TR EMERITUS

I am the son of illegal Street Hawker & Taxi Driver. My mother has applied for hawker stall in the Toa Payoh market numerous times but her applications were all rejected just because my father had a taxi driver license! There were 10 of us in the family and they expected one taxi driver to feed all! Thus we all became illegal... 

Lee Kuan Yew famously told Singaporeans: “Follow that rainbow, go ride it.” The words of Singapore’s late founding father meant something then but rings hollow today. Ask the young and the not-so-young now: do they see a rainbow, where oh where is that rainbow? As a country, we seem to be drifting sideways, directionless,... 

You could call it a stoke of good fortune, but after bashing out a piece on how people on Vietnam’s streets were setting up street stalls to get by, I ended up having to become a patron of the streets. It was a case of my host not feeling well enough to take me out and so I needed to look for my own dinner. I didn’t really...