jumped to his death. Maybe they should take a picture of the mess at the bottom of the HDB block and headline it, “this gunk used to be a Government Scholar”.

They are making a big deal out of it isn’t it? People usually kill themselves for larger reasons than just the end of a love affair. The decision to die involves the ending of a life, and it usually reflects the belief, rightly or wrongly, that definitely more than one aspect of the life have failed. It could not possibly be that a girl had just rejected him. He must have felt that he failed in other aspects as well. The way that the suicide was reported therefore makes the reasons seem unnecessarily frivolous. Maybe he had just come home from a place where winters are extremely long and dreary. Maybe he couldn’t fit in socially with his new workplace.

There are 2 general meanings of suicide. One of them is a cry for help. The other one is a true unwillingness to carry on living. The first could come across as a little disingenuous: you don’t really want to kill yourself but you’re sending a strong signal that you want people to help you. In the second you don’t give a damn and you just want it to end. Statistics on suicide usually show that women attempt suicide more often, and men commit suicide more often, which highly suggests that the first reason appeals more to women and the second reason more to men.

There have been 2 times when I seriously considered suicide, and thankfully it has stayed this way for quite a few years. During the second time I was in the uni and yes – I had just ended a relationship, but I think it was more than that that drove me to despair. I couldn’t find an easy way out of my troubles, my future was murky, I didn’t know how I was going to slog through the rest of my uni years. There had been a period of optimism before that, when I thought that I had solved a lot of problems in my life, and later on I found out that at least some of the solutions were temporary. For the record I am acquainted with another scholar who “attempted” suicide. She was female.

Thank goodness nothing happened. I could deal with the fact that my life was over, but what would happen if my name was splashed across the papers, as an example of a recipient of privilege who cocked it up in a uniquely spectacular fashion? I would be dead by then, of course, and unable to know anything about the consequences, but my God, the shame! Thank goodness it never got to be a thought in my mind.

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On another note, I recently heard that a divorce had taken place. It was sad. I didn't know the couple that well but it never seemed to me that the couple had anything in common. It was sad because that wedding was one of the first I had been to, and I saw what it was like when the groom (he was a colleague at that time) was scurrying around to fix things up.

I am a little superstitious. I have been to like maybe 3 dates in 10 years, but I noticed that if I were to go dating in places that close down soon after, the relationship is near the end. There was the annex of a spaghetti restaurant (the second floor was closed soon after.) There was a date at Scott's food court not long before it got closed down. Both didn't last. OK, one of them petered out to its fairly unseemly conclusion, in the other case both of us didn't click and we didn't pursue it.

OK, it's superstition. But psychological research shows that human behaviour is very much shaped by its environment. I suppose that the strength of a relationship - any one, not just a spousal one - depends on there being a shared environment. That's why I would want that environment, that context to be a lasting one. If an environment that symbolises a relationship were to disappear without being adequately replaced, that is very dangerous.

Well that wedding took place in a place that closed down soon afterwards and while I never allowed myself to think that the "curse of the closing down location" would affect this guy, this does fit in with the natural pattern. I would be very wary about closing down places.

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An update on this earlier post - I think that water girl is still living in my block. I bumped into her at the lift. She still looks great, but I feel much less crazy about her than years ago.

Champions League draw

Now for some boliao mathematics.

In the draw for the Champion's League knock out phase, out of 16 teams there were 3 Italian teams and 4 English teams. As it turns out, all 3 Italian teams were drawn against English sides. Fabio Capello, the England coach has said that "with all the permutations, that was practically impossible". Is he as good a mathematician as he is a football coach?

Now in a randomised draw, all permutations are equally possible - anyway without knowing much about how the draw took place, that is what I assume. We will calculate how many possible combinations of teams there are. The formula is:

ie the number of ways of choosing 2 from 16, then the number of ways of choosing 2 from 14, etc, then we divide it by 8 factorial because there are 8! different ways of arranging the same match up in order, and we need to remove the duplicate combinations.

With a little bit of algebra manipulation we have

Next we calculate the number of different permutations for there to have the English teams matched with the Italian teams. First, we assign Man U to match 1, Liverpool to match 2, Chelsea to match 3 and Arsenal to match 4. Then we will assign Inter Milan, Juventus and AS Roma to one of these matches.

Inter Milan can choose between 4 matches, Juventus chooses 1 of the other 3, and AS Roma chooses one of the two. Then the last English team chooses 1 of the other 9. So that gives us 4 * 3 * 2 * 9 ways of arranging matches 1 to 4. For matches 5 to 8 we have, according to the calculation of the first part, 8! / (4! 2^4) combinations. So multiplying the two together and cancelling the 4! on the top and bottom, we have:

Then, we take (3) and divide it by (2) and see what we get...

Apparently there is only a 1 in 100 chance, meaning like something like this is a rare occurance, but not like Fabio Capello says, practically impossible.

The conclusion is that Fabio Capello should stick to football coaching and stop pontificating about probability theory.

Famine

Almost 20 years ago there was an essay writing competition. The winner of the essay writing competition would win for my school 20 Macintoshes, and back in those days, the Macintosh was seen as a Mercedes Benz like computer. Somebody from our school won, and he was a hero. We were all grateful to him for his efforts.

This Ju-Len guy did the same for his school. Not sure if he won it for my school but good for him anyway. He was a hero. Unfortunately later in life he became a “star blogger” for the Straits Times and started writing shit articles like the one I saw one morning in mypaper:

Scarcity doesn’t cause hunger, stupidity does

I am not sure how qualified I am to comment on this, because in my entire lifetime – which includes five years of living on my own, the total number of sacks of rice I have ever bought amount to precisely zero.

I only buy rice indirectly, that is, from hawkers and restauranteurs, and so far I haven’t noticed any movement in the price of rice. I don’t even eat rice that
often. For some reason, I prefer noodles and pasta. I’ve been more pained by the
rising price of petrol, but even then I’m consoling myself that even though crude oil prices have gone up four times in the last five years or so, pump prices haven’t even doubled in that time.

And yet we grumble, which is a very human thing to do. It’s also a human reaction to panic at the rising price of rice, even though it’s gone up by just 30 per cent (so I’ve read), and that according to the NTUC, only 22 cents out of every $10 spent at their stores is expended on rice.

I’m guessing that our elders, who unlike us have actually lived through times of desperate deprivation, are the ones most compelled to hoard rice right now.

But to borrow a phrase from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.

Rather aptly, he spoke these words during the depths of the Great Depression.

Rice hoarders would do well to heed the lesson contained therein: panicking is only going to make things worse.

Let’s have some perspective here. We are very far from conditions which bring about famine.

Take the Great Chinese Famine of 1958.

During a three-year period of starvation caused by a convergence of factors including natural disaster, economic mismanagement and belief in flawed pseudo-scientific agricultural techniques, as many as 30 million people starved to death.

According to Wikipedia, the Chinese authorities now accept that the main culprits for the famine were human, apportioning 65 per cent of the blame on mismanagement and 35 per cent on natural causes. Indeed, more often than not,
starvation seems to stem from idiocy rather than scarcity.

The Bengal famine of 1943 saw up to three million people starve to death, but Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen holds that there was no actual shortage of rice at the time.

In fact, there was more rice around than in 1941, a year in which no famine occurred.

Instead, rumours of a rice shortage caused hoarding and rapid price inflation, and Mr Sen writes in his 1981 book, Poverty and Famines, that although Bengal had enough food to go around, millions of people suddenly found themselves too
poor to afford it.

People who hoard rice here may be acting on a simple self-preserving impulse, but they are actually making the situation worse.

Thankfully, we live in a fairly open economic system.

In the long run, I believe that the free market should correct the situation, as it tends to do for any good or service. If all else fails, we’ll always have Soylent Green.

(It’s a fictional product – a small, green wafer which is advertised as being produced from “high-energy plankton” – featured in a 1973 science fiction movie of the same name.)

First you tell people that you’re not qualified to write articles, and then you write them anyway. But of course that does not automatically disqualify you from writing more stuff.

There is nothing wrong with his main point which is that hoarding is bad, but he makes 2 severe mistakes in this article.

First, he asserts that the main cause of rising food prices is artificial and man made. This is not true. At some point we would have crossed the threshold from a situation where everybody has enough to eat, and the main problem is distribution, to a Malthusian situation. (Malthus was the guy who predicted that the world will run out of food one day.) I read it some where that the point is somewhere around 2010, and we are near that point.

It is very reassuring to ourselves that all we have to do is to solve the problem of distribution, but it may not be true for much longer. It is very politically incorrect to say this, but all the people in China / India / Vietnam / Thailand / UAE / Qatar / Brazil who are getting richer are gobbling up more food than they did 10-20 years ago and that is creating scarcity.

The other thing is that one of the main components of our food is crude oil – not for transportation, but for manufacturing fertiliser. When crude oil prices go up, the fertiliser will get more expensive and correspondingly food will be more expensive.

So fellars don’t kid yourself that doomsday is not going to come. The end is near.

This mistake is also in believing the past is the same as the present. He points to the example of China after the Great Leap Forward but he forgets that it was a different economic situation from now. Today there could not be a person who can engineer a famine like Mao did because there is nobody powerful enough to do so.

The second big mistake he makes is saying that “free market” cures everything. The free market would have prevented the Great Leap Forward famines. But it is not a cure all. He already pointed out that the hoarding is due to the greed of merchants. Fair enough, but isn’t that what the free market expects them to do? Is not the solution enforcement and regulations?

Then there are other stupid things that he wrote, like “rice has only gone up by 30 cents”. I think he doesn’t realise that Singapore has poor people. We didn’t have many poor people when we were growing up but that’s changed now. Yes, NTUC is doing its job keeping rice prices down but it’s not just an ant bite to some people.

I wonder why newspapers like to tell lies like this. They ought to be telling people: stop eating meat. Eat more vegetables. Stop using biofuel. Stop using cars. (And for goodness sake fix the bloody MRT!) But I guess nobody really wants to tell the bad news.

Addendum: it just came to my attention that Soylent Green in the movie of its name, is actually human meat. The movie depicts an apocalyptic scenario where people don’t have enough to eat, and we have factories murdering people and processing their flesh into food products. Some people wondered whether he didn’t know about Soylent green, or if he was being subversive. The former is quite unlikely – there has to be a reason why a person would purposely put in a fairly obscure movie reference, and that particular one. He gets brownie points for being subversive and wins back a little bit of respect from me.

Fair and Balanced reporting

JAKARTA - MOMENTS before their Adam Air Boeing 737 aircraft crashed into the sea, killing all 102 people on board, the two pilots were frantic.
'This is really bad. It is starting to fly like a bamboo ship. Pull up. Pull up. Pull up!' screamed one.

The other yelled: 'Crazy, this is crazy.'

Their last recorded words, captured by the cockpit voice recorder, were released yesterday by investigators who blamed errors by the two pilots and a faulty navigation system for the crash on New Year's Day last year.

Investigators found that the pilots had accidentally disconnected the autopilot system while trying to fix a problem in the navigation instruments.

'Without the autopilot, the plane went out of control, listing to the right and pitching down,' investigator Santoso Sayogo told a press conference yesterday.

The plane was flying from Java to an airport in the east of Indonesia when it spiralled from the sky at a height of 10,000m. It took around two minutes to hit the sea, investigators said.

Several days passed before fishermen and navy boats located floating wreckage off the island of Sulawesi. Both flight data recorders were eventually found on the sea bed. The plane's mostly intact fuselage remains under water.

No bodies were recovered.

Transport Minister Jusman Syafei Djamal said Adam Air had registered 154 defects in the Boeing 737-400's navigation system in the three months before the crash, showing that the plane was poorly maintained.

Indonesia's transport safety chief Tatang Kurniadi said: 'The accident happened because of a combination of several factors, including the failure of both pilots to intensively monitor flight instruments, especially in the last two minutes of the flight.'

The pilots had reported the navigation system problem but sounded unconcerned, even joking just 20 minutes before the plane went down.

Later, as they tried to fix the problem, the autopilot disengaged, causing the plane to bank to the right.

The pilots were apparently unaware that they were now flying the plane and ignored 'a number of initial alerts, warnings and changes to displays' indicating the jetliner's increasingly critical situation, the National Transportation Safety Committee report said.

They were so preoccupied with the repair work they were attempting that they did not act to stop the plane's descent and prevent it from going out of control.

Well, there’s that article. Is there anything wrong with the article? I don’t think so. But look at the way that the Straits Times headlined it. “Pilots were joking and unconcerned just before crash”. This is a blatant foul which makes the pilots look really bad. But is this true?

We know that the pilots made a serious mistake in disconnecting the autopilot while trying to repair the navigation system. But that is not due to negligence. Nobody who makes a mistake in a split second should be blamed too much. If they are joking and laughing well their job is a stressful one and you can’t expect anybody to be serious all the time. Everybody knows that Indonesians like to laugh and joke.

It’s clear that the airline is to be blamed for faulty maintenance. Or you could even attribute it to the proliferation of all these budget airlines proclaimed not long ago to be the great and wonderful thing of the future. Airplanes so wonderful they don’t even need to be maintained. Governments who think that when they hands off and not regulate commercial air transport industry they are not fucking around with peoples’ lives.

Most convenient thing to do in this case is to let the dead assume all the blame. Meanwhile I feel sorry for the pilots who not only have to screw around with shitty equipment and endanger all their lives but risk these reporters slanting stories against them and letting their families face the wrath of the victims’ families.

The iPod Workforce

THEY want to be paid at least $2,500 a month and be praised at work, but won’t skip their evening gym sessions to work overtime.

They roll into the office with their iPods and mini-skirts around noon – and yet expect to be CEO by the end of the week.

But the shocker is: Many professionals – the young blood entering the workforce – whom my paper spoke to actually agreed with this depiction of themselves. Four local recruitment firms also affirmed these trends among new hires.

A recent episode of American news programme 60 Minutes zeroed in on those born after 1980, who are known as the Millennial Generation – or the iPod
Generation.

Its findings were culled from interviews with employers, young employees and recruitment experts in the US.

The show found that Millennial Generation employees have no company loyalty and think that anyone over 30 is old, redundant and should be retired.

Mr Josh Goh of recruitment firm GMP Group felt that the same attitude prevails among the under-30s here who have not gone through a recession.

Said the corporate services manager: “Due to the current talent shortage, employers are telling recruits what the company can do for them, rather than ask what they can do for it.”

Assistant project manager Mr Heng Tee Jin, 24, is one such Millennial Generation employee. While he agreed that “young employees are often seen as lazy or lacking in ambition”, he said he has also witnessed peers who are “equally hungry for success”.

“It boils down to the individual”, he added.

This was a MyPaper article that I copied out. I think it was published last month.

This is the issue that has been talked about ever since I was young. This is what you get when you have a parent who worked his way out of poverty, and never tires of reminding you of what it’s all about.

It is infectious enough to be scary. I have seen people, who after marrying one of my family members, start having more of a work ethic than they did before. And it’s all that nagging, that consistent competition and one-upmanship that goes around.

Some of my aunts have asked me, well the 3 eldest cousins have degrees from nice universities in the US. (She means myself, my sister and my cousin). And you have the younger one who gets pressured because she can’t do the same. They ask me, do you feel bad about giving pressure to your youngsters?

I said that I didn’t know. Yes, I received a lot of help when I was young in my studies. Not from tuition, not from asking help from my teachers. My parents did give me a good hard push when I was very young and that definitely helped. Also I never had to worry about anything else other than studying, and that helped. The rest was all down to my talent and hard work. So I said I just did what I did without thinking too hard about how people who are going to follow after me are going to take it.

But I can be quite offensive about doing well. I think that when I did well in school I pissed my sister off so much that she became really competitive and did even better than me in school.

When I think about it, their complaints that I was putting pressure on my younger cousin did not make sense. One of them was a successful fund manager, really raking it in. The other did not really fit the conventional Singaporean notion of success but she is a good enough cook that we know that she will succeed if she wants to go into business. Then there’s my father, former head boy, top student, climbed up the corporate ladder. Their youngest sister married a successful businessman. I think it is completely not fair for them to complain about me giving the youngsters pressure.

We’ll keep on giving youngsters pressure and taking pressure, I guess. That is the system. We’ve usually had corporal punishment in my family. I didn’t like getting beaten the shit out of when I screwed up but I will do it to my kids because this is family tradition. My grandmother beat the shit out of my father, my father beat the shit out of me, and I will beat the shit out of my kids when they screw up.

So when I see that article about what youngsters are like in their work, I don’t feel particularly proud to be associated with that generation of assholes. You do not need to be from a poor background to have that extra drive and passion. Bill Gates was born upper middle class. In a perverse way, even though Paris Hilton was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, you need a certain amount of drive to keep your name constantly in the tabloids without having any artistic talent that people normally need to end up there in the first place.

I wish my generation of people were not like that. I wish they were humble down to earth folk who didn’t place such emphasis on hedonism and shit like that.

I don’t want to give the impression that I’m the model employee because I’m not. But I still think there has to be some minimum standard for everybody, and people should get their priorities in life right.

In the business world, people usually consider it a success if all your customers are spoilt and pampered assholes who say me me me I I I, vacuous enough to part with their cash at every given opportunity, seeking fleeting pleasures, not giving a fucking thought about how they are contributing to the betterment of society and that is completely fucked up.

Mas Selamat Kastari

Let's dispel a few myths about Mas Selamat Kastari. People think he will be caught. I don't think it will be easy, or possible, I don't think he will be caught before he links up with JI again. It is possible to escape from Singapore. There is jungle. Why they put the Whitley detention centre so close to the jungle escapes me, but in Singapore, if you're not close to a jungle, then you are close to the coast, and you can still escape to another island.

I don't know why they say he is still in Singapore. They only made this public 4 hours after he escaped. This is really stupid. If you were to make this public immediately, it would have been much easier to catch him, everybody would have been able to look out for him. I'm sure it takes less than 2 hours to escape from this small island.

Saying that he is still in Singapore does serve one purpose. When you are in the government long enough you will realise that times of adversity will unite the people, as it did in the SARS case. Never mind that you yourself were the cause of that adversity.

Mas Selamat may or may not join back to JI and return to terrorism. It is possible either way.

His escape will not make a big difference to terrorism. JI's the way that it has always been. If it needs more talented people it can always find them. One more or one less doesn't make a difference.

What is not a myth is if I do find myself face to face with him I will try to beat the shit out of him before the police stop me.

I am very annoyed. But not as annoyed as the air defence units in the country who will have to work harder because he is on the loose.

Cherian George raised the interesting question of why the media has failed to report on the inquiries into the security lapse. That's the last thing the Straits Times would want to write about. Who in the press would want to criticise Internal Security since most of them work for them anyway? And some have also criticised the nomination of an insider to be a member of the so-called independent inquiry into the case.

This just in: LKY has criticised the handling of the case and blamed "complacency". Well and good. But it is interesting that the first time that the media reports about the culpability it is still LKY who opens his mouth. Doesn't the prime minister of the country have anything to say? Do LHL and GCT wait for him to take the lead? nobody wants to say anything risky unless it's LKY saying it?

Rob Hughes / Pantene

Just bought myself a new bottle of shampoo. Apparently I got it at 10% off but I was buying it in Raffles City which means that 10% off means what you'd expect to pay for it in a HDB estate. It's Pantene Pro V total body care which is nice except that I wish that the name doesn't sound like I'm smearing some poor girl's underwear over my head.

Here's an interesting article about the African Cup of Nations, written by Rob Hughes who often writes for the Straits Times. Interestingly it appears that a Singaporean syndicate attempted to bribe Benin and Namibia to throw matches. (And why wouldn't they since they're minnows and everybody expects them to lose anyway.) That's great! Who says that Singaporeans don't have entrepreneural spirit? And I was thinking, "well, let's see whether he reports all that stuff in the Straits Times".

Suddenly it hit me: I have often been put off by his seemingly high handed and moralistic tone when talking about the excesses of the English Premier League. But then I realised that the Straits Times is probably one of the very few outlets he has to bitch about the EPL, since he couldn't possibly do it in any of the British papers that he writes for. So if you write for the Straits Times, bitch about England, and vice verca. That's fabulous.

But don't expect me to read any more articles of him bitching about the EPL on the Straits Times. It's getting bloody boring.

Gods of Finance

Damn. I should have known better to keep my mouth shut.

It was all very puzzling at first: why was the Singaporean press so eulogistic towards Suharto? Why did all those people he murdered passed over cursorily as mere "mistakes"? Why did LKY go all the way to Indonesia to pay tribute to him?

Then when talking to a bunch of financial ppl they mentioned that Singapore's financial sector caters mainly to Big Indonesian Business. The same bunch of people who got astoundingly rich partly because of political favours from Suharto. The same bunch of people to whom Suharto is a patron saint. Nobody doubts that this money is earned through hard work, but also nobody doubts that corruption and laundering is also involved.

My God, in writing up that article on Suharto I have been angering the Gods of Finance. Please forgive me!!!

Letter to a young playwright

If my house was on fire and I only had time to rescue 1 thing from it, what would it be?

At some point I really wanted to be a playwright. On some level, at least. At least I knew I had it in me, and it was something to be brought out, and after I brought it out I'd see if I wanted to continue. (Unfortunately not.) It's so different these days, I don't watch TV, I don't watch movies, I don't even read fiction.

I got my chance to stage a play when they had a call for plays. Not really a competition but 3 entries would be chosen, and it wasn't that stringent considering that only 8 entries showed up. But that was a chance I had to grab. The judge, who is a fairly prominent playwright in Singapore and who I will not name for good reasons, not only selected my entry but he wrote me a letter. I suppose he was as old as I am now, so maybe he was still at the end of his idealistic phase, or he feels this responsibility to encourage people who can write to write.

Somebody reminded me recently about a teacher who called me a "maths guy", and it was not a compliment because she was complaining about how nobody liked her subject, literature*1. I felt vindicated - you can write great essays for your lit paper but I wouldn't say you understand what it's all about unless you come up with an original work of your own. But it wasn't only about that. I will still remember the joy of creating something of my own, and when it is done, thinking to myself, "limpeh has earned the right to carve 'playwright' on my tombstone".

So to answer my first question, it's the letter that this judge / playwright wrote me that I will save from the fire. Now at the top of the letter he wrote "this is only for you and no one else". And indeed this is the first time I showing it around - it's been 15 years and I'm sure he won't mind and anyway I'm not naming him. The less relevant parts are cut out. The ego trips are cut out. And anyway he's got good advice so who am I to keep it all to myself?

"What do you expect for yourself, as a person and as a playwright? Why do you write? Is it like Peter*2 , for quick publicity? Or is it long term, a need to write and rewrite, a need to improve and be hurt along the way? *3

"The staging of this play is not the end of the play; neither is it the end of your "life" as a playwright. Yes, a production is important but it is a test in the school of life - these productions are tests, but there are no exams, no promotions - the promotion or development depends on you - how much do you want to learn? How much do you want to risk? How much do you want to struggle and fight? I seem to be asking more questions than giving answers, but some fundamental things you really ought to sort out.

(Here he writes some general comments about my play. I start to remember why I like this letter so much because I still get that great great ego trip every time I read it. Unfortunately I'm cutting out the ego trip.)

"Go with your instincts. Yes, the play worked on 1st reading. Yes, also there are many ways of rewriting - everybody's got to put their 2 cents' worth and really who knows which way(s) will work best? ...

"Yes entertainment is important - I totally agree with you. Your style at the moment seems to be a technique (which I like to use too) ie let's all laugh together, let's all have fun - then suddenly I (playwright) make you (audience) feel sick. Great, it works, so go with that.

"It is scary when you say you don't know much about kampong life - I think you really have to know - this play works best if it's believable. It has to be believable - the chracters have to be real and like - their dilemmas must be shown clearly, conflicts heightened. ...

(some discussion of characters which will not make sense to those who do not have the scripts in front of them)

"Death is very sad. Death of a child / teenager is painful - it's a sin. Don't waste too much time after the death - it has already left a very bitter taste in the audience. Finish the play and let the audience leave... that's what I believe.

"The advantage of having a playwright physically present at rehearsals and working with actors is that you can change to suit the actors' language abilities. If they can't handle Singlish - forget it. Thel ast thing you would want is pukey Miss La La exaggerated sickening Singlish just for laughs. You have more integrity than that. Anyway situational humour works better than all the "I donch know"s in the world. *4 ...

"The structure is pretty straightforward. I don't think you should be ashamed or apologetic for that - nor should you put down other types of plays. All plays are good if they are written with honesty and integrity. ...

"When rewriting for the final time - look at all the scenes very very carefully - is there any scene you think does not develop the play? Are there scenes which are too mono- functional? Perhaps some scenes can be combined to say the same things in less time?

"Working with actors / directors etc is not easy as I'm sure you know by now. This is especially so if everyone is more or less "new". There really is no solution or formula to this. As a playwright, you must be as open to suggestions as possible and very often this is painful because you dan't separate the honest "let's improve this production together" suggestion from the "I want a bigger role" or "I'm insecure playing this role" suggestions.

"Stand your ground if you really feel strongly about something. The way I see it - if you can explain why you wrote something and what you expect to achieve, the other party should give in. But if you can't explain and the other party offers sound suggestions and explanations, then maybe you should change.

"I strongly don't believe in actors amending my script - which is why I make it a point to attend rehearsals. If they or anyone has a problem, tell you and you change. One person must have a vision, a thread of what this play is about, and that person is you. The director will interpret that vision / spine in his way.

"Spend time talking to the director without the actors. Actors, in my experience, don't know what they want. They are also strange / paradoxical creatures. They can give the most magical or detrimental suggestions and fight tooth and nail over it.

"By talking to the director alone, both of you build trust and relationship that will unite the production rather than divide it.

"Actors, like kids, must see that the "parents" both agree. If not you'll have the kids going to Daddy Director when Mummy Playwright does not want to give in and vice versa.

"Finally, I don't know you and I hope that you are not offended by some of the things that I say. I am being very frank and I'm not talking down or being condescending (at least I don't think so). I'm not treating you like a 15 or 16 year old. I'm talking to you playwright to playwright.

"I offer my help readily because I feel strongly that people who are seriously interested in theatre should be given good opportunities to learn. I never had a glimmer of support when I was in school - no one bother, no one cared. I don't want to see that happening to other students.


"Also, I have very strong views about theatre and playwriting which I want to share. Not every playwright wants to share and worse still, some playwrights share wrongly.

"I like your self interview, I like your notes. You are honest and I respect that. You are willing to make mistakes and learning. You have strong and important concerns. Please continue writing and writing. Call me if you need more clarification or consultation.

"All the best."

*1 in return I left her out of the loop. She didn't know I had written a play until my entry was selected. I'm a bitch like that.
*2 Peter was a character in my play who was a publicity whore
*3 My motives? I knew I had it in me, so I had to do it. I had a great idea, and it encompassed a lot of what I was thinking about at that time. There could have been vanity involved, but so what?
*4 Yes, I wrote dialog in Singlish but that was how it sounded in my head. It wasn't meant to be gimmicky but it doesn't look so good on the printed page.

After I read this letter again, I remembered that this playwright had been brought in as a consultant for our production. And I was having conflicts with the production cast and crew. They didn't like my play, and kept on wanting to change it, and emphasise the more American aspects of it. In fact I must have asked him for advice on how to mediate. I was 1 year older than the cast and crew and from a different school, so the odds may have been stacked against me, but I fought.



Yes I was more driven in those days. I really wanted the play to go through, and in the way I wanted it to work. I was thinking it could be my first and last stint in drama and I wanted to do this the right way. But it wasn't as though my vision was perfect. There were a lot of things I didn't know how to do: how to research, the difference between stuff on a page and words spoken out. And I had very little or no experience with theatre.



(And also when I went to the U I was quite driven to learn as much, read as widely as I could. I don't know why I can't seem to summon up the same enthusiasm for my day job.)



I'm still marvelling that he took the time to write that letter to me. It was a little sad that I had to stop writing. I know what it's like to write your first play, where, if it works, and if it's good you will start thinking that you could make a career out of it. That play was probably the best I had written, and it must have seemed that at 16 I had it in me to go on to better things. He must have been thinking back to that time he was starting out, what would he have wished he had known then? Because I saw a lot of ruminating about "writing as a career". When he wrote that the letter is only for me, I think he didn't want me to use it as a weapon against the cast and crew I disagreed with. The general comments about being a playwright for the first time should be applicable to anybody about to start out.



Ultimately there was a lack of desire to keep on fighting the battles you have to go through for to set up drama productions. As for being an artist, it does seem a little more frivolous than making a lot of money, or learning a lot of history, or serving industry, or serving the government, or being a relief worker in a god forsaken place. I believe that every artist has his natural idiom, the medium which he feels most comfortable with. While I could write a decent play, my natural medium happens to be music. It is for these reasons I quit writing plays.



That letter is now officially designated as a family heirloom, together with all those medals my sister won in academic competitions.

The play had very rich sources. The idea of bourgeoisie life versus noble savage. Being principled versus expediency. How something good and noble like preserving your own habitat becomes warped and perverted into something darker. Citizen action versus big business interests. The power of the media to shape opinion.

I had various forms of inspiration: God wanting to cast you out of Eden but your putting up a protest. Having to grow up but clinging on to your childhood. The guy in front of the tank in Tiananmen was an inspiration. Fantastic Mr Fox, the Roald Dahl book was an inspiration. Even Chee Soon Juan, who was staging a Gandhi style hunger strike at that point was an inspiration - if it only served to show that if you were to appropriate a greater moral legacy for your own lesser, selfish cause, there is something vaguely ignoble about it.

And the story that I told was a little more universal than I realised at the point. The farmers who were asked to move into HDB flats were not that willing. The Palestinians who were uprooted from the homes in 1948. I would look at the media storm which accompanied the Elian Gonzalez affair and think, "this is somewhat similar to what I wrote". I think, irregardless of the quality of execution, I picked a good plot.



I thought at that time, "when I reach adulthood I will be in a so much better position to rewrite it, and write this better". But maybe I might not do that.

Year of living dangerously

In college I took a course in Southeast Asian History. I thought they were going to teach some really interesting stuff they wouldn't talk about in NUS. Nothing on Singapore, unfortunately. Maybe we didn't really matter? Or maybe they had too many Singaporeans on government scholarships going to that school that they decided not to poke the hornet's nest? There was a little on Malaysia but not much. Anyway the whole region is so big that you probably didn't have that much to say about Singapore.

Yes, you had Southeast Asia as a region being much more prosperous than Africa or South America. But there were problems too. The Vietnam war(s). Politics of Thailand. World war II. Indonesia (I'll come to that later). Philippines and people power. The Cambodian killing fields. Yes, you have zone of peace, freedom and neutrality, but I guess I wasn't fully aware of how much trouble there was in our region, and how much our region could really be called a region, given that a lot of these things hardly affected us.

Anyway I read news reports about people having fairly reverential attitudes towards a dying Suharto on his deathbed. When I hear that I think back upon how controversial a figure like Augustus Pinochet was. He was just like Suharto and Mobutu, Cold War era dictators who received support from the CIA because they were reliably anti-communist, and other than that, they could more or less do whatever they wanted.

In 1965, which is the year of our independence (the most accurate term is succession.) there was a coup. I can't remember all the details, but you can read about it in the history books. What followed was an orgy of violence, killings and counter killings. A lot of people who were supposedly "communist" were targeted. The CIA played a minor role in all this, or at least since a lot of Communists were being wiped out. Sukarno had been fairly friendly towards the Communists (at least he was a main part of the non aligned movement) and the US weren't sad to see him go, since Indonesia was one of the "dominos" they were afraid of. (One of the main arguments for fighting in Vietnam was the fear that they would spread Communism to Southeast Asia.)

So a lot (half a million) people die gruesome deaths. Burnt, hanged, balls chopped off. And this is the thing: nobody ever has a full account of what happened, and historians are in disagreement, although some of them contend that Suharto had a lot of responsibility.

Indonesia for the next few decades was run like a police state. Repression was very brutal, especially in places that had aspirations towards secession. In some villages in Aceh, you would sometimes have the soldiers going into the main square and firing a gun into the air, and this would be the symbol for everybody to assemble there. Anybody found missing at that time would be liable for jail, execution or dunno what rubbish.

Then there was East Timor. Now all of Indonesia is basically the old Dutch colonial empire, but the Portugese had a small colony and it was basically East Timor. Portugal was the first of the European colonial powers and also the last, and only decolonised in the 1970s when the Portugese decided that their dictator was ruining the economy by fighting useless wars in Angola. So around 1974, the Portugese empire (including Macau, Angola, Mozambique, East Timor, and others) fell. Then Indonesia moved in to claim East Timor for themselves. What followed was around 25 years of bloodshed in one of the most brutal military occupations ever. (To give an idea how bad it was, some of the old people there were saying, "the Japanese were never this horrible to us".) Beatings, imprisonment, guerilla warfare, that sort of stuff. I think a fifth of the population was murdered over those 25 years.

Now a lot of the responsibility for this should go to the soldiers themselves, who thought that East Timor was going to be a piece of cake and didn't expect that occupation was going to be so difficult for that. But Suharto also was president over all that. Yes, there are things you have to be careful about when you are running an empire, because if you allow East Timor to go free, those people in Aceh and Irian Jaya are going to get some funny ideas. But East Timor was never a part of the old Indonesia, so they were very different.

At least one of the more useful things that BJ Habibie did was to allow East Timor to have a referendum in which case Independence won easily over the "Autonomy" option. And the Indonesian army didn't leave without stirring some trouble on their way out of course: the reason they were in there for so long was because it is very important for an army to be seen as having balls. But East Timor is independent now.

Then there was the corruption, where Suharto had a lot of business interests, and exchanged the granting of political favours to monopolies for business profits. Had a very wealthy family.

We wouldn't hear a lot of this, of course. Singapore's tack is that since Suharto is our good friend, an even better friend than Malaysia, we don't criticise him or learn anything about him. Never mind that Indonesia is a land where there is a small elite which is very rich, while most of them are very poor. (In this respect a lot of Southeast Asia is like Latin America.)

Well Suharto was pretty good for the Indonesia economy wasn't he? Maybe. I don't expect Indonesia to be considered a "tiger" the way they were in the early 90s. At least not anytime soon. And yes he did get brought to trial, although I don't really know what came of it. And yes at least Suharto wasn't an outright thief like Mobutu - the Indonesian Chinese would never have let him get away with it. But according to some reports, he is still the most corrupt politician in the world today, with $15 billion in stolen assets to his name (or his children's names). Fat lot of good $15 billion is going to do you when you're lying there with multiple organ failure.

There was this great big hoo hah about Augustus Pinochet. He is just like Suharto: came to power in a coup, ran a brutal military dictatorship but also put economic stability back into Chile. And still the British were very adamant about trying him for crimes against humanity. OK, he was directly responsible for "disappearing" people. Suharto? Who's going to make Suharto pay for his crimes?

When dictators die, people will sometimes shake their heads and lament that they made "mistakes". Chiang Kai Shek made a lot of "mistakes". Mao also made a lot of "mistakes" although he was good for China. (But who deserved more credit for unifying China, Chiang or Mao?) Franco also made "mistakes".

You wouldn't really need to put Suharto in jail now of course, but it's very important that people decide what his place in history is going to be. Well Lee Kuan Yew was fairly friendly towards Suharto when they met. Maybe he's worried about what people would say about himself when he goes. This is not to say that he won't be seen in a more positive light than Suharto. (But let's not forget that his job was much much easier than Suharto's.) Is he setting a precedent to be lenient with peoples' "mistakes"?

I think he wants to defend the stand that he has taken in being more cosy to Indonesia than Malaysia during his time in office. It's not nice if the person he's been coddling up to is seen as the mass murderer that he is. I'm not saying it's wrong to be friendly to Suharto - why would you want to piss off a giant country which surrounds you?

And when you are judging Indonesia's "economic progress", you got to ask yourself, is it economic progress when the rich get richer and the poor stay poor? It makes the government's job so much easier when all you have to do is to make sure that rich people grow rich fast enough so that they can disguise the fact that not everybody's getting the money. Indonesia has 200m people although if you were to only see the visitors here you'd think that everybody there is rich, and there was even this chump who wrote to the press, claiming he had seen "real" Indonesians telling him what a great guy Suharto is. I mean those people who got rich during the Suharto years would naturally say that. What about those guys in the big city slums, the starving villagers, the massacred separationists? They wouldn't be staying at his fancy hotel where a room for 1 night would cost 6 months' salary right? What a moron.

So that's the other thing that Suharto stands for: the idea that when you take care of your rich, the rest of the world will take care of itself. LKY's endorsement of Suharto by no means refutes this idea, and it is a big indication of where Singapore too is heading.

And we won't know what Singapore will be like when he goes, which might not be that long time away.

Tabloid Morality

I don’t usually like to read tabloid reporters. A few days ago the Shin Min papers had a large picture of Lin Qingxia in a bikini 25 years ago. Now, you may wonder, who could complain about that? Speaking as a person who reached puberty around the same time that they started airing advertisements of her as a “spokesman” for Lux body wash, and having pictures of her on TV frolicking around in the bathtub, I thought it was a wonderful thing.

But the headlines were this: she never married Qin Han, who was her co-star and 1 of the most handsome Taiwanese guys 20 years ago. And that is because Qin Han was then married to a wife who told him: you can divorce me and marry any woman you want other than Lin Qingxia. Otherwise I will mess up your wedding and commit suicide at your ceremony. I was like, damn. It was bottom of the barrel stuff. Bringing up shit that is of no contemporary relevance (except for the wonderful bikini photos), and poking into other peoples’ private business is not nice.

However there were some stories that I thought that were good calls, and you got to give the tabloid reporters some credit for stirring up moral outrage where it is due. One of them was the case of petrol thieves. Of car owners, owing to the high price of petrol, pumping gas, and speeding off whenever they feel like it. It highlighted the ugly behaviour of these motorists (technically they are thieves and therefore criminals) and I like to think that this reduced the number of petrol thieves in the short term. But it also highlighted the plight of the petrol pump attendants - apparently the oil companies were deducting the cost of the stolen petrol from their already meagre salaries. This is really alarming, although when you think about it, there has to be some form of disincentive for them against allowing petrol theft to happen. And there’s the bad PR for the oil companies so they got to think about whether or not they appear to be too inhumane.

Then there was this other story of this teacher who walked out of the supermarket with goods without paying for them. Apparently he was completely distraught about being caught. He pleaded for clemency towards the police man who refused to give it to him. First, let’s not judge whether he was telling the truth, that he really forgot to pay. Forgetting to pay is not the same as shoplifting, although you could say that whether the person tried to hide the goods is a pretty good test to distinguish.

The thing is that teachers are really held accountable to higher moral standards than anybody else. They exist in a different universe from other people because they are appraised by children, rather than adults. Adults will already have understood moral grayness and in some ways can be more flexible than children. The simple fact is that his career as a teacher was over. And that’s one reason why I will never be a teacher of secondary schools or below. Because I can never stop swearing. I won’t mind trying to be a lecturer, where I don’t have to think so hard about holding my tongue.

The thing is that he told the policeman that his job as a teacher was stressful and the policeman was stupid enough to question that. He obviously does not read the papers or blogs. Every blog I have read tells me that teaching is a stressful and overworked profession, even though they may not be as underpaid as they always was.

Cross Cultural communication

This is most interesting.

Here is a video clip that caused a great big furore on the internet.



You can see the reactions of the Singaporeans from the comments, enough said. We're all very upset that these guys ran away without paying, and sat 3 people on trishaws that were only designed for 2. Singaporeans were upset because:

1. These people were rowdy, drunk and by sitting 3 to a trishaw, were bullying a helpless old man who couldn't keep up with them.

2. They called it a taxi when it was clear to us that trishaws are never used as transportation in Singapore, but novelty rides for tourists.

3. They didn't pay up for the trishaw ride.

The comments got so vociferous that it even made it to the newspapers, like the front page of the New Paper. And I personally wanted them to die of AIDS.

Then there was a big discussion on the internet, and much to my surprise, many of the British posters argued that:

1. The trishaw driver was providing a service. If the trishaw drivers in UK are too slow, they could opt not to pay up.

2. The old man was looking at the tourist's wallets and was being an asshole.

3. The old man shouldn't have agreed to take on the 3 people.

Well I thought at first that it was a deliberate ploy on their part to treat the trishaw as a form of transportation, a totally false argument in Singapore's context. But some of their arguments were so consistent with each other that I begun wondering if there wasn't some big misunderstanding at work. And I remember one of the 3 guys saying that he didn't really think it was that big a deal, and that the comments were an "eye opener". (He didn't say he was upset at the comments but it was an "eye opener"). What's going on?

I came to realise that:

1. Trishaws are actually used in London, and are used for transportation!
Now this is surprising because you couldn't imagine that happening here with our wide boulevards. But London is full of nooks and crannies because it's an ancient city, imagine that the whole city looked like our Arab St - a bit like what London is like. This makes it more ideal for trishaws to be used. They can also weave around traffic and are actually faster than cars in a traffic jam.

2. In London, trishaws are driven by fit young people. Because they are a form of transportation, the value of the ride is in getting from point A to point B.

3. Trishaws in London can seat 3 passengers. And therefore they weren't completely wrong in thinking that it was the same here.

Whereas in Singapore:

1. Trishaws are a symbol of our national past. The old man represents the coolie, a potent symbol of Singapore's early days. They are very closely associated with the suffering of our forefathers.

2. Ang mohs are always the bad guys in movies.

3. You treat old people with respect.

4. The only reason why old people drive trishaws is that they're meant to be joyrides, and that there is absolutely no time pressure on them to get your tourist around from point A to B. It is hard work, but not backbreaking work, and may not even be as bad as being a hawker's assistant.

Now if you saw it from our point of view, these 3 factors are explosive. There is racism, xenophobia, lack of respect for the elderly, nationalism, all sorts of emotions involved. The rage at the inequality in the world.

But if you see it from the other perspective, it could be a genuine misunderstanding. Sure, those guys were very obnoxious, and made a lot of snide remarks about how crappy and slow the trishaw was. But if you're drunk and loaded you could make the mistake of thinking that the trishaw is a form of transport. We treat the old with respect but why are so many old people still working and not on welfare?

And if you see the end of the video, they hopped onto a cab. This doesn't forgive them for not paying, but it supports the view that what they really wanted was to get to another place. What was the distance? They started at the junction of River Valley and Hill St, which is where the trishaw riders wait. Then they got off where? Before Funan centre. They had travelled the length of the MICA building. The brits were right. It was barely 100m. $10 is a little expensive for 100m. Would you be reluctant to pay up? I know I would. When they took out the wallet, were they taunting him, or were they seriously considering how much to pay?

The old man was upset. He said that his average takings are $30 a night and he probably had a right to feel robbed. But he didn't think that much about it later on and he was probably puzzled about why this video clip raised so much media attention. And when you know the facts, the only real thing he had to complain about was not being paid.

They were laughing, sure. But when you're drunk, anything is funny. And if you know all the facts, maybe it's a little funny.

That guy Bo Davis wanted to say was that a big misunderstanding had taken place. It's much less sinful if it was a misunderstanding.

I don't want to defend them too much because they're plainly assholes. But I think that the legions of Singaporeans who flamed them on the net did so based on first impressions and disregarding a lot of plausible alternative explanations for some of the things they said.

There's this other thing you have to consider. What is the vocation of a man? Why would an old and weak person drive a trishaw around when there are taxis and buses which do the job better? There are only 3 reasons: transport, entertainment (as in the novelty of the experience of riding an old quaint method of transport) and begging (as in the old woman selling you overpriced tissues is not really retail, but it's more respectable than begging). Let's not contemplate the transportation (because that's ridiculous) or the begging (because that's disrespectful). Therefore his real job is to be an entertainer and a tour guide.

And what's an entertainer and a tour guide to do but make tourists happy? If a tourist out for a good time and comes across a beggar, what's he to do? If he keeps on making merry he's insensitive. If he wants to be respectful, he's just spoilt his mood. Now laughing and being merry is of course different from mocking a person in his face, but the line is very fuzzy. In that video, I couldn't definitely say it was the latter and not the former. And with the old man casting a disapproving eye on the rowdy youngsters and grouchily intoning "very happy, very happy ah..." I'm sorry but there is something genuinely funny about it.

What is a guy like that doing at Clarke Quay? But he has every right to be at Clarke Quay. In physical resemblance, he looks perfectly the part of those coolies who used to carry rice sacks at Clarke Quay 50 years ago. But now it's a watering hole. Big big difference. I think this encounter has to be seen in its big context, which is the clash of cultures between the rice sack Clarke Quay and the watering hole Clarke Quay.

I've seen boorish behaviour as bad as this, in the old town square of Prague, where a gang of yobs were shouting out "USA! USA!" I was embarrassed to have been living in the United aSSholes of America for 4 years. Then this other time when some yankees were taunting some old busker, asking him if he knew how to play Charlie Parker (for non-Jazz folks, Charlie Parker was an immature fool who make a total mess of his life, died young, and was also the greatest jazz musician of all time.) In the end, they didn't pay up, and the busker angrily launched into an impromptu rendition of ABBA's "Money Money Money".

Shit like that happens all over the world, I guess.

Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin)

I heard another super watered down funk tune and after a bit of straining I recognised it as "Thank You (Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin)". Fair enough, since it was performed by the Shrek guys, can't expect too much of an ass like Eddie Murphy. Then the radio DJ says that the thing is James Brown. What a dickhead.

I picked up a copy of August 2007's "Vanity Fair" and in it was a story that almost made my eyes pop out. It was an interview with Sly Stone. "The first in 25 years!"

It was. Anybody who wants to read Sly Stone's sad story can refer to any of these links. He was a great original, a trailblazer who managed to fuse soul, rock, funk and jazz and make it sound like they were all meant to be together. A great songwriter, whose tunes are still being covered today. A musical inspiration to many, like Kool + the Gang, Parliament / Funkadelic, Earth Wind and Fire. He practically invented 70s soul and funk. Almost everybody in that extraordinarily rich period of black music copied him. Many rappers sampled his music.

The reason why he's never been made a hero is simply because he isn't one. Yes, his early records were utopian. He put his band, Sly + the Family Stone together as one of the first multi- racial bands which featured both men and women.

And guess what - at the grand old age of 64, he's planning a comeback. A comeback! He had been making comebacks since the mid-70s, when the drug habit got the better of him. By then he had lost a great deal of his stature because of his erratic behaviour. His music, while still competent, was not as brilliant as before. In the 80s, he was arrested for a few drug offences, and made a few attempts at comebacks that were best described as shambolic.

But now he's back! And guess what, for the first time, we heard that he'd been off drugs for 10 years! Nobody saw him much between 1993, when he turned up to be inducted into the rock and Roll hall of fame, and 2006, when he performed at the Grammys for a short while.

Brian Wilson, as the head Beach Boy made "Pet Sounds" in 1966. Paul McCartney acknowledged later that "Sergeant Pepper" was an attempt to match up to its lofty standards. Elsewhere it was acknowledged as one of the great masterpieces of pop music. Unfortunately, he went mad trying to make the follow-up, "Smile" in 1967. He remained productive, and some of the songs that were supposed to be on "Smile" surfaced on other Beach Boys albums. Incredibly, "Smile" was finished in 2004, when he decided, as an old man, to go back into the studio after 37 (!) years and finish the job. Equally incredibly, it seems to be more or less what he envisioned in 1967, and everywhere it was lauded as another great album, although not quite the equal of "Pet Sounds".

There are other great recluses of music. There is Kevin Shields, who as member of My Bloody Valentine created "Isn't Anything" at a cost of 250K pounds, almost bankrupting his record company in the process. But it was worth it: it was a masterpiece. But that was in 1991, we waited for a follow up that never came.

There is Syd Barrett, who was the founding leader of Pink Floyd, made an exceptional album. (He's now dead.)

There is Lee Mavers, who as the leader of La's, made a pop album as good as anything that came out during the 60s.

There is Cat Stevens, who became an Islamic fundamentalist.

Well let's hope the Sly Stone album comes out and we'll see what happens.

Pissing on a grave

Way to go!

The (probably drunken) actions of my old schoolmate Alfian would go a long way towards putting to the sword my old school's reputation as a bunch of government nerds.

The text of the email sent to Thio Li Ann can be found here. Pissing on her grave, indeed! And you would not put it past her to shamelessly milk it for what it's worth, 1 piss and 1 fuck could amount to being "full of obscene invective".

When he's done pissing I will be next in line.

Al Gore

Vanity fair is getting to be a really interesting magazine to read. Sometimes I wonder if all those books I read aren't anything but extended magazine articles. No, I didn't pick up that issue just because of Nicole Kidman's fantastic albeit 40 year old bodice. There was interesting stuff like reporting on how, in 2000, the media laid into Al Gore. It was amazing, there were plenty of people who were writing for liberal publications, and therefore supposed to be on the same side as Gore, laying into him and taking smallest remarks and making him look bad.

It's not at all clear what kind of president Al Gore would have been. Yes, he could probably win the Nobel prize this year but Jimmy Carter, a second rate president, also won the Nobel prize. They'd have called him a government nerd. He might have had to deal with Republican dominated congresses, I don't know if he was going to be able to handle all that.

What is clear, though is that history would have been quite different if Gore had won. There would not have been an Iraq. I don't know if Gore would have prevented 9/11, but he would have at least been more diligent about anti-terrorism. And there might not have been Afghanistan and Iraq. There might not be the amazing fiscal mismanagement that sees the US dollar in peril. The US government would not be as secretive and hostile as it is today. It used to be that the media would whack Clinton and Gore left right centre. At the beginning of the Bush administration they would be the ones whacking the media left right and centre, and it is only now, when evidence of Bush mismanaging emerges, that he's beginning to get some.

I don't know what Gore's response to 9/11 would have been. He might not have been astute enough as Bush is to ride the wave of popularity that these tragedies can give you. It's not only cynical thing to get political power: trying to attain power is like trying to earn money, it depends on how you get the power, and also what you use that power for.

That's the thing, if you're very fast to make war, like in the Bush administration, then people say that you're war mongering. If you're very slow to make war, like Clinton was in Bosnia, then people say that you're a coward and a weakling. You just can't win.

It's interesting how Gore's image is being rehabilitated. I don't think it would be so if he became president. They would continue whacking him, although they might relent a little if 9/11 did take place under him. He's done a lot to push the cause for environmentalism (now renamed "climate change" to make the threat more concrete, and less altruistic and hippy-ish). And former presidents can be very good ambassadors for causes. They are ideal as activists because everybody already knows them. It's not fair, of course, people on the ground would slog for their causes, put in the hours, wage war against riot police, work for shit pay in order to bring peace and justice to the world whereas these guys have it easy and collect Nobel Prizes. But Nobel Prizes are always political and the act of awarding it is always about bringing attention to big causes, so I say what the hell if that's the way the system works then that's the way it works.