TR EMERITUS

We Have Become A Mad Society Under The PAP! If you are the middle class or aspiring to join the middle class in Singapore, you may feel like crying.And I can understand your anguish. How does one fathom the craziness of the society the PAP has created with Category B COEs hitting a new record of $146 002, up from $140,889 in the last tender. And the Open category COE has also gone to a new high of $152,000,from $144,640. Lawrence Wong, you can talk till the cows come home and nobody will believe a word of what you utter about narrowing inequality. You are part of the problem,which has seen inequality skyrocket under the PAP government. Your Forward Singapore exercise has been a total waste of time and does not possess a shred of credibility. You too are a total waste of time!Please do not waste any more public funds to print the report. Nobody is interested. We Must Regain Our Country, Our Dignity, Our Future!   Lim Tean    Read More →

Never in the history of Singapore sports has a female athlete captured such a rapturous outburst of ovation for a female Singapore athlete for her spectacular singular achievement of capturing the gold medal in the 100 metre event of the Asia Game in Hangzhou in China. Shanti Pereira is the Singapore Sprint Queen in every sense of he word. Even PM Lee Hsien and President Tharman Shanmugaratnam were overawed and proudly added in their congratulation. Could it be a divine disposition that after fifty years of drought in the female sprint talent a sprint champion is born to take the world by storm. And coming from a minority ethnic group makes it all the more remarkable. She almost made it to a sprint double but missed the 100 metre gold by a whisker. She is indeed a sprint champion in Asia and the Olympic sprint contest with world female athlete will not daunt her. So far there does not appear to be any formidable challenger to Shanti Pereira on the world athletic scene and she may just have the nerve to pull off a victory.in the sprint events in the Olympic. The training to prepare her for the competition was gruelling and her personal coach Luis Cunha ha done a vey remarkable job in perfecting her for the race. As a coach he has to be unobtrusive but from what little that had been made public about his expertise for training Shanti Pereira I think he deserves a national medal for his dedication. I think quite a lot of credit should be given to him for Shanti's achievements. Almost overnight Shanti Pereira has become a household name not only in Singapore but in the West as well. Dos not the PM Lee Hsien Loong think some form of national prestige should be awarded Shanti Pereira? Money she may demur but a national medal will certainly boost her confidance.   Yoong Siew Wah * The author was the Director of Singapore’s Internal Security Department (ISD) from 1971 to 1974. He was Director of the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB) in the 1960s, and had a distinguished career in the Singapore Special Branch in the 1950s      Read More →

One of the most interesting cross-cultural communications that Huong and I have had in the 12-years that we’ve been together has been on the issue of visas into certain places. I simply cannot understand why she’s willing to go all out to deal with the bureaucracy of getting into certain places. She’s currently trying to get into the USA and the paper work is, in my view, pointless. However, to her, dealing with the paper work is a small price one has to pay to get into the USA. For me, I always figured that with the exception of Bhutan, no place was worth going to if you had to wrestle with bureaucrats just to get in. I take France as an example. When I was in school in the 1990s, I refused to go to France. Every country in the EU allowed Singaporeans visa-free entry and I couldn’t see what the French had to offer that required a struggle with bureaucrats. The difference in our attitude boils down to passports. I travel on a Singapore passport, which according to The Henley Passport Index for 2023 allows me to enter 193 countries without having to apply for a visa. The Singapore passport has the best of East and West. Our reputation is such that Western nations trust us enough that we’ll leave after a certain period to go back to decent paying jobs and nice homes, rathe than trying to stay illegally. We’re also Asian enough for places in Indo-China not to shake us down for visa fees when we enter. Say what you like about Singapore but I don’t have much incentive to leave. Whilst I am not rich by any means, I am earning a living in a decent enough currency and have access to decent enough facilities. If I move anywhere, its either for holiday or it’s got to be an amazing business opportunity. Huong by contrast, travels on a Vietnamese passport, which according The Henley Passport Index for 2023, allows her to travel to 54 countries visa-free. While Vietnam has been an “up-and-coming” economy, life in rural Vietnam, where Huong was born, remains tough. Then you got to add in the fact that the Vietnamese Dong competes with the Iranian Riyal for the world’s lowest value currency on the planet, which means that even if there are jobs available, you’re going to look and feel poor compared to everyone else (I used to have that feeling with my friends in the UK when it was a three-to-one exchange rate in favour of the GBP to the SGD. No matter how many SGD I had, it always had to be divided by three for my British friends to understand). So, for Huong everywhere outside Vietnam is a place of prosperity. I bring up the contrasting attitudes that Huong and I have towards visas because today is World Migrant and Refuge Day, which if you look at geopolitical events, has become especially significant. Think of things like the War in Ukraine, where people have been displaced and forced to flee because someone decided to grab their country. Its also significant in Singapore. Despite being a nation that was built by migrants and people fleeing either economic deprivation or political persecution, we easily fall for the notion that “outsiders” from less developed places are out to get us. Take one of our “great” military achievements in the 1970s – turning away boats of refugees fleeing Vietnam. The only comment I got from someone who was part of this military achievement was “why didn’t these people stay and fight?” Erm, the world’s strongest military had just abandoned them and you expected them to stay and fight with? I believe that I am not the only native-born Singaporean who has an inability to understand the need to leave your “homeland.” The general attitude that many of us have is that you couldn’t make it in your own country so you come to mine and want to rob me of my birthright. I remember a decently educated customer at the Bistrot using that precise argument to defend Donald Trump’s remarks on Mexicans being rapist. Our position is a very privileged one. What we fail to recognize is that people like refugees fleeing economic deprivation or political persecution have a hunger to survive and thrive. What they are fleeing from is to them, so awful that they devote their energy to the host country and end up building the host country. I grew up in the UK where the “Pakis” (the generic term a lot of Brits use for South Asians. A good portion were not actually from Pakistan but Gujaratis from Africa) built corner shops and sent their kids to school and even into 10 Downing Street. The native Whites by contrast found gainful employment asking you for small change. Then, we need to remember that the man that many in the “Anti-Refuge” and “Anti-Migrant” camp claim to worship was once a refugee. After her was born in a manger, he and his parents had to get him into Egypt as fast as they could. The reason was simple, Harrod the Great had decided to go on a child murdering spree. [LINK] So, here’s the question. What would have happened to Western Civilization, which claims to be founded on “Judeo-Christian” principles had Jesus not been allowed to flee persecution? How does one claim to accept Christ as lord and savior yet at the same time see people fleeing persecution as a nuisance?   Tang Li *Although I’ve been based mainly in Singapore for nearly two decades, I’ve had the privilege of being able to meet people who have crossed borders and cultures. I’ve befriended ministers and ambassadors and worked on projects involving a former head of state. Yet, at the same time, I’ve had the privilege of befriending migrant labourers and former convicts. All of them have a story to tell. All of them add to the fabric of life. I hope to express the stories that inspire us to create life as it should be.      Read More →