A few daring predictions - or rather cutting through the conventional wisdom that we see in the media circa 3Q2010 that stands in the way of seeing reality. In no particular order:
(1) Britain lurches into a recession in early 2011 - and possibly bringing Europe into one. One simply can't cut 8% off government spending (or approx. 5% of the GDP worth of consumption) - and 500,000 jobs, or increasing the unemployment level by 20% - without having some sort of impact on a weak economic recovery. Interest rates are already low and whatever boost in confidence from fiscal prudence will not compensate for lower demand. The Coalition government's cuts will - on hindsight - be seen to be foolhardy.
(2) Barack Obama finds himself (still) popular - The media will wake up from the meme of Obama losing popularity, by realizing that he has a really stable bed-rock of following that stays resilient no matter what. Since Jan 2008, he has polled around 45% when faced with Hillary and later against McCain. Only when he was flushed with victory in late 2008 and early 2009, he rose above the 50% mark. It is remarkable that given the state of the country and the wringers he has been put through for the past 2 years, Obama's numbers essentially remained unchanged. This is the bedrock that propels him to a second term. The world will also concludes that he remains the best they can expect and deals with him on that basis.
(3) Global economies in steady and sustainable recovery - Behind all the feelings of impatience over the momentum of economic recovery and fears of a double-dip, conventional wisdom is missing out very real recoveries in the booming BRIC and emerging economies which led to recoveries in Europe and the US (where corporate profits are beating expectations, farm prices breaks record and exports booming). The only road bumps are self-inflicted (see Britain above).
(4) Green technology undergoes a breakthrough - Behind all the glum after Copenhagen Climate Summit, the key to permanently reducing our carbon footprint will come from a series of innovations that breaks out much like the internet in the 1990s; and take the world by surprise. Although where it will emerge is be unpredictable, the under-pinnings are all there: a combination of national competition, strategic government-led investments in science, internet-speed linkages and collaboration, market forces from demands in the emerging markets esp. China and India and China's manufacturing prowess that lowers costs.
(5) China makes quiet moves towards internal democracy - Beneath the official caution and reflexive oppression, the Chinese society moves into a level of prosperity, personal liberty and maturity that evolve into quiet progress on political reform, that takes place as experiments and in a piece-meal manner in the more advanced provinces and cities. The next decade will be remembered as a balancing act between political reform and struggles to contain dangerous nationalist tendencies (from the majority and not just from minorities).
(6) Water replaces CO2 as the environmental issues of the day - As with CFCs in the 1990s, acid rain in the 1980s, CO2 will be overtaken as the environmental issue of the day by water. Structural changes in the supply and demand of water in Middle-east, India, North-China, Southwest US and Australia will trigger a new global crisis and consciousness about living with less water. On the other hand, changes in the weather pattern will bring too much water to many parts of the world - whether from hurricanes, torrential monsoons and rising sea levels - will spur water related innovations and engineering. Water technologies and supply commands a premium. China exports its hard-won desertification fighting and tree-planting know-how as green technologies.
(7) Asians are the new Westerners - After 200 years, Asians will be considered the global elite - bringing together the same mix of envy and resentment. In many parts of the world, East Asians are already considered the "new white" as the establishment or the social elite. This mentality will spread to the West itself.
(8) Gas becomes competitive with oil - The perfect storm of 4 factors: massive reserves of non-traditional gas in the developed world coming on tap, glut in LNG capacity and resulting plunge in tradable gas prices, drive for cleaner energy and expansion of electricity into transportation conspire for gas to first replace coal in power generation and oil in transportation. Because gas requires massive, bankable long term investments, the expansion of gas encourages progressive, stable and responsible governments in the Middle-east.
(9) Turkey joins BRIC and emerges as an economic powerhouse that Europe finds increasingly difficult to ignore but equally hard to embrace. Turkey forms the new nucleus of influence to be reckon with that stretches from Eastern Europe to Central Asia and the Levantian Middle East. This revives in economic and political terms the old Ottoman sphere of influence of a billion people ignored by Europe and out-of-reach of the US, China or India.
(10) America gets transformed - again - by its army of new Asian and Hispanic immigrants that lifts it away from becoming Latin America (income and socio-economic inequality, entrenched special interests, oligarchic centers of power and decline) and its Western-dominated worldview into a mightier version of Canada (progressive, open, diverse). Future historians would notice a reassertion of America's historic Asiatic/Pacific cultural and ethnic links after a period of when European connection dominates.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Thursday, October 7, 2010
The last farewell to my wife — Lee Kuan Yew
It is apt to let his own words to speak for his grief.
October 06, 2010
Oct 6 — Ancient peoples developed and ritualised mourning practices to express the shared grief of family and friends, and together show not fear or distaste for death, but respect for the dead one; and to give comfort to the living who will miss the deceased.I recall the ritual mourning when my maternal grandmother died some 75 years ago. For five nights the family would gather to sing her praises and wail and mourn at her departure, led by a practiced professional mourner.Such rituals are no longer observed. My family’s sorrow is to be expressed in personal tributes to the matriarch of our family.In October 2003 when she had her first stroke, we had a strong intimation of our mortality.My wife and I have been together since 1947 for more than three quarters of our lives. My grief at her passing cannot be expressed in words. But today, when recounting our lives together, I would like to celebrate her life.In our quiet moments, we would revisit our lives and times together. We had been most fortunate. At critical turning points in our lives, fortune favoured us.As a young man with an interrupted education at Raffles College, and no steady job or profession, her parents did not look upon me as a desirable son-in-law. But she had faith in me.We had committed ourselves to each other. I decided to leave for England in September 1946 to read law, leaving her to return to Raffles College to try to win one of the two Queen’s Scholarships awarded yearly. We knew that only one Singaporean would be awarded. I had the resources, and sailed for England, and hoped that she would join me after winning the Queen’s Scholarship.If she did not win it, she would have to wait for me for three years.In June the next year, 1947, she did win it. But the British colonial office could not get her a place in Cambridge.Through Chief Clerk of Fitzwilliam, I discovered that my Censor at Fitzwilliam, W S Thatcher, was a good friend of the Mistress of Girton, Miss Butler.He gave me a letter of introduction to the Mistress. She received me and I assured her that Choo would most likely take a “First”, because she was the better student when we both were at Raffles College.I had come up late by oneterm to Cambridge, yet passed my first year qualifying examination with a class 1. She studied Choo’s academic record and decided to admit her in October that same year, 1947.We have kept each other company ever since. We married privately in December 1947 at Stratford-upon-Avon. At Cambridge, we both put in our best efforts. She took a first in two years in Law Tripos II. I took a double first, and a starred first for the finals, but in three years.We did not disappoint our tutors. Our Cambridge Firsts gave us a good start in life. Returning to Singapore, we both were taken on as legal assistants in Laycock & Ong, athriving law firm in Malacca Street. Then we married officially a second time that September 1950 to please our parents and friends. She practised conveyancing and draftsmanship, I did litigation.In February 1952, our first son Hsien Loong was born. She took maternity leave for a year.That February, I was asked by John Laycock, the Senior Partner, to take up the case of the Postal and Telecommunications Uniformed Staff Union, the postmen’s union.They were negotiating with the government for better terms and conditions of service. Negotiations were deadlocked and they decided to go on strike. It was a battle for public support. I was able to put across the reasonableness of their case through the press and radio. After a fortnight, they won concessions from the government. Choo, who was at home on maternity leave, pencilled through my draft statements, making them simple and clear.Over the years, she influenced my writing style. Now I write in short sentences, in the active voice. We gradually influenced each other’s ways and habits as we adjusted and accommodated each other.We knew that we could not stay starry-eyed lovers all our lives; that life was an on-going challenge with new problems to resolve and manage.We had two more children, Wei Ling in 1955 and Hsien Yang in 1957. She brought them up to be well-behaved, polite, considerate and never to throw their weight as the prime minister’s children.As a lawyer, she earned enough, to free me from worries about the future of our children.She saw the price I paid for not having mastered Mandarin when I was young. We decided to send all three children to Chinese kindergarten and schools.She made sure they learned English and Malay well at home. Her nurturing has equipped them for life in a multi-lingual region.We never argued over the upbringing of our children, nor over financial matters. Our earnings and assets were jointly held. We were each other’s confidant.She had simple pleasures. We would walk around the Istana gardens in the evening, and I hit golf balls to relax.Later, when we had grandchildren, she would take them to feed the fish and the swans in the Istana ponds. Then we would swim. She was interested in her surroundings, for instance, that many bird varieties were pushed out by mynahs and crows eatingup the insects and vegetation.She discovered the curator of the gardens had cleared wild grasses and swing fogged for mosquitoes, killing off insects they fed on. She stopped this and the bird varieties returned. She surrounded the swimming pool with free flowering scented flowers and derived great pleasure smelling them as she swam.She knew each flower by its popular and botanical names. She had an enormous capacity for words.She had majored in English literature at Raffles College and was a voracious reader, from Jane Austen to JRR Tolkien, from Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian Wars to Virgil’s Aeneid, to The Oxford Companion to Food, and Seafood of Southeast Asia, to Roadside Trees of Malaya, and Birds of Singapore.She helped me draft the Constitution of the PAP. For the inaugural meeting at Victoria Memorial Hall on 4 November 1954, she gathered the wives of the founder members to sew rosettes for those who were going on stage.In my first election for Tanjong Pagar, our home in Oxley Road, became the HQ to assign cars provided by my supporters to ferry voters to the polling booth.She warned me that I could not trust my new found associates, the leftwing trade unionists led by Lim Chin Siong. She was furious that he never sent their high school student helpers to canvass for me in Tanjong Pagar, yet demanded the use of cars provided by my supporters to ferry my Tanjong Pagar voters.She had an uncanny ability to read the character of a person. She would sometimes warn me to be careful of certain persons; often, she turned out to be right.When we were about to join Malaysia, she told me that we would not succeed because the UMNO Malay leaders had such different lifestyles and because their politics were communally-based, on race and religion.I replied that we had to make it work as there was no better choice. But she was right.We were asked to leave Malaysia before two years.When separation was imminent, Eddie Barker, as Law Minister, drew up the draft legislation for the separation. But he did not include an undertaking by the Federation Government to guarantee the observance of the two water agreements between the PUB and the Johor state government. I asked Choo to include this. She drafted the undertaking as part of the constitutional amendment of the Federation of Malaysia Constitution itself.She was precise and meticulous in her choice of words. The amendment statute was annexed to the Separation Agreement, which we then registered with the United Nations.The then Commonwealth Secretary Arthur Bottomley said that if other federations were to separate, he hoped they would do it as professionally as Singapore and Malaysia.It was a compliment to Eddie’s and Choo’s professional skills. Each time Malaysian Malay leaders threatened to cut off our water supply, I was reassured that this clear and solemn international undertaking by the Malaysian government in its Constitution will get us a ruling by the UNSC (United Nations Security Council).After her first stroke, she lost her left field of vision. This slowed down her reading. She learned to cope, reading with the help of a ruler. She swam every evening and kept fit. She continued to travel with me, and stayed active despite the stroke. She stayed in touch with her family and old friends.She listened to her collection of CDs, mostly classical, plus some golden oldies. She jocularly divided her life into “before stroke” and “after stroke”, like BC and AD.She was friendly and considerate to all associated with her. She would banter with her WSOs (woman security officers) and correct their English grammar and pronunciation in a friendly and cheerful way. Her former WSOs visited her when she was at NNI. I thank them all.Her second stroke on 12 May 2008 was more disabling. I encouraged and cheered her on, helped by a magnificent team of doctors, surgeons, therapists and nurses.Her nurses, WSOs and maids all grew fond of her because she was warm and considerate. When she coughed, she would take her small pillow to cover her mouth because she worried for them and did not want to infect them.Her mind remained clear but her voice became weaker. When I kissed her on her cheek, she told me not to come too close to her in case I caught her pneumonia.I assured her that the doctors did not think that was likely because I was active.When given some peaches in hospital, she asked the maid to take one home for my lunch. I was at the centre of her life.On 24 June 2008, a CT scan revealed another bleed again on the right side of her brain. There was not much more that medicine or surgery could do except to keep her comfortable.I brought her home on 3 July 2008. The doctors expected her to last a few weeks. She lived till 2nd October, 2 years and 3 months.She remained lucid. They gave time for me and my children to come to terms with the inevitable. In the final few months, her faculties declined. She could not speak but her cognition remained.She looked forward to have me talk to her every evening.Her last wish she shared with me was to enjoin our children to have our ashes placed together, as we were in life.The last two years of her life were the most difficult. She was bedridden after small successive strokes; she could not speak but she was still cognisant.Every night she would wait for me to sit by her to tell her of my day’s activities and to read her favourite poems. Then she would sleep.I have precious memories of our 63 years together. Without her, I would be a different man, with a different life. She devoted herself to me and our children.She was always there when I needed her. She has lived a life full of warmth and meaning.I should find solace at her 89 years of her life well lived. But at this moment of the final parting, my heart is heavy with sorrow and grief.
October 06, 2010
Oct 6 — Ancient peoples developed and ritualised mourning practices to express the shared grief of family and friends, and together show not fear or distaste for death, but respect for the dead one; and to give comfort to the living who will miss the deceased.I recall the ritual mourning when my maternal grandmother died some 75 years ago. For five nights the family would gather to sing her praises and wail and mourn at her departure, led by a practiced professional mourner.Such rituals are no longer observed. My family’s sorrow is to be expressed in personal tributes to the matriarch of our family.In October 2003 when she had her first stroke, we had a strong intimation of our mortality.My wife and I have been together since 1947 for more than three quarters of our lives. My grief at her passing cannot be expressed in words. But today, when recounting our lives together, I would like to celebrate her life.In our quiet moments, we would revisit our lives and times together. We had been most fortunate. At critical turning points in our lives, fortune favoured us.As a young man with an interrupted education at Raffles College, and no steady job or profession, her parents did not look upon me as a desirable son-in-law. But she had faith in me.We had committed ourselves to each other. I decided to leave for England in September 1946 to read law, leaving her to return to Raffles College to try to win one of the two Queen’s Scholarships awarded yearly. We knew that only one Singaporean would be awarded. I had the resources, and sailed for England, and hoped that she would join me after winning the Queen’s Scholarship.If she did not win it, she would have to wait for me for three years.In June the next year, 1947, she did win it. But the British colonial office could not get her a place in Cambridge.Through Chief Clerk of Fitzwilliam, I discovered that my Censor at Fitzwilliam, W S Thatcher, was a good friend of the Mistress of Girton, Miss Butler.He gave me a letter of introduction to the Mistress. She received me and I assured her that Choo would most likely take a “First”, because she was the better student when we both were at Raffles College.I had come up late by oneterm to Cambridge, yet passed my first year qualifying examination with a class 1. She studied Choo’s academic record and decided to admit her in October that same year, 1947.We have kept each other company ever since. We married privately in December 1947 at Stratford-upon-Avon. At Cambridge, we both put in our best efforts. She took a first in two years in Law Tripos II. I took a double first, and a starred first for the finals, but in three years.We did not disappoint our tutors. Our Cambridge Firsts gave us a good start in life. Returning to Singapore, we both were taken on as legal assistants in Laycock & Ong, athriving law firm in Malacca Street. Then we married officially a second time that September 1950 to please our parents and friends. She practised conveyancing and draftsmanship, I did litigation.In February 1952, our first son Hsien Loong was born. She took maternity leave for a year.That February, I was asked by John Laycock, the Senior Partner, to take up the case of the Postal and Telecommunications Uniformed Staff Union, the postmen’s union.They were negotiating with the government for better terms and conditions of service. Negotiations were deadlocked and they decided to go on strike. It was a battle for public support. I was able to put across the reasonableness of their case through the press and radio. After a fortnight, they won concessions from the government. Choo, who was at home on maternity leave, pencilled through my draft statements, making them simple and clear.Over the years, she influenced my writing style. Now I write in short sentences, in the active voice. We gradually influenced each other’s ways and habits as we adjusted and accommodated each other.We knew that we could not stay starry-eyed lovers all our lives; that life was an on-going challenge with new problems to resolve and manage.We had two more children, Wei Ling in 1955 and Hsien Yang in 1957. She brought them up to be well-behaved, polite, considerate and never to throw their weight as the prime minister’s children.As a lawyer, she earned enough, to free me from worries about the future of our children.She saw the price I paid for not having mastered Mandarin when I was young. We decided to send all three children to Chinese kindergarten and schools.She made sure they learned English and Malay well at home. Her nurturing has equipped them for life in a multi-lingual region.We never argued over the upbringing of our children, nor over financial matters. Our earnings and assets were jointly held. We were each other’s confidant.She had simple pleasures. We would walk around the Istana gardens in the evening, and I hit golf balls to relax.Later, when we had grandchildren, she would take them to feed the fish and the swans in the Istana ponds. Then we would swim. She was interested in her surroundings, for instance, that many bird varieties were pushed out by mynahs and crows eatingup the insects and vegetation.She discovered the curator of the gardens had cleared wild grasses and swing fogged for mosquitoes, killing off insects they fed on. She stopped this and the bird varieties returned. She surrounded the swimming pool with free flowering scented flowers and derived great pleasure smelling them as she swam.She knew each flower by its popular and botanical names. She had an enormous capacity for words.She had majored in English literature at Raffles College and was a voracious reader, from Jane Austen to JRR Tolkien, from Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian Wars to Virgil’s Aeneid, to The Oxford Companion to Food, and Seafood of Southeast Asia, to Roadside Trees of Malaya, and Birds of Singapore.She helped me draft the Constitution of the PAP. For the inaugural meeting at Victoria Memorial Hall on 4 November 1954, she gathered the wives of the founder members to sew rosettes for those who were going on stage.In my first election for Tanjong Pagar, our home in Oxley Road, became the HQ to assign cars provided by my supporters to ferry voters to the polling booth.She warned me that I could not trust my new found associates, the leftwing trade unionists led by Lim Chin Siong. She was furious that he never sent their high school student helpers to canvass for me in Tanjong Pagar, yet demanded the use of cars provided by my supporters to ferry my Tanjong Pagar voters.She had an uncanny ability to read the character of a person. She would sometimes warn me to be careful of certain persons; often, she turned out to be right.When we were about to join Malaysia, she told me that we would not succeed because the UMNO Malay leaders had such different lifestyles and because their politics were communally-based, on race and religion.I replied that we had to make it work as there was no better choice. But she was right.We were asked to leave Malaysia before two years.When separation was imminent, Eddie Barker, as Law Minister, drew up the draft legislation for the separation. But he did not include an undertaking by the Federation Government to guarantee the observance of the two water agreements between the PUB and the Johor state government. I asked Choo to include this. She drafted the undertaking as part of the constitutional amendment of the Federation of Malaysia Constitution itself.She was precise and meticulous in her choice of words. The amendment statute was annexed to the Separation Agreement, which we then registered with the United Nations.The then Commonwealth Secretary Arthur Bottomley said that if other federations were to separate, he hoped they would do it as professionally as Singapore and Malaysia.It was a compliment to Eddie’s and Choo’s professional skills. Each time Malaysian Malay leaders threatened to cut off our water supply, I was reassured that this clear and solemn international undertaking by the Malaysian government in its Constitution will get us a ruling by the UNSC (United Nations Security Council).After her first stroke, she lost her left field of vision. This slowed down her reading. She learned to cope, reading with the help of a ruler. She swam every evening and kept fit. She continued to travel with me, and stayed active despite the stroke. She stayed in touch with her family and old friends.She listened to her collection of CDs, mostly classical, plus some golden oldies. She jocularly divided her life into “before stroke” and “after stroke”, like BC and AD.She was friendly and considerate to all associated with her. She would banter with her WSOs (woman security officers) and correct their English grammar and pronunciation in a friendly and cheerful way. Her former WSOs visited her when she was at NNI. I thank them all.Her second stroke on 12 May 2008 was more disabling. I encouraged and cheered her on, helped by a magnificent team of doctors, surgeons, therapists and nurses.Her nurses, WSOs and maids all grew fond of her because she was warm and considerate. When she coughed, she would take her small pillow to cover her mouth because she worried for them and did not want to infect them.Her mind remained clear but her voice became weaker. When I kissed her on her cheek, she told me not to come too close to her in case I caught her pneumonia.I assured her that the doctors did not think that was likely because I was active.When given some peaches in hospital, she asked the maid to take one home for my lunch. I was at the centre of her life.On 24 June 2008, a CT scan revealed another bleed again on the right side of her brain. There was not much more that medicine or surgery could do except to keep her comfortable.I brought her home on 3 July 2008. The doctors expected her to last a few weeks. She lived till 2nd October, 2 years and 3 months.She remained lucid. They gave time for me and my children to come to terms with the inevitable. In the final few months, her faculties declined. She could not speak but her cognition remained.She looked forward to have me talk to her every evening.Her last wish she shared with me was to enjoin our children to have our ashes placed together, as we were in life.The last two years of her life were the most difficult. She was bedridden after small successive strokes; she could not speak but she was still cognisant.Every night she would wait for me to sit by her to tell her of my day’s activities and to read her favourite poems. Then she would sleep.I have precious memories of our 63 years together. Without her, I would be a different man, with a different life. She devoted herself to me and our children.She was always there when I needed her. She has lived a life full of warmth and meaning.I should find solace at her 89 years of her life well lived. But at this moment of the final parting, my heart is heavy with sorrow and grief.
Wednesday, October 6, 2010
LKY's Grief
I will let the words speak for themselves. The man has a lot to teach even when he grieve. Its not easy to know what sentiments and feelings go through the minds of elderly Chinese man like him, so it is refreshing that he allowed himself to be vulnerable and share his feelings.
It take some courage for the older generation to get our of their reserved and unsentimental shell. So it helps to think of other older relatives in our family and begin to understand a bit more about what they are feeling too, as they age, in times of illness and when they grief for a long loved one.
From the NYT, 10 September 2010.
Days of Reflection for Man Who Defined Singapore
By SETH MYDANS
SINGAPORE
“SO, when is the last leaf falling?” asked Lee Kuan Yew, the man who made Singapore in his own stern and unsentimental image, nearing his 87th birthday and contemplating age, infirmity and loss.
“I can feel the gradual decline of energy and vitality,” said Mr. Lee, whose “Singapore model” of economic growth and tight social control made him one of the most influential political figures of Asia. “And I mean generally, every year, when you know you are not on the same level as last year. But that’s life.”
In a long, unusually reflective interview last week, he talked about the aches and pains of age and the solace of meditation, about his struggle to build a thriving nation on this resource-poor island, and his concern that the next generation might take his achievements for granted and let them slip away.
He was dressed informally in a windbreaker and running shoes in his big, bright office, still sharp of mind but visibly older and a little stooped, no longer in day-to-day control but, for as long as he lives, the dominant figure of the nation he created.
But in these final years, he said, his life has been darkened by the illness of his wife and companion of 61 years, bedridden and mute after a series of strokes.
“I try to busy myself,” he said, “but from time to time in idle moments, my mind goes back to the happy days we were up and about together.” Agnostic and pragmatic in his approach to life, he spoke with something like envy of people who find strength and solace in religion. “How do I comfort myself?” he asked. “Well, I say, ‘Life is just like that.’ ”
“What is next, I do not know,” he said. “Nobody has ever come back.”
The prime minister of Singapore from its founding in 1965 until he stepped aside in 1990, Mr. Lee built what he called “a first-world oasis in a third-world region” — praised for the efficiency and incorruptibility of his rule but accused by human rights groups of limiting political freedoms and intimidating opponents through libel suits.
His title now is minister mentor, a powerful presence within the current government led by his son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. The question that hovers over Singapore today is how long and in what form his model may endure once he is gone.
Always physically vigorous, Mr. Lee combats the decline of age with a regimen of swimming, cycling and massage and, perhaps more important, an hour-by-hour daily schedule of meetings, speeches and conferences both in Singapore and overseas. “I know if I rest, I’ll slide downhill fast,” he said. When, after an hour, talk shifted from introspection to geopolitics, the years seemed to slip away and he grew vigorous and forceful, his worldview still wide ranging, detailed and commanding.
And yet, he said, he sometimes takes an oblique look at these struggles against age and sees what he calls “the absurdity of it.”
“I’m reaching 87, trying to keep fit, presenting a vigorous figure, and it’s an effort, and is it worth the effort?” he said. “I laugh at myself trying to keep a bold front. It’s become my habit. I just carry on.”
HIS most difficult moments come at the end of each day, he said, as he sits by the bedside of his wife, Kwa Geok Choo, 89, who has been unable to move or speak for more than two years. She had been by his side, a confidante and counselor, since they were law students in London.
“She understands when I talk to her, which I do every night,” he said. “She keeps awake for me; I tell her about my day’s work, read her favorite poems.” He opened a big spreadsheet to show his reading list, books by Jane Austen, Rudyard Kipling and Lewis Carroll as well as the sonnets of Shakespeare.
Lately, he said, he had been looking at Christian marriage vows and was drawn to the words: “To love, to hold and to cherish, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse till death do us part.”
“I told her, ‘I would try and keep you company for as long as I can.’ That’s life. She understood.” But he also said: “I’m not sure who’s going first, whether she or me.”
At night, hearing the sounds of his wife’s discomfort in the next room, he said, he calms himself with 20 minutes of meditation, reciting a mantra he was taught by a Christian friend: “Ma-Ra-Na-Tha.”
The phrase, which is Aramaic, comes at the end of St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, and can be translated in several ways. Mr. Lee said that he was told it means “Come to me, O Lord Jesus,” and that although he is not a believer, he finds the sounds soothing.
“The problem is to keep the monkey mind from running off into all kinds of thoughts,” he said. “A certain tranquillity settles over you. The day’s pressures and worries are pushed out. Then there’s less problem sleeping.”
He brushed aside the words of a prominent Singaporean writer and social critic, Catherine Lim, who described him as having “an authoritarian, no-nonsense manner that has little use for sentiment.”
“She’s a novelist!” he cried. “Therefore, she simplifies a person’s character,” making what he called a “graphic caricature of me.” “But is anybody that simple or simplistic?”
The stress of his wife’s illness is constant, he said, harder on him than stresses he faced for years in the political arena. But repeatedly, in looking back over his life, he returns to his moment of greatest anguish, the expulsion of Singapore from Malaysia in 1965, when he wept in public.
That trauma presented him with the challenge that has defined his life, the creation and development of a stable and prosperous nation, always on guard against conflict within its mixed population of Chinese, Malays and Indians.
“We don’t have the ingredients of a nation, the elementary factors,” he said three years ago in an interview with the International Herald Tribune, “a homogeneous population, common language, common culture and common destiny.”
Younger people worry him, with their demands for more political openness and a free exchange of ideas, secure in their well-being in modern Singapore. “They have come to believe that this is a natural state of affairs, and they can take liberties with it,” he said. “They think you can put it on auto-pilot. I know that is never so.”
The kind of open political combat they demand would inevitably open the door to race-based politics, he said, and “our society will be ripped apart.”
A political street fighter, by his own account, he has often taken on his opponents through ruinous libel suits.
He defended the suits as necessary to protect his good name, and he dismissed criticisms by Western reporters who “hop in and hop out” of Singapore as “absolute rubbish.”
In any case, it is not these reporters or the obituaries they may write that will offer the final verdict on his actions, he said, but future scholars who will study them in the context of their day.
“I’m not saying that everything I did was right,” he said, “but everything I did was for an honorable purpose. I had to do some nasty things, locking fellows up without trial.”
And although the leaves are already falling from the tree, he said, the Lee Kuan Yew story may not be over yet.
He quoted a Chinese proverb: Do not judge a man until his coffin is closed.
“Close the coffin, then decide,” he said. “Then you assess him. I may still do something foolish before the lid is closed on me.”
'This house will be empty' That was how Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew put it when he spoke about his wife's inevitable passing in an interview with The Straits Times for an upcoming book.
Q: How are you coping with her illness?
A: We can't choose how we go. It's a difficult way of going but life is like that. So I've adjusted and accepted the inevitable. The doctors say even though you expect it when it happens, it's still a blow. I can only wait and see, and I've mentally sort of prepared myself... But there will be another adjustment when she finally isn't here. Then this big house will be empty. Fortunately I'm able to concentrate on my other work, so life goes on.
Q: Who do you turn to if you're feeling a bit down or you want somebody sympathetic to talk to?
A: I would say my wife.
Q: And now? Do you go to her bedside to talk to her?
A: I do that every night. I read to her, I tell her what I've been doing for the day and the news of the day from The Straits Times, IHT and Wall Street Journal. Then I read her the poems that she likes and has flagged over the years.
Q: She can't speak. How does she convey how she feels to you?
A: She blinks. 'Yes', one blink; 'no', two blinks.
· Can we start by asking how is Mrs Lee and how difficult is it for you coping with her illness?
Well, at the beginning it was. When it happened in May last year it was traumatic...She had recovered from her first stroke in 2003, reasonably unimpaired. We dashed her to hospital - the National Neuroscience Institute. There they found a new bleed (in the brain), this time in a more difficult position where it affects the movements. But there was still hope that she would recover with some physiotherapy, although maybe the quality of life would not be as good as before. Then while she was undergoing therapy, within the first two weeks she had two more strokes, one after another. The doctor said it's no use, physiotherapy cannot do anything because it was traumatic. So we brought her home, and I had to shift into my study room, which is next to my bedroom, because she had to have nurses round the clock. All the trauma meant I could not sleep. I developed a heart flutter and all sorts of problems that may have come on a few years later but came on earlier because of the stress.
After a while you adjust yourself mentally. I can do nothing except provide good nursing, so I've resigned myself. So have my children. She's gradually losing more and more of her faculties. There must have been more minor bleeds. Now she has cognition but she can't speak. But that's life. I was thinking to myself when I fell off the bicycle recently - had I knocked my head against the floor, I would be in a similar condition. We can't choose how we go. It's a difficult way of going but life is like that. So I've adjusted and accepted the inevitable. The doctors say even though you expect it, when it happens it's still a blow. I can only wait and see, and I've mentally sort of prepared myself.
It also reminded me of my own mortality and how quickly it can change in the flicker of a second if there's an internal bleed. That's life. I cannot choose how I'm going to go. I just carry on my life and that's that. If you start thinking about it, you will go downhill. Every day is a bonus, so let's carry on.
· Is she conscious of what's happening around her? Can she recognise...?
I'm the one she recognises the most. When she hears my voice, she knows it's me. This is after 62 years together, which makes it more difficult for her and for me. Because there's full cognition - when I tell her, look, our daughter is in hospital with some problem, she's suddenly alert and listens. But the hours of cognition are becoming less and less because she's sleeping more and more. Energy levels go down...
I have to psychologically make adjustments. I've adjusted. But there will be another adjustment when she finally isn't here. Then this big house will be empty. Fortunately I'm able to concentrate on my other work, so life goes on. I travel and do all the things I have been doing. If I don't carry on with life, I will degrade. If you think you're going to sit down and read novels and play golf, you're foolish - you'll just go downhill. Every day is a challenge. Every day has problems to be solved.
· Who do you turn to if you're feeling a bit down or you want somebody sympathetic to talk to?
I would say my wife.
· And now? Do you go to her bedside to talk to her?
I do that every night. I read to her, I tell her what I've been doing for the day and the news of the day from The Straits Times, IHT and Wall Street Journal. Then I read her the poems that she likes and has flagged over the years.
· She can't speak. How does she convey how she feels to you?
She blinks. Yes, one blink; no, two blinks.
· What were some of the best times you had as a couple?
Well, my greatest joy was when my wife won the Queen's scholarship and I managed to get her into Cambridge immediately after that, because that meant she didn't have to wait for me for three or four years in Singapore. Had she not got a scholarship, I'd have gone back (to Singapore) in three years and finished the bar exams as soon as possible. Before I left, she had said, after three years we will become strangers to each other. I said, no, we won't. In the end, she took a risk and so did I, because we might have drifted apart. She got the scholarship, I got her a place and we got married that December (in 1947) quietly in Stratford-upon-Avon. Then we came back and remarried again in 1950. I don't think that's an offence (laughs), to marry a woman twice, the same woman!
· What would you say is the secret to a long and happy marriage?
First of all, we accommodated each other. There was nothing we fundamentally disagreed on. She knew my quirks and I knew her eccentricities. She's a voracious reader. She read Horace, the Iliad and Gibbon's Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire. She read books on fishes, on food - the books on her bookshelf at home. I'm not interested in those subjects but she is. I'm interested in what I am doing. In the case of my memoirs, she would read my drafts and would simplify the English to make it easier to read and understand. Because as a conveyancing lawyer she's particular about the meanings of words, they should be clear, they should be simple. As a result, she influenced my writing style. I used to write convoluted sentences, the way I speak. She says, no, no, speaking is all right because you can repeat yourself and you can pick up where you left off. But in writing, you write a sentence and you move on. So you make it clear and crisp. If you look at my writings before my memoirs, my written style has more loops. She cured me of loops. She said, you want this to be read by O-level students. Don't use multisyllable words when you can use a single-syllable word, which is what (British style guide writer) Ernest Gowers advised. It was good advice. One of my doctors told me, I read your book and I found it very simple. So my wife succeeded. We adjust to each other.
· How else did she influence you?
In almost everything. I left the domestic chores to her. She runs the household and the maids. Now I have a problem. I got a man who fixes things up and looks after the maids. It's not satisfactory because he doesn't know what the maids do in the bedroom and it's not cleaned as before. It's a problem. I have to get my sister to teach the cook because my daughter is not interested in these things. She's interested in her work and writing the next article and her BlackBerry. Her cooking is to take raw salmon and put it in the microwave. My wife is a good cook and she gave instructions to the maid on how to cook.
She'll know when something is not right. She's got highly sensitive taste buds and sensitive nostrils. She can tell straight away, oh, you've put too much lengkuas (galangal) and so on, reduce it. I would not have known what was wrong. I just knew it didn't taste good. She would know. I miss all that. Life goes on. Now my sister helps to train the cook. She's a good cook. Life means adjustment. We make do after a while.
It take some courage for the older generation to get our of their reserved and unsentimental shell. So it helps to think of other older relatives in our family and begin to understand a bit more about what they are feeling too, as they age, in times of illness and when they grief for a long loved one.
From the NYT, 10 September 2010.
Days of Reflection for Man Who Defined Singapore
By SETH MYDANS
SINGAPORE
“SO, when is the last leaf falling?” asked Lee Kuan Yew, the man who made Singapore in his own stern and unsentimental image, nearing his 87th birthday and contemplating age, infirmity and loss.
“I can feel the gradual decline of energy and vitality,” said Mr. Lee, whose “Singapore model” of economic growth and tight social control made him one of the most influential political figures of Asia. “And I mean generally, every year, when you know you are not on the same level as last year. But that’s life.”
In a long, unusually reflective interview last week, he talked about the aches and pains of age and the solace of meditation, about his struggle to build a thriving nation on this resource-poor island, and his concern that the next generation might take his achievements for granted and let them slip away.
He was dressed informally in a windbreaker and running shoes in his big, bright office, still sharp of mind but visibly older and a little stooped, no longer in day-to-day control but, for as long as he lives, the dominant figure of the nation he created.
But in these final years, he said, his life has been darkened by the illness of his wife and companion of 61 years, bedridden and mute after a series of strokes.
“I try to busy myself,” he said, “but from time to time in idle moments, my mind goes back to the happy days we were up and about together.” Agnostic and pragmatic in his approach to life, he spoke with something like envy of people who find strength and solace in religion. “How do I comfort myself?” he asked. “Well, I say, ‘Life is just like that.’ ”
“What is next, I do not know,” he said. “Nobody has ever come back.”
The prime minister of Singapore from its founding in 1965 until he stepped aside in 1990, Mr. Lee built what he called “a first-world oasis in a third-world region” — praised for the efficiency and incorruptibility of his rule but accused by human rights groups of limiting political freedoms and intimidating opponents through libel suits.
His title now is minister mentor, a powerful presence within the current government led by his son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. The question that hovers over Singapore today is how long and in what form his model may endure once he is gone.
Always physically vigorous, Mr. Lee combats the decline of age with a regimen of swimming, cycling and massage and, perhaps more important, an hour-by-hour daily schedule of meetings, speeches and conferences both in Singapore and overseas. “I know if I rest, I’ll slide downhill fast,” he said. When, after an hour, talk shifted from introspection to geopolitics, the years seemed to slip away and he grew vigorous and forceful, his worldview still wide ranging, detailed and commanding.
And yet, he said, he sometimes takes an oblique look at these struggles against age and sees what he calls “the absurdity of it.”
“I’m reaching 87, trying to keep fit, presenting a vigorous figure, and it’s an effort, and is it worth the effort?” he said. “I laugh at myself trying to keep a bold front. It’s become my habit. I just carry on.”
HIS most difficult moments come at the end of each day, he said, as he sits by the bedside of his wife, Kwa Geok Choo, 89, who has been unable to move or speak for more than two years. She had been by his side, a confidante and counselor, since they were law students in London.
“She understands when I talk to her, which I do every night,” he said. “She keeps awake for me; I tell her about my day’s work, read her favorite poems.” He opened a big spreadsheet to show his reading list, books by Jane Austen, Rudyard Kipling and Lewis Carroll as well as the sonnets of Shakespeare.
Lately, he said, he had been looking at Christian marriage vows and was drawn to the words: “To love, to hold and to cherish, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse till death do us part.”
“I told her, ‘I would try and keep you company for as long as I can.’ That’s life. She understood.” But he also said: “I’m not sure who’s going first, whether she or me.”
At night, hearing the sounds of his wife’s discomfort in the next room, he said, he calms himself with 20 minutes of meditation, reciting a mantra he was taught by a Christian friend: “Ma-Ra-Na-Tha.”
The phrase, which is Aramaic, comes at the end of St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, and can be translated in several ways. Mr. Lee said that he was told it means “Come to me, O Lord Jesus,” and that although he is not a believer, he finds the sounds soothing.
“The problem is to keep the monkey mind from running off into all kinds of thoughts,” he said. “A certain tranquillity settles over you. The day’s pressures and worries are pushed out. Then there’s less problem sleeping.”
He brushed aside the words of a prominent Singaporean writer and social critic, Catherine Lim, who described him as having “an authoritarian, no-nonsense manner that has little use for sentiment.”
“She’s a novelist!” he cried. “Therefore, she simplifies a person’s character,” making what he called a “graphic caricature of me.” “But is anybody that simple or simplistic?”
The stress of his wife’s illness is constant, he said, harder on him than stresses he faced for years in the political arena. But repeatedly, in looking back over his life, he returns to his moment of greatest anguish, the expulsion of Singapore from Malaysia in 1965, when he wept in public.
That trauma presented him with the challenge that has defined his life, the creation and development of a stable and prosperous nation, always on guard against conflict within its mixed population of Chinese, Malays and Indians.
“We don’t have the ingredients of a nation, the elementary factors,” he said three years ago in an interview with the International Herald Tribune, “a homogeneous population, common language, common culture and common destiny.”
Younger people worry him, with their demands for more political openness and a free exchange of ideas, secure in their well-being in modern Singapore. “They have come to believe that this is a natural state of affairs, and they can take liberties with it,” he said. “They think you can put it on auto-pilot. I know that is never so.”
The kind of open political combat they demand would inevitably open the door to race-based politics, he said, and “our society will be ripped apart.”
A political street fighter, by his own account, he has often taken on his opponents through ruinous libel suits.
He defended the suits as necessary to protect his good name, and he dismissed criticisms by Western reporters who “hop in and hop out” of Singapore as “absolute rubbish.”
In any case, it is not these reporters or the obituaries they may write that will offer the final verdict on his actions, he said, but future scholars who will study them in the context of their day.
“I’m not saying that everything I did was right,” he said, “but everything I did was for an honorable purpose. I had to do some nasty things, locking fellows up without trial.”
And although the leaves are already falling from the tree, he said, the Lee Kuan Yew story may not be over yet.
He quoted a Chinese proverb: Do not judge a man until his coffin is closed.
“Close the coffin, then decide,” he said. “Then you assess him. I may still do something foolish before the lid is closed on me.”
'This house will be empty' That was how Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew put it when he spoke about his wife's inevitable passing in an interview with The Straits Times for an upcoming book.
Q: How are you coping with her illness?
A: We can't choose how we go. It's a difficult way of going but life is like that. So I've adjusted and accepted the inevitable. The doctors say even though you expect it when it happens, it's still a blow. I can only wait and see, and I've mentally sort of prepared myself... But there will be another adjustment when she finally isn't here. Then this big house will be empty. Fortunately I'm able to concentrate on my other work, so life goes on.
Q: Who do you turn to if you're feeling a bit down or you want somebody sympathetic to talk to?
A: I would say my wife.
Q: And now? Do you go to her bedside to talk to her?
A: I do that every night. I read to her, I tell her what I've been doing for the day and the news of the day from The Straits Times, IHT and Wall Street Journal. Then I read her the poems that she likes and has flagged over the years.
Q: She can't speak. How does she convey how she feels to you?
A: She blinks. 'Yes', one blink; 'no', two blinks.
· Can we start by asking how is Mrs Lee and how difficult is it for you coping with her illness?
Well, at the beginning it was. When it happened in May last year it was traumatic...She had recovered from her first stroke in 2003, reasonably unimpaired. We dashed her to hospital - the National Neuroscience Institute. There they found a new bleed (in the brain), this time in a more difficult position where it affects the movements. But there was still hope that she would recover with some physiotherapy, although maybe the quality of life would not be as good as before. Then while she was undergoing therapy, within the first two weeks she had two more strokes, one after another. The doctor said it's no use, physiotherapy cannot do anything because it was traumatic. So we brought her home, and I had to shift into my study room, which is next to my bedroom, because she had to have nurses round the clock. All the trauma meant I could not sleep. I developed a heart flutter and all sorts of problems that may have come on a few years later but came on earlier because of the stress.
After a while you adjust yourself mentally. I can do nothing except provide good nursing, so I've resigned myself. So have my children. She's gradually losing more and more of her faculties. There must have been more minor bleeds. Now she has cognition but she can't speak. But that's life. I was thinking to myself when I fell off the bicycle recently - had I knocked my head against the floor, I would be in a similar condition. We can't choose how we go. It's a difficult way of going but life is like that. So I've adjusted and accepted the inevitable. The doctors say even though you expect it, when it happens it's still a blow. I can only wait and see, and I've mentally sort of prepared myself.
It also reminded me of my own mortality and how quickly it can change in the flicker of a second if there's an internal bleed. That's life. I cannot choose how I'm going to go. I just carry on my life and that's that. If you start thinking about it, you will go downhill. Every day is a bonus, so let's carry on.
· Is she conscious of what's happening around her? Can she recognise...?
I'm the one she recognises the most. When she hears my voice, she knows it's me. This is after 62 years together, which makes it more difficult for her and for me. Because there's full cognition - when I tell her, look, our daughter is in hospital with some problem, she's suddenly alert and listens. But the hours of cognition are becoming less and less because she's sleeping more and more. Energy levels go down...
I have to psychologically make adjustments. I've adjusted. But there will be another adjustment when she finally isn't here. Then this big house will be empty. Fortunately I'm able to concentrate on my other work, so life goes on. I travel and do all the things I have been doing. If I don't carry on with life, I will degrade. If you think you're going to sit down and read novels and play golf, you're foolish - you'll just go downhill. Every day is a challenge. Every day has problems to be solved.
· Who do you turn to if you're feeling a bit down or you want somebody sympathetic to talk to?
I would say my wife.
· And now? Do you go to her bedside to talk to her?
I do that every night. I read to her, I tell her what I've been doing for the day and the news of the day from The Straits Times, IHT and Wall Street Journal. Then I read her the poems that she likes and has flagged over the years.
· She can't speak. How does she convey how she feels to you?
She blinks. Yes, one blink; no, two blinks.
· What were some of the best times you had as a couple?
Well, my greatest joy was when my wife won the Queen's scholarship and I managed to get her into Cambridge immediately after that, because that meant she didn't have to wait for me for three or four years in Singapore. Had she not got a scholarship, I'd have gone back (to Singapore) in three years and finished the bar exams as soon as possible. Before I left, she had said, after three years we will become strangers to each other. I said, no, we won't. In the end, she took a risk and so did I, because we might have drifted apart. She got the scholarship, I got her a place and we got married that December (in 1947) quietly in Stratford-upon-Avon. Then we came back and remarried again in 1950. I don't think that's an offence (laughs), to marry a woman twice, the same woman!
· What would you say is the secret to a long and happy marriage?
First of all, we accommodated each other. There was nothing we fundamentally disagreed on. She knew my quirks and I knew her eccentricities. She's a voracious reader. She read Horace, the Iliad and Gibbon's Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire. She read books on fishes, on food - the books on her bookshelf at home. I'm not interested in those subjects but she is. I'm interested in what I am doing. In the case of my memoirs, she would read my drafts and would simplify the English to make it easier to read and understand. Because as a conveyancing lawyer she's particular about the meanings of words, they should be clear, they should be simple. As a result, she influenced my writing style. I used to write convoluted sentences, the way I speak. She says, no, no, speaking is all right because you can repeat yourself and you can pick up where you left off. But in writing, you write a sentence and you move on. So you make it clear and crisp. If you look at my writings before my memoirs, my written style has more loops. She cured me of loops. She said, you want this to be read by O-level students. Don't use multisyllable words when you can use a single-syllable word, which is what (British style guide writer) Ernest Gowers advised. It was good advice. One of my doctors told me, I read your book and I found it very simple. So my wife succeeded. We adjust to each other.
· How else did she influence you?
In almost everything. I left the domestic chores to her. She runs the household and the maids. Now I have a problem. I got a man who fixes things up and looks after the maids. It's not satisfactory because he doesn't know what the maids do in the bedroom and it's not cleaned as before. It's a problem. I have to get my sister to teach the cook because my daughter is not interested in these things. She's interested in her work and writing the next article and her BlackBerry. Her cooking is to take raw salmon and put it in the microwave. My wife is a good cook and she gave instructions to the maid on how to cook.
She'll know when something is not right. She's got highly sensitive taste buds and sensitive nostrils. She can tell straight away, oh, you've put too much lengkuas (galangal) and so on, reduce it. I would not have known what was wrong. I just knew it didn't taste good. She would know. I miss all that. Life goes on. Now my sister helps to train the cook. She's a good cook. Life means adjustment. We make do after a while.
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Impressions of Asia in 2010 - Singapore
My visit to Singapore was brief. But I went with my eyes and ears open and a strong intention to see for myself how the place was doing.
Even before I went there, I had the chance to speak to one of Asia's most well-connected and thoughtful businessman-statesman, who opined that Singapore is making a faustian bargain by opening its mega-integrated resorts a.k.a. casinos. From his observation, the Singapore economy is hitting the jackpot from the flood of money coming in - mainly from the less savory parts of the region. But there will be a hidden cost in terms of the future of the Singapore society.
According to him, the irony with Singapore is that it promises a clean, safe and law-abiding society within its borders, but readily turns a blind-eye to whatever happens outside of it. So if you have a lot of money with you Singapore is a safe place to spend A LOT of them without attracting attention and keep whatever you can get out of the casinos. According to him, among those in the know, the typical percentage of the capital one tends to lose in casinos is "competitive" with the going rate -whatever that is - for money laundering. The deal, though, is anyone can bring in as much cash as they wish, no questions asked, but you must declare it upon entry. If you try to sneak in a suitcase stuffed with $10m of bank notes, you will be arrested for failing to declare at customs. But if you declare it, a policeman would count the money in front of you (no risk of the policeman ever demanding a cut) and return the money to you and no one else - except the Singapore Government - knowing about it. That is exactly what has been happening since the IRs opened. Lots of money flooding in and as the government hoped, some of the money being spent in a big way in Singapore.
The problem is that too much money of dubious origins swishing around the system is not all good news. The gambling industry tend to be accompanied by sub-industries of other vices both private and public. The effects of conspicuous consumption and people spending all the money without seeming having to work hard can be very corrosive on the Singapore society. For a long time, although Singapore has its playgrounds for the rich (Malaysian royalties and Indonesian tycoons comes to mind), Singapore's own elites have been founded solidly on meritocracy and having to earn their wealth. At the least, this latest influx of wealth might cause resentment within the Singapore heartland (the HDB population). At worse it might set all the wrong examples of easy money and short-cuts to wealth that will undermine Singapore's precious work ethic and desire for relentless self-improvement.
I agree with that analysis - to a point, but I see that as a little too single dimentional. Besides, I also believe there is more to Singapore's latest boom. After my visit, I was more optimistic than ever that Singapore has moved - no transformed itself - pretty successfully to a new economic level. Fundamentally, after a decade long restructuring driven by the Asian Financial Crisis, the growth of China, India and the Gulf States (which provided dynamism and competition in equal measures) - not to mention external shocks from SARS, 9-11 and the Global Financial Crisis - I believe Singapore has found a formidable way to benefit.
I call it selling the "Singapore Quality".
In my view, Singapore has differentiated itself from Hong Kong in an important way. Mind you, both of them will continue to do very well. But while Hong Kong is becoming the service capital for Greater China, Singapore is becoming the service capital for the rest of Asia (beginning from the Persian Gulf area, partially for Indian sub-continent and dominantly for Southeast Asia). Increasingly, not only MNCs are using Singapore as a springboard not only to reach markets and consumers in the region; but regional corporations are using Singapore as a springboard for talents, services and infrastructure both to serve their home market but also to expand internationally.
For a long time, Singapore's professed niche has been to be a first-world island in a third world region so that it can be a conducive location for MNCs to locate their expatriates and regional HQ. Less trumpeted was its attraction for business people from less developed or secure areas in the region (Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar and as far as Nepal plus to a lesser extent, China) to host a second home, educate their children and even run their business remotely in the peace and comfort of the Lion City. These days, I was reading, Singapore is now acting as the secondary HQ or main international outpost for many Indian conglomerates and business families. In fact, a major newspaper has quoted that among the Indian business classes, Singapore is jokingly referred to as "the cleanest city in India". If this continues, that is clearly an important development as the Indian economy outgrows its capacity for its own corporations to service itself.
What Singapore is really selling the "Singapore Quality" of its social stability, security, comfort reliability and efficiency.
Corporate Singapore has also moved outwards with great sophistication to export the "Singapore Quality". It was may be 20 years ago, after visiting Europe and talking to Swiss business executives, that Lee Kuan Yew had an epiphany that Singapore has to somehow transcend the limited size of its economy. He spoke admiringly of Swiss companies like Nestle or Credit Suisse or Sandoz that make their money globally because they export certain skills or knowledge or quality-image that others could not replicate. I was a teenager then, but I remember he said Singapore will need to grow its "second wing."
That is what Corporate Singapore - particularly the GLCs - have been doing with increasing success after almost 20 years. This tend to take place in three different ways: The first involve acquisition or investment in foreign corporations and assets - such as stake in telecommunication operators in India, Indonesia and (ill-fatedly) Thailand, ports and in the banking sector. The major shipyards in Singapore are also developing enormous additional capacity in Indonesian islands as part of their outward move. Real estate players like Capitaland and Keppel Land are also major investors in real estate projects in China usually through JVs with local players. All these brings a direct exposure to growth opportunity and introduce business opportunity for their Singaporean sub-contractors and partners.
The second route involves replicating the "Singapore Quality" elsewhere in the region. Corporate Singapore in collaboration with the Singapore Government and its soverign wealth funds have been building townships and industrial parks with the Singapore Quality as its main selling point. In Vietnam, 4 major townships are being developed to provide "Singapore Quality" living, working, logistics and recreation infrastructure for foreign investors and locals alike. In these townships, Sembcorp is developing the power, water, waste water and roads system to underpin a reliable infrastructure for investors. Sembcorp is leveraging on its expertise in from operating Singapore's multi-billion dollar Jurong Petrochemical Island project and selling itself as a world-class industrial park water-purification, power, steam and O&M (operations and maintenance capable of the highest reliability, safety and performance. Projects in Oman and Abu Dhabi are a start. The potential is enormous given the gap between demand and capability in Indian sub-continent, Gulf States and Southeast Asia.
The third route involves outsourcing. For example, as airlines in India, the Gulf States and China grows and add new planes, companies such as SIA Engineering and ST Engineering benefit from their need for world-class maintenance and certification to keep them airworthy. Keppel Corp and Sembawang Marine are among the top builders in the world for the most advanced oil rigs and specialised support vessels. Specialised Singaporean engineering companies are among the most competitive fabricators of industrial plants and equipment for oil and gas projects. I even hear of companies who specialise in the design, fabrication and on-site installation of bathroom and wardrobes for five-star hotels all over the world (even in Europe, Middle East and Americas).
Given these examples of the Singapore Quality at work, I have come to appreciate how the Singapore's finicky high-expectations, efficiency-obsessed, value-demanding and Kiasuism with global rankings and benchmarking has turned into a tremendous competitive advantage. These have resulted in soft-skills - planning, design, manufacturing, execution, management, efficiency - that cannot be replicated over-night and which money alone cannot buy. Dubai can spend billions on the physical infrastructure but money alone cannot buy the soft skills that are needed to manage, operate and maintain a world class facility. For whatever India or China cannot supply - and where Europe or America are either unsuitable, incapable, uncompetitively-priced or uninterested - that is the niche Singapore is stepping in.
And Singapore is ready for this transformation in more than one way. While the sight of the Marina Sands Resort was riveting enough, what also caught my eye was that Singapore's CBD is currently in the process of doubling in size. An expansion that is more akin to Pudong or Dubai is taking place along the Marina Bay area in Singapore. To Cheung Kong and Hongkong Land which are part owners of the Marina Bay Financial Center, it would not be lost on them that Singapore has a 55% cost advantage over Hong Kong in Class A office space. And with all those empty acrage on the reclaimed Marina Bay area, Singapore can sustain this pricing advantage.
In terms of population, the population of Singapore has grown tremendously - around 20% in the past decade - with influx from China, India and from around Southeast Asia. This has inevitably been causing social angst and unease. But they have also been restocking the skills base, keep the working population up, and the avarage age of the population and labour costs down. I find that the costs of living, especially in the Singapore heartland still pretty managable.
In terms of public infrastructure, Singapore has been building on its strengths by moving ahead with new projects during the downturn and promising even more to come. For example: the MRT system is now easily more than double what it was when it began and due to double again within the next decade. Private construction is happening all over the place with speed and ambition; and the attention to quality and design is very high.
All in all, this means that quite apart from the Second Wing, Singapore's domestic economy is doing well. The price of real estate has gone up in recent years and the Government is clamping down to stop a bubble forming. Before my trip, I wondered if Singapore's recent upswing is real or is it a bubble? And even if its real, has it peaked? After this trip, I do believe its real and there is much much more to come.
A friend of mine wisely provided the observation that one can tell if times are really well by observing how hard/easy it is to get a taxi. Based on this experiment, he believes although times are good it has not peaked yet. He told me that while we were in a taxi, and the taxi driver quickly agreed.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
5 Quotations On The Oval Office Rug
President Obama got some redecorating done for the Oval Office. With it came a new rug the edge of which is surrounded by 5 quotations.
“The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself” – President Franklin D. Roosevelt
“The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, But It Bends Towards Justice” – Martin Luther King Jr.
“Government of the People, By the People, For the People” – President Abraham Lincoln
“No Problem of Human Destiny Is Beyond Human Beings” – President John F. Kennedy
“The Welfare of Each of Us Is Dependent Fundamentally Upon the Welfare of All of Us” – President Theodore Roosevelt
“The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself” – President Franklin D. Roosevelt
“The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, But It Bends Towards Justice” – Martin Luther King Jr.
“Government of the People, By the People, For the People” – President Abraham Lincoln
“No Problem of Human Destiny Is Beyond Human Beings” – President John F. Kennedy
“The Welfare of Each of Us Is Dependent Fundamentally Upon the Welfare of All of Us” – President Theodore Roosevelt
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
馬英九向錢穆遺孀致歉
Qian Mu is my favorite Chinese History scholar cum writer. I had read most of his publications and developed an immense liking of his writing and analysis when I was in my 20s.
This apology is long overdued and I am very happy to see the leaders across the Strait like Wen and Ma who embody many fine aspects of the best Confucianist values - the respect for the scholars.
2010-08-31
(綜合報道)(星島日報報道)國學大師錢穆六十年代離開香港後，定居台北素書樓。一九九○年，錢穆病榻中，因被指控侵佔市府土地，被逼搬離故居，旋即病逝。馬英九(相關)昨日在錢穆逝世二十周年追思會上，以總統身分向錢穆遺孀胡美琦致歉，強調當局重視文人故居，不再做出「不公不義」的事。
一九六七年，錢穆夫婦應蔣介石邀請從香港遷往台北，在翠林幽谷的外雙溪建房，親手繪製圖樣，由當局代為施工。次年入住時，錢穆因紀念母親命名此樓為「素書樓」，在此長居二十三年。
一九九○年，當時的台北市議員周伯倫，指稱素書樓佔用市府土地，而時任立委的陳水扁(相關)也強烈要求台北市政府收回。當時錢穆雖高齡九十六歲，眼盲體衰，但不甘受辱，決定搬走，三個月後辭世。
馬英九昨日表示，他以飲水思源、追念大師的心情參加追思會，對事件一直耿耿於懷，一九九八年當上台北市長之後，開始整修名人故居。○二年素書樓整修完成，重開大門時，他即以台北市長身分，向錢穆遺孀胡美琦鞠躬，代表市政府致歉。
他昨日再次向錢夫人表達歉意，強調賓四先生（錢穆）沒有霸佔公產，那塊地是賓館用地，在錢穆返台前原作招待外賓之用，絕無侵佔公有財產之事。
「君子疾沒世而名不稱焉」，馬英九又引《論語‧衞靈公篇》來說明錢穆的委屈。他表示，台灣社會除自由民主外，也講求公平正義；對於不公不義的二二八事件、白色恐怖及錢穆故居風波等，他保證不再發生。
八十二歲的錢穆遺孀胡美琦昨日坐着輪椅致詞表示，四十三年前由於兩位蔣總統禮賢下士，讓他們夫妻住進素書樓，卻因政客的污衊而搬離。她說，世事無常，如同錢穆生前所寫「塵世無常，性命終將老去；天道好還，人文幸得綿延。」
錢夫人因長年住院，已很少回故居，昨日睹物思人，難掩傷感，不時拭淚。台北市文化局長謝小韞在追思會中，向錢夫人深情地說：「這裏永遠是您的家」。
為紀念錢穆學術貢獻，目前「素書樓」已改為紀念圖書館，委託東吳大學管理，並定名「錢穆故居」，定期舉辦書畫展、學術座談會等。
This apology is long overdued and I am very happy to see the leaders across the Strait like Wen and Ma who embody many fine aspects of the best Confucianist values - the respect for the scholars.
2010-08-31
(綜合報道)(星島日報報道)國學大師錢穆六十年代離開香港後，定居台北素書樓。一九九○年，錢穆病榻中，因被指控侵佔市府土地，被逼搬離故居，旋即病逝。馬英九(相關)昨日在錢穆逝世二十周年追思會上，以總統身分向錢穆遺孀胡美琦致歉，強調當局重視文人故居，不再做出「不公不義」的事。
一九六七年，錢穆夫婦應蔣介石邀請從香港遷往台北，在翠林幽谷的外雙溪建房，親手繪製圖樣，由當局代為施工。次年入住時，錢穆因紀念母親命名此樓為「素書樓」，在此長居二十三年。
一九九○年，當時的台北市議員周伯倫，指稱素書樓佔用市府土地，而時任立委的陳水扁(相關)也強烈要求台北市政府收回。當時錢穆雖高齡九十六歲，眼盲體衰，但不甘受辱，決定搬走，三個月後辭世。
馬英九昨日表示，他以飲水思源、追念大師的心情參加追思會，對事件一直耿耿於懷，一九九八年當上台北市長之後，開始整修名人故居。○二年素書樓整修完成，重開大門時，他即以台北市長身分，向錢穆遺孀胡美琦鞠躬，代表市政府致歉。
他昨日再次向錢夫人表達歉意，強調賓四先生（錢穆）沒有霸佔公產，那塊地是賓館用地，在錢穆返台前原作招待外賓之用，絕無侵佔公有財產之事。
「君子疾沒世而名不稱焉」，馬英九又引《論語‧衞靈公篇》來說明錢穆的委屈。他表示，台灣社會除自由民主外，也講求公平正義；對於不公不義的二二八事件、白色恐怖及錢穆故居風波等，他保證不再發生。
八十二歲的錢穆遺孀胡美琦昨日坐着輪椅致詞表示，四十三年前由於兩位蔣總統禮賢下士，讓他們夫妻住進素書樓，卻因政客的污衊而搬離。她說，世事無常，如同錢穆生前所寫「塵世無常，性命終將老去；天道好還，人文幸得綿延。」
錢夫人因長年住院，已很少回故居，昨日睹物思人，難掩傷感，不時拭淚。台北市文化局長謝小韞在追思會中，向錢夫人深情地說：「這裏永遠是您的家」。
為紀念錢穆學術貢獻，目前「素書樓」已改為紀念圖書館，委託東吳大學管理，並定名「錢穆故居」，定期舉辦書畫展、學術座談會等。
Friday, August 27, 2010
Impressions of Asia in 2010 - Malaysia
One of the more amazing changes in SE Asia for the past decade has been the growth of budget airlines.
Recently I had the opportunity to fly between KL and Brunei on Air Asia and between KL and Singapore on Tiger Airways. Imagine my return flight to Singapore from KL cost only S$27 all inclusive. It would cost more for my daughter and I to take a cab from KL to KLIA than for the flight itself. Although evident for sometime, may I say once more that air travel has experienced the quantum transformation that cars went through 30 years ago and mobile phones 15 years ago. As Air Asia says, "now everybody can fly".
Air Asia is clearly the major player that it deserved to be. One look at the KLIA budget terminal would suggest their domination of the sector accounting for more than 80% of flights. Interestingly, some of the flights technically belong to different entities like Air Asia Thailand or Air Asia Indonesia or the long haul Air Asia X, but they seem seamless in terms of branding and operations, flying people in-and-out of the KL hub to dozens of regional cities. I see them as a true Malaysian success story founded on creativity and actually adding-value.
The other transformation as far as I can see, especially in the Klang Valley, is the massive outbreak of tolled highways, which has spread like tentacles from a poison ivy to colonise existing public roads, cutting through remorselessly through whole neighbourhoods (the dicing-up of Pudu and Cheras comes to mind) and reaching through hitherto forested (for now) valleys to double-up on other existing highways. In my mind, they are no longer about infrastructure or connecting places or even good planning. I just feel they merely smack of greed where the logic seems to be for the well-connected to each find a way to sneak in their own highway so as to block off a slice of revenue or opening up opportunities to develop plantation/state-land for their own benefit.
In the smaller towns, I had the feeling that they are slowly being abandoned by the world which is leaving them by. It used to be that smaller towns used to have a respectable core of middle class - successful planters, enterpreneurs, lawyers, doctors, educators - who form the heart and soul of the community. Nowadays, those who are left are well past their prime, retirees who has seen their children left for the brighter lights of KL, Singapore and any number of places beyond.
Among those who remain, the education level, career prospects and sources of legitimate income just seem to be stagnant or fallen. I just feel in smaller towns, the middle class has been hollowed out by migration, mal-distributions of wealth and opportunity and a type of inflation that is uniquely targeted at carving out the quality of life for middle-class Malaysians.
For example: Food and drink at the hawker centers typically go for RM3 and RM1 or less respectively. Single storey houses and stuff you find in the village shops are cheap although the quality is awful. On the otherhand, once you get beyond the "village-basics", anything more sophisticated (clothes, shampoos, consumer products, appliances etc.) and some services (restaurants etc) are more highly priced than even in the developed countries. I am sure for some products, import tax and duties may be to blame. But in most cases I was not talking about luxury products.
This phenomenon of illogically high prices for consumer goods and luxuries is even more pronounced once one gets to KL. The vast disparity suggested to me that there is a huge gulf between the ordinary people and a very small minority of the super wealthy. If there is one thing that seem amiss in Malaysia today, it would be that the system is engineered to feather the nest of the elite and at the cost of those who are trying to remain in the middle class. When one consider how much it would cost to live comfortably as a Malaysian urban middle class i.e., the costs and availability of property*, the car + toll, education, consumer items, eating out, satellite TV, communications, personal safety, etc. there just seem to be a considerable and deliberate range of financial burden - caused by a combination of taxes/duties, corporate collusion, corrupt money making schemes, or simply failures of public policy - just at that point when one try to make it from hardship to a comfortable life. May be there is nothing to be made from the poor, but unless Malaysia takes better care of its middle class, it can never make the next step to being a developed country.
And there is another observation that troubled me. I went to a few book shops and I began to see a growing segment of Malay books of all types - anything from romance novels, to fantasy stories set in the time of the Prophet, to personal development books written by this Ustaz and the other. While I was amazed at the growth of the world of Malay publishing, I was also getting concerned at the insularity of the world view of someone who only has access to those books. Usually just around the next corner, I could see a similar phenomenon of large numbers of interesting books in Chinese that originate from China. They appeal to different target audiences but the effects are the same: a world view that is limited and may not be very enlightened or relevant to a multi-cultural country. I wonder what society would be like if different segments read only their own books and newspapers, listen to their own music, watch their own TV channels and talk only to people within their own groups.
On that slightly dismal note, I move next to Singapore....
Recently I had the opportunity to fly between KL and Brunei on Air Asia and between KL and Singapore on Tiger Airways. Imagine my return flight to Singapore from KL cost only S$27 all inclusive. It would cost more for my daughter and I to take a cab from KL to KLIA than for the flight itself. Although evident for sometime, may I say once more that air travel has experienced the quantum transformation that cars went through 30 years ago and mobile phones 15 years ago. As Air Asia says, "now everybody can fly".
Air Asia is clearly the major player that it deserved to be. One look at the KLIA budget terminal would suggest their domination of the sector accounting for more than 80% of flights. Interestingly, some of the flights technically belong to different entities like Air Asia Thailand or Air Asia Indonesia or the long haul Air Asia X, but they seem seamless in terms of branding and operations, flying people in-and-out of the KL hub to dozens of regional cities. I see them as a true Malaysian success story founded on creativity and actually adding-value.
The other transformation as far as I can see, especially in the Klang Valley, is the massive outbreak of tolled highways, which has spread like tentacles from a poison ivy to colonise existing public roads, cutting through remorselessly through whole neighbourhoods (the dicing-up of Pudu and Cheras comes to mind) and reaching through hitherto forested (for now) valleys to double-up on other existing highways. In my mind, they are no longer about infrastructure or connecting places or even good planning. I just feel they merely smack of greed where the logic seems to be for the well-connected to each find a way to sneak in their own highway so as to block off a slice of revenue or opening up opportunities to develop plantation/state-land for their own benefit.
Enough to say I was troubled by many of the things I saw in Malaysia.
In the smaller towns, prices and the standard of living are still low. Families still subsist on wages of a few hundred ringgit. Migrant labourers are brought in for less than RM500 - which is a lower wage than one find in many parts of China. Since when Malaysia want to - or rather need to - compete with China on labour costs? But migrant labour are increasingly a fact of life, that is increasingly keeping wages and quality of the workforce low, even when they are being suspected (rightly or - more likely, wrongly) for anything from increased crime, social problems to racial provocations. Even then a considerable portion of what pass for wages for foreign workers actually go to "agents" or the legal holder of their employment passes who tend to be handed about to division chiefs and other local politicians.In the smaller towns, I had the feeling that they are slowly being abandoned by the world which is leaving them by. It used to be that smaller towns used to have a respectable core of middle class - successful planters, enterpreneurs, lawyers, doctors, educators - who form the heart and soul of the community. Nowadays, those who are left are well past their prime, retirees who has seen their children left for the brighter lights of KL, Singapore and any number of places beyond.
Among those who remain, the education level, career prospects and sources of legitimate income just seem to be stagnant or fallen. I just feel in smaller towns, the middle class has been hollowed out by migration, mal-distributions of wealth and opportunity and a type of inflation that is uniquely targeted at carving out the quality of life for middle-class Malaysians.
For example: Food and drink at the hawker centers typically go for RM3 and RM1 or less respectively. Single storey houses and stuff you find in the village shops are cheap although the quality is awful. On the otherhand, once you get beyond the "village-basics", anything more sophisticated (clothes, shampoos, consumer products, appliances etc.) and some services (restaurants etc) are more highly priced than even in the developed countries. I am sure for some products, import tax and duties may be to blame. But in most cases I was not talking about luxury products.
This phenomenon of illogically high prices for consumer goods and luxuries is even more pronounced once one gets to KL. The vast disparity suggested to me that there is a huge gulf between the ordinary people and a very small minority of the super wealthy. If there is one thing that seem amiss in Malaysia today, it would be that the system is engineered to feather the nest of the elite and at the cost of those who are trying to remain in the middle class. When one consider how much it would cost to live comfortably as a Malaysian urban middle class i.e., the costs and availability of property*, the car + toll, education, consumer items, eating out, satellite TV, communications, personal safety, etc. there just seem to be a considerable and deliberate range of financial burden - caused by a combination of taxes/duties, corporate collusion, corrupt money making schemes, or simply failures of public policy - just at that point when one try to make it from hardship to a comfortable life. May be there is nothing to be made from the poor, but unless Malaysia takes better care of its middle class, it can never make the next step to being a developed country.
And there is another observation that troubled me. I went to a few book shops and I began to see a growing segment of Malay books of all types - anything from romance novels, to fantasy stories set in the time of the Prophet, to personal development books written by this Ustaz and the other. While I was amazed at the growth of the world of Malay publishing, I was also getting concerned at the insularity of the world view of someone who only has access to those books. Usually just around the next corner, I could see a similar phenomenon of large numbers of interesting books in Chinese that originate from China. They appeal to different target audiences but the effects are the same: a world view that is limited and may not be very enlightened or relevant to a multi-cultural country. I wonder what society would be like if different segments read only their own books and newspapers, listen to their own music, watch their own TV channels and talk only to people within their own groups.
On that slightly dismal note, I move next to Singapore....
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