The Rich Boy

Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created – nothing. That is because were all queer fish, queerer behind our faces and voices than we want anyone to know or than we know ourselves. When I hear a man proclaiming himself an ‘average, honest, open fellow”, I feel pretty sure that he was some definite and perhaps terrible abnormality which he has agreed to conceal – and his protestation of being average and honest and open is his way of reminding himself of his misprison.”

There are no types, no plurals. Yet each one of us are so liable to categorization and pigeon-holing despite all the queerness that makes compartmentalization so contrived. Anson Hunter reminds me of a he whom I know, and whose fate seems to be written on the pages of Scott Fitzgerald’s novella The Rich Boy. And I had helped to write it.

I have seen too many 500 days of summer in real life, stretching way longer than the 2 hour film itself, in an excruciating dragging motion that has broken too many plates and downed too many bottles of bitter beer in its ceaseless replay. Sometimes I wish there were a fast-forward button so I could get to the end of it – which invariably begins with a wedding invite from the girl the hopelessly quixotic part of you still wish you would marry, or the chance encounter with her in a park with her kids and dog frolicking around, and you groveling in mid-life crisis. Storylines have become types, too frequently repeated to be even tragic.

I think I need to rewrite my own story.

Game of Assassins

On that epic game of assassins in FroSoCo – which amused me to no end. 

She walks in beauty, armed in stride
Measured in smile and honest in lie
The best laid plans of man and mice,
so says Steinbeck, oft go awry.
But lauren sweet as betrayal is
hoists a pistol shows her might.

He looks intriguing here tonight
Though dressed in tie and suit alright
Is like a chicken on the road
Looking right and left and right
Coyly coyan corners close
Pulled the trigger that ended her night.

He heard she will to crepevine go
Contrived a plan till then laid low
She who knew still shudders so
But pretty lucas won’t let go
till all that’s best of dark and bright
is downed, though how we do not know.

For days along the corridors
Reverberate the same old cries
“Et-u brute?” asks the piteous
“Ate-you, dudette,” smiles the wry.
So Katelyn was not meant to be
And the last trio standing saw to it.

Eventually the trio in black
avowed to end the game in jest
to settle scores and vendettas
with not themselves but those who hold
those giant bazookas that make
a pretty mess and sight to behold.

In fawkesian masks they sit awaiting,
Their fates are sealed but eyes are peeled
Terminators onto they pounce
Revenge for all friendships renounced.
Into the night they battle on
Till both relents and alas, peace out.

Happiness is a water gun
reloaded much with FroSoFun
and now that all has come to past
I too shall stop my bloody rhyme.

Greece’s real crisis: a political quagmire

for the Stanford Progressive

Nothing describes the Greece crisis in starker terms than the numbers, which have been offering scarce consolation for the Greeks and the wider Eurozone. For the fifth consecutive year, Greece is in a recession, with an official unemployment rate of 22%. This being official statistic coming from Greece bureaucracies who have become experts in the game of numbers fudging, we know better than to take it at face value – the real figure is probably higher. Of the unemployed, 46-47% are youths – a perfect recipe for instability. Riots and demonstrations have become so commonplace (on average, 3 demonstrations occur every day) it is not news anymore, but it sure does means trouble for businesses, which have seen some 60% fall in revenue because of the indignados’ sit-ins and protests.

But while the country’s woes are at heart economic ones given its large sovereign debt and deficits, it was not just economic fundamentals that drove Greece and the wider Eurozone into the doldrums. To begin with, Greece’s economy only accounts for 2% of EU’s economy, which is something like Indiana’s share of the US economy. If Indiana goes bust, it’s unlikely US will go under – so it would have been unimaginable, if not with the benefit of hindsight, that the knock-on effects of Greek’s crisis could be as dramatic and severe as it is now. Greek’s public debt to GDP ratio is high (143%), but not unusual among countries today if we put it into perspective – the CIA factbook lists 9 other countries that has a higher public debt than Greece, of which the highest are Japan (198%). There were obvious faultlines in Greece’s economic fundamentals and structure, but what led to investors fleeing in droves with little desire of returning was a problem that runs deeper, and is much harder to fix.

Greece’s crisis is at root a political crisis. What this crisis exposed in incredibly stark terms were not merely the deficits in economic terms, but a veritable deficit in political credibility. The crisis has laid bare all the rank corruption that had been mining all within the toxic political ecosystem: political patronage, clientelism, massive corruptions at all levels of society. Greece’s brand of democracy, it seems, takes on an interesting twist – it is the par exemplar of a democratization of corruption. For the past 20 years, it had been pretending to reform its political and economic systems. It was at one point a role model for its poorer neighbors Romania, Bulgaira and Hungary, priding itself on economic integration into the EU. EU went along with its sweet story and numbers, until the tipping point came and everything soured. As it turned out, lilies that fester smell far worse than weed.

The deficit in political credibility is severe not simply because the ruling party had failed to deliver or blatantly abused public trust, but stems more from the fact that there is no party that comes anywhere close to winning the trust of the majority. While the Greeks in the past had called for a more plural political landscape with more alternative parties leaning towards the center, they now see an emergence of political parties on the extreme left and right. These parties appeal to populist quick-fixes and disgruntled voters who had become disillusioned with the two mainstream parties, and thwart chances of parties achieving a functional majority needed to maintain the bare structural semblances of government. The fragmentation of the Greek political scene has bred far too many cynics, many of whom will cast protest votes that go to the extreme left or right wing parties, or not turn up at all come Election Day on 6 May.

Fixing the Greek political mess will prove much harder than any bailout plans, austerity measures that have been negotiated and pushed through so far. None of the political parties appear willing to work towards a working coalition government, each one continues pulling and tugging in different ways – some gunning for return to Drachma, some wanting to declare Greece bankrupt, and yet others appeal to disruptive xenophobic elements in what is already a divided and disillusioned society. There is precious little enthusiasm for the coming election, and chances of a political party winning a functional majority or any semblance of a mandate is depressingly low.

Unless Greece gets its politics together, prospects will remain grim for a long time to come. But no one really expects to see the light at the end of the tunnel any time soon – certainly not on 6 May, in any case.

listen, darling, listen to your own reflection. and tell me what you hear.

swan song

into the quiet waters it glides
cutting through the mercury rink
never really still
beneath, paddling
in rehearsal for the swan song
that is about to begin.

21 April, not really knowing.

For C. [by Richard Wilbur]

For J. 

After the clash of elevator gates

And the long sinking, she emerges where,

A slight thing in the morning’s crosstown glare,

She looks up toward the window where he waits,

Then in a fleeting taxi joins the rest

Of the huge traffic bound forever west.

On such grand scale do lovers say good-bye—

Even this other pair whose high romance

Had only the duration of a dance,

And who, now taking leave with stricken eye,

See each in each a whole new life forgone.

For them, above the darkling clubhouse lawn,

Bright Perseids flash and crumble; while for these

Who part now on the dock, weighed down by grief

And baggage, yet with something like relief,

It takes three thousand miles of knitting seas

To cancel out their crossing, and unmake

The amorous rough and tumble of their wake.

We are denied, my love, their fine tristesse

And bittersweet regrets, and cannot share

The frequent vistas of their large despair,

Where love and all are swept to nothingness;

Still, there’s a certain scope in that long love

Which constant spirits are the keepers of,

And which, though taken to be tame and staid,

Is a wild sostenuto of the heart,

A passion joined to courtesy and art

Which has the quality of something made,

Like a good fiddle, like the rose’s scent,

Like a rose window or the firmament.

Midnight at a Subway

Into the hollow cylinder of darkness I enter
shuddering -
the chilly draught licks away at the back of my naked neck
in a public display of affection – a zephyric counterpoint
to the couple tugged snugged
hugged away in the corner, arms-locked,
half-eclipsed
by a coterie of moving shades
each waltzing and shifting to the mellow tune
of the copper-glazed saxaphonist -

                Those vagabond shoes
                                Are longing to stray
                                         Right through the very heart of it
                     New York New York

Then the lulling silence was devoured at once
by a dull metallic silver stream
that roared and teared its way through
the rattling steel that stood the test of grime and rime
bits of white and grey in the air aflying
the saxophonist a silent pantomime
her parting kiss a monochromatic polaroid,
captioned: time to say goodbye.

open – wide – lights flood –
shut.
Palmprint on the cold window pane.

The deliverance of adieus left
as speedily as it came.
I stand, over the edge
watching it leave in its howling departure
a buzzing neon white emptiness,
the plaintive sound of parting love.

Life’s Scars

Time and time again I come back to this one poem, each time wishing it’d be the last.

They say the world is round, and yet
I often think it square,
So many little hurts we get
From corners here and there.
But one great truth in life I’ve found,
While journeying to the West-
The only folks who really wound
Are those we love the best.

The man you thoroughly despise
Can rouse your wrath, ’tis true;
Annoyance in your heart will rise
At things mere strangers do;
But those are only passing ills;
This rule all lives will prove;
The rankling wound which aches and thrills
Is dealt by hands we love.

The choicest garb, the sweetest grace,
Are oft to strangers shown;
The careless mien, the frowning face,
Are given to our own.
We flatter those we scarcely know,
We please the fleeting guest,
And deal full many a thoughtless blow
To those who love us best.

Love does not grow on every tree,
Nor true hearts yearly bloom.
Alas for those who only see
This cut across a tomb!
But, soon or late, the fact grows plain
To all through sorrow’s test:
The only folks who give us pain
Are those we love the best.

20.

So I’m turning 20 in a few hours. A-fifth-of-a-century old, probably a quarter through life, and feeling younger than I am. It seemed like just a week ago that I wrote down my first ‘ambition’ in response to “what do you want to be when you grow up?” in a kindergarten class. I wanted to be a policewoman cos I loved playing catching and chasing after people, until I realized that’s not what a policewoman does all the time, and changed my mind. It seemed also like yesterday that I thought I’d just have three kids, watch them grow and die beautifully away – in which case I wouldn’t need to be doing math problem sets now. I still think that way sometimes. Sometimes I look at what I’m doing now and I smile at the irony of those musings.

Sometime back I was talking to a friend, who got me thinking about how to make sense of each juncture in our lives, and what it means to choose. Imagine a window – a long, wide window that stretches from one end to another point far, far away. So wide, so ignorant of boundaries, so much potential – all the space that we as a child had to see the world, all the interesting things outside of the prison of the self which we can see through those sparkling, young and innocent eyes. In the beginning we all start off with that window. As we age and grow older, every decision that you make, big and small, starts closing up on your window like red curtains that sail in from both sides. Our view of the world, our possibilities and options become fewer and fewer. There are lesser things we can change, and lesser things we choose to see (or in fact, can see). We make important decisions that draws new boundaries – we choose our careers, we choose our lifelong partners, we choose what we want to do in the future… every one of those decisions make your window narrower, and narrow yet.

So 20 years went by. 30, 40, 50,60… until our window probably can’t get any narrower. Now slightly exhausted and desiring rest (a word we knew not in our youth), we recline on a couch and look out of the window – a view that will stick with you for the rest of your life. Is it the best view you can get? A view you like, that you would love looking out at every single day for the remaining of your short life on this dream-visited world?

A good life is about making sure that you are left with a view that speaks to your heart at the end of the day. It could be you with three kids running about, it could be you being rich and famous, it could be you forever married to the piano, or the love of your life. And planning for life is about how we narrow that window strategically – or accidentally, for some lucky ones (in which case there is nothing to be said about planning) – such that the penultimate view it encloses is what you like to see. What you would live for, and what gives you strength for living another day.

Just two days ago I was sitting at a train station, waiting. A man walked up to me, sat beside me and started telling me his story. I didn’t know him, and I didn’t ask. I listened while he told me, with a blank countenance staring into a far nothingness, about the story of his son. He was 25, in his prime. Decided one day that there is nothing to live for, and no meaning to be had. Decided that life was not worth living another day, since death will catch you one day anyway. Decided to leave the world without saying goodbye. It’s one of those moments where you go, Oh Shit, while you listen. Prof Harrison spoke of each human life as a little parenthesis in a larger scheme of things during class that day. Here’s one that has ‘oh shit’ in between. With a tragic silence, and a wavering sigh. The train came, and he left.

Maybe some people decided that the view out there isn’t worth looking at anymore. That it’s hard to keep breathing, and easier to pull the plug. I can’t say which is better, but life is what it is. You find yourself in different positions every time you stop to look inwards. You are faced with that few options within sight. You make do. And, like a friend once told me, in life you can learn helplessness or optimism – which would you pick?

Sure, the world is not made for idealists. Disappointments after disappointments, disillusionment after disillusionment will be thrown, like slings of arrows, at you, and it is so, so easy to just say Fuck It and resent everything in this dull and unbecoming world. Cynicism puts a curtain over the little that is left of the window, so the viewer is left to naval-gazing self-clamoring. The alternative is nothing quite grand or happy-ever-after; it is not always very much brighter as grey is to black, but it is certainly more comforting in retrospect. It is an acceptance of the world for what it is, a mellow forbearance for the ugly things in life coupled with that innocent appreciation for the beautiful things in life. It is you looking out the window and seeing not just the depressingly ugly things that go on regardless of your seeing it, but also the pretty things that will be left unappreciated had you not chosen to see them.

And the wonderful thing? We’ve all got a choice. Whatever the determinists say about free will and determinism, I don’t think the wandering stars predetermine everything. I don’t think those moments when I felt so much in control, despite the multitude of unknowns, were mere illusions. And if you choose to seize those moments, call up the youthful idealism that you had when you were 19, and make meaning out of every such moment, you’re in for some helluva lifetime. And even if all seems quite the opposite, just keep breathing. Everything, as my favorite song keeps reminding me, will be OK.

Happy Birthday to me.

The stalling of SOPA: a stray beam of light in American politics

For The Stanford Progressive.

Most people have come to realize that democracy in America is so dysfunctional that it’s hard for one to celebrate it without being called a naive, starry-eyed idealist. As a matter of fact, money speaks louder than anything else in American politics, public discourses have been hijacked by lobbyists and interest groups of all stripes and colors, and the prevailing gridlock in Capitol Hill has convinced us that party politics have conveniently rendered the nation’s interests secondary. “Power to the people” has long become a myth, like a fading graffiti on an abject-looking brick wall discolored by disillusion and cynicism.

The recent stalling of SOPA, however, is a rare beam of light in the darkness that might offer a glint of hope. The controversial Internet censorship bill, despised by the public and netizens as unnecessarily draconian, ineffective, and a blatant curtailment of free speech via Internet censorship, has been stalled due to – by official accounts – a “lack of consensus”. But this probably has less to do with “consensus” in the Congress and more to do with the serious backlash from tech enclaves (right here in Silicon Valley) and the online community, which have responded with blackouts in protest, petition-signing, and inundations of congressional hotlines and websites.

While the bill is not technically scuttled, it appears to be destined for an ignominious defeat, and that gives every Internet user a reason to cheer. It is a victory, and a sign that people can affect policies and bills if enough attention is generated, if enough people care enough, and constructive activism efforts made their way into Washington. Of course, the killing of SOPA isn’t entirely a bottom-up effort that speaks simply of victory of the grassroots or netizens; afterall, it had the backing of a powerful tech industry whose forerunner was Google who no doubt had their own army of lobbyists. The fight may be characterized as a proxy war between the movie and music industries that are pro-SOPA, and the tech industry that is vehemently anti-SOPA. But the countervailing forces, one should realize, certainly wasn’t entirely directed by the tech industry.

What emerged were activist groups such as engineadvocacy.org and americancensorship.org that aimed not just to spread public awareness, but to build some sort of infrastructure that helps to change things in more tangible ways in Washington – an infrastructure that puts the government’s internet policies under greater scrutiny by generating sustained discourse and getting its network right to extend its sphere of influence. In politics, money matters; but knowing the right people who can speak up for you is just as important, and navigating through that complicated mesh of relationships can be a real difficulty. In this case, a strong chorus was generated, powerful enough to have forced SOPA and PIPA proponents to cave in. For the “undecideds” in Congress who didn’t know what to make of SOPA, it became politically disadvantageous to support it in the face of the strong opposition both on line and off.

Why did SOPA pass through the Congress as far as it did? One can take the more cynical view that congressmen who backed SOPA did it merely under pressures of lobby groups from the music and movies industry, but one may also think of them as generally good souls who are well intentioned, but lacking in understanding of how the internet works or how piracy can be effectively combated. Someone (who wishes to remain off the record) once commented that SOPA made it through as far as it did partly because there was a discernable gap between congressmen and the wider Internet community which spawned this knowledge gap – a very plausible claim.

Regardless, here is a rare instance where democracy worked to stop a bad policy in its track – by the sheer force of people (though this did not operate in the absence of big corporations’ backing), where freedom of expression has allowed players outside of the establishment to change the minds of people inside the establishment. And that’s a feat. It took the right mix of disruptive innovators compelled to serve causes that are not being served by the incumbents, to figure out a way to work around the lumbering establishment crowded with clamoring lobbyists, to finally make themselves heard and taken seriously. But stopping something bad is far from enough; true victory comes from building the right infrastructure that can get good things done. It’s entirely likely that SOPA would re-emerge like a phoenix from the ashes in other forms, and when that time comes let’s hope that the tech community can do more than boycotting, but chip in and help those congressmen (many of whom can be your grand-dad) figure out something that actually works.

Democracy in America is still pretty hopeless, but occasionally a faint stray beam of light streams in and that should bring the starry-eyed idealist some temporary comfort.

PAP narratives: Head you lose and Tail you lose too.

Found this in my inbox today, and realized it does ring of some truth:

——————————————————————-

1.   When we  complain that GLCs are marginalising the small businesses for government tenders, PAP says the GLCs can deliver best value  and quality.

2.   When we say foreigners are taking away our jobs, they say foreigners are here  to create jobs.

3.   When PMETs cannot find  jobs, they say degree holders refused to be  security guards.

4.   When we complain about the  huge income divide, they say it is a worldwide  phenomenon.

5.   When we complain about long waiting time and high cost of health, they say  other countries envy our system.

6.   When we  say HDB flats are unaffordable, they say they are affordable if you pay over 30 years or  more.

7.   When we say we have little left for  retirement, they say we will push back the retirement age.

8.   When we say Ministers are  the highest paid in the world, they say corporate CEOs earn much more.

9.   When we say COEs do not ease road congestions, they say they will  build more ERP gantries.

10.  When we say buses  and MRT are too crowded, the Public Transport  Council says they are satisfied with the service .

11.   When we say you are not comparing apples to apples, they say Singapore is unique .

So Head you lose and Tail you lose too!!!

—————————————————–

When every complaint of Singaporeans is met with an unconvincing rejoinder, you know there is something quite wrong with PAP’s narratives. It seems to be missing the point on so many hot potato issues it’s no wonder the 2011 election was watershed the way it was, and cynicism continues hangs like a thick veil in the air months after that. My mother used to complain incessantly about the government and I thought her the typical Singaporean so very fond of complaining; but as I thought more deeply about these issues I realized increasingly that her complaints are quite founded, and although it often misses the complete picture and is necessarily reductive with all her sweeping generalizations, there is truth beneath the patina of grudging prejudice and thoughtless cynicism.

Tocqueville

“Sometimes man advances so quickly that the wilderness closes in again behind him. The forest has only bent beneath his feet and springs up again once he has passed by. As one travels through the new states of the West, buildings are not infrequently found abandoned in the depth of the woods. Often the ruins of a cabin turn up in the remotest solitude and, to one’s astonishment, half-finished clearances witness to both the power and waywardness of human beings. Amid these abandoned fields, on these day-old ruins, the ancient forest soon pushes out new shoots. Animals recover their hold over their domain, smiling nature covers up the traces of man with green branches and flowers and hurries to conceal his transient footsteps.” 

It is hard to expect that any political theorist or historian today can come up with prose of such beauty and poetic sensitivities. Reading Tocqueville for the past few days has felt like watching an extended movie that traverses time and space, past and present, all the protean and permanent that makes you wonder if this man has not a pen of God. And this has been one of his quieter moments of musing. The rest of the tome had been the most eloquent generalizations of man, democracy, tyranny, freedom, and the raw foibles of plans of mice and men… written with such forceful energies and prophetic touches it is so easy to want to believe everything he says, forgetting at once his biases as an aristocrat, and fallibilities as a man. Sometimes I wonder how the dichotomy of matter and art cannot be real, and how, when Gertrude asked Polonius for “more matter, less art”, she was quite mistaken. For matter is art, and the contrary is no less true.

something in the water, something in the water…

The leaves have fallen. Just yesterday I wrote a poem about the maple tree that was so much alive and its foliage set ablaze in torches of red and golden and orange; now it’s balding, its leaves dangling precariously on the frail branches that could hardly withstand the slightest breeze. The floor inherits its bygone youth, the litter of confetti still fresh with the colours of yesterday.

I’m writing now because I’m, for once in so long, bored. I’m waiting for that dreadful math test that is to come in 3 hours, and between now and then yours truly is in a real limbo where doing more math brings diminishing marginal returns, and not doing math puts you in a strange vacuum of uncertainty and disorientation. I’ve been singing for a few hours now – some random songs that has been imprinted now in my subconscious, and now it’s just a long, unending wait till 7pm. God knows why anyone one with a heart at all would start a 3 hour paper at 7pm.

I wear a demeanor made of bright pretty things

What she wears, what she wears, what she wears

Birds are singing on my shoulders, in harmony it seems

How they sing, how they sing, how they sing.

 

Give me nights of solitude, red wine in a glass of two, reclined in a hammock on a balmy evening.

I’ll pretend that it’s no thing that’s skipping my heart when I think

Of you thinking of me babe I’m crazy over you.

 

Give me long days in the sun,

Preludes to the nights to come

Previews of the mornings laying in all lazy

Give me something fun to do, like a life of loving you,

Kiss me quick now baby I’m still crazy over you.

All sweet and pretty, except the last three words. It reminds me of childish puppy love that could find no better words to express that warm fuzzy feeling of infatuation because there isn’t actually a better word to misuse.

A morning view from a room

Past the break of dawn the rolling mists have dissipated,
giving way to a sunburst glorious and shy
that peeps through the foliage of an old elm so sly,
reclined on red maples strangely percolated

with the expectant energy of a darting squirrel
which, now awake and being squirrelly so,
dances about the wild conflagration cast aglow
in sunkissed orange and a morning furor

matched only by the sprawling curls of cirrus
up in the film of blue where a nameless contrail
leaves a scar that parts in two the shale,
the clouds that spread like Andes ridges

slowly and subtly thinning out, disappearing
into a harmless fault
line.

There’s something in the dew studded grass -
something in that quiet sparkle
that pronounces the awakening of the morning outside
and the end of life everywhere else
as lonely people wake to another day
pass a passing comment late
on the beauty that admires them
more than they can reciprocate.

Occupy Stanford, Occupy The Future, and Why Care?

A piece I wrote for the Stanford Progressive, in response to the recent Occupy Movements on campus and elsewhere in US.

For some three weeks now, Occupy Stanford has been staging walkouts and rallies as part of the broader Occupy Movement that has swept across United States since mid September. These have been poorly received by a largely lukewarm student population with whom the “We are the 99%” protestations hardly resonates, despite a very committed student-run General Assembly that is still camping 24/7 in Meyer library now as I write. Some have called it a hypocritical movement (“We are the 1%, for god’s sake!), others have criticized as being a reactive jumping on to the national bandwagon with no real direction, and yet more others simply don’t really care or know what to make of it – the Stanford bubble does insulate students from the outside world to our detriment sometimes.

It is also not uncommon to overhear conversations about the movements at dining tables, which often end a dismal laugh-off, “Occupy Stanford is a joke!” And it’s in some sense true – there is no real protest in Stanford – Stanford certainly don’t share the enthusiasm of our neighbor UC Berkeley and Davis, whose student-led Occupy movements have gone so far as to ignite violent police crackdowns. But joke or no joke, protest or no protest, I think there are strong reasons for a school-wide conversation on a movement that is a symbolic expression of profound inequality that pervades American society today. Let me begin with a few observations on campus that has set me thinking over the past weeks:

“We are the 1% – why should we care?”

This is, to my mind, the most disturbingly snobbish statement I have heard around campus with reference to the Occupy movements. Sure, Stanford is a “billionaire university” and most graduates do go on to do very well, many eventually becoming the “1%” in the economic hierarchy. But to say that this gives Stanford students little reason to do anything about the problem of inequality, or there they are no in any position to make noise about it betrays a sense of arrogance and myopic indifference. In fact, I would argue that it is precisely because they are seen as the 1% that they should make a statement about the untenability of the status quo: that inequality on this works to society’s great detriment and should not be tolerated, that there are systemic flaws that has allowed corrupt corporate culture to take a strong foothold that needs to be corrected, that America government cannot yield itself to becoming a “wall-street government”.

The whole “percentage” metaphor that has captured public imagination has been the key way by which the movement has been framed, and if we look deeper one realizes that it is not mere rhetorical flourish. On some levels, it does capture the essence of the gross inequality that protestors are railing against today – the fact that the top 1% of American populous possess wealth equivalent to 50% of Americans (that’s a whopping 55%) should trouble anyone with genuine concern about the health of American social fabric and any care for the ideals on which this country was founded upon.

Yet ultimately, it should not matter which “percent” students come from. As much as this protest has been characterized as a class war in which the have-nots run up against the well to do, it is at its root a protest against broader, systemic failures of a system that has failed to deliver equitable outcomes to the people. Stanford students, whether they like it or not, are part of this system and there are more reasons than one to care about the future of this system.

Seen in this light, Occupy Stanford – despite largely failing to gain traction on campus – is not a mere show of solidarity of the “XX” percent of Americans; it is a movement that vocalizes and acknowledges that the economic inequality is a serious problem that cannot be underestimated. The General Assembly’s attempts have been feeble at best, but it is also a reassuring sign that Stanford students are not completely enclosed within a bubble of indifference towards the tempestuous world outside.

“They don’t know what they’re protesting for!”

A common criticism about the Occupy movements – here in Stanford as in elsewhere – is the seeming lack of concrete objectives and focus. Some Occupy movements in parts of the States have tried to diffuse the appearance of vagueness by proposing concrete lists of explicit demands – such as tax reforms for the wealthy, limits on contributions to political campaigns, abolishment of corporate personhood, while others – such as Occupy Wall Street – has no such concrete litanies. Occupy Stanford likewise seems to lack a list of specific reforms or demands.

My sense is that this “vagueness” and lack of clear direction of Occupy movements is to be expected. One reason is this: no one really knows how to fix the system. Embroiled within the protests is a complex panoply of problems, many of which are the same problems that caused the financial crisis in the first place: lax regulation of the financial industry, an amoral corporate culture that is not confined to Wallstreet alone, the hijacking of public political discourses by corporate power and lobbyists… all of which are intricately intertwined so that it is almost impossible to proclaim that any litany of solutions can effectively fix the messed up system no one can even come close to fully grasp.

As a result, protests that have proffered specific goals often present “solutions” that create the false impression that the systemic problems plaguing America are easily solved by particular “silver bullets” (say, abolish corporate personhood!), some of which are not well-considered in the first place. The people can hardly be expected to hold the solutions to the myriad of exceedingly complex problems that continue to frustrate policymakers, puzzle the academia and confuse politicians. How, for instance, do you solve the problem of unbridled greed? It is naïve to expect that the solution can be easily summarized in a statement of demand, which I think explains why, unlike past civil rights movements where the people are rallying for clear demands such as universal suffrage and racial equality, the Occupy Movement is at best seen as one that vocalizes dissatisfaction, drawing national attention to a problem instead of a concrete demand. And that is just as important – the first step to solving a problem is acknowledging that it exists and merits attention.

“Occupy The Future”: the start of a meaningful and calibrated discourse in Stanford

Occupy Stanford, despite its feeble attempts at rallying the larger student body, has at the very least proven that some Stanford students are concerned about the glaring inequalities that characterize American society. This week saw the emergence of a new coalition of faculty, undergraduates and graduates under the name of Occupy The Future, which kickstarted a series of events yesterday with the film-screening of Charles’ Ferguson academy award-winning documentary “Inside Job”, one of the most incisive analysis of the events that precipitated the 2008 subprime crisis and its aftermath.

With student essays posted daily on the Boston Review, discussions and roundtables, Occupy The Future looks like a promising movement that can hopefully inspire a school-wide conversation on the Occupy movements that have transpired and the underlying issues concerning inequality, corporate power and government. It’s a movement that rings with a sense of pragmatism, one that reminds Stanford students about the common future that has to be shaped not tomorrow, but today.

I end with a quote from Noam Chomsky’s recent article:

“…if you want to change the world you’d better try to understand it. That doesn’t mean listening to a talk or reading a book, though that’s helpful sometimes. You learn from participating. You learn from others. You learn from the people you’re trying to organize. We all have to gain the understanding and the experience to formulate and implement ideas.”

The Occupy Movement is an unprecedented opportunity to overcome America’s current hopelessness, and – even for non-American Stanford students – a great live lesson on how people can change the world for the better. It seems vague because the problem is complex and far from easy to pin down, but give it time and something constructive might just come out of it – if people care enough.

Lady with the floppy hat

Now the lady with the floppy hat
returns to her shabby room
looking just the way she left it –
lights dimly casting flickering shadows
on the uncemented bricks of age,
desk strewn with the instruments of vanity
lipstick licking the air, the mirror the eyeshadow the panoply
of cosmetics laying there as if there is some unfinished business
to be attended to. As if the lady with the floppy hat and – now she takes it off –
tousled hair
needs another inch thick of paint
on her anesthetized face downcast eyes and pursed dainty lips.

As if an inch isn’t enough.

The flickering shadows dance their way into her,
down an impetuous vortex of things forgotten:
men who came and went, love she never fell in
and never fell out of, cologne she had savored
and let intoxicate, roses left by the door
which would wilt and turn into velvet dust
never to be replaced again –
except in the faint anamnesis every now and then
when she lay alone staring at the ceiling
where a shadow puppet show plays
ending invariably
with no ending –
for the morning sun will flood the stage
long before she could close her shadowed eyes
to dream of happily ever after.

Then she puts on her floppy hat,
lays out the canvas before the mirror
and with dexterous strokes paint another inch thick -

As if an inch isn’t enough.

Till she has buried all she does not want remembered
nor forgotten, till her smile will not break through
the torpid crust of paint upon which the flickering shadows dance
till the morning sun shines through and down the white curtains fall.

Waking up to a mirror by the bedside

At dawn I peer into the mirror and I see
a face that time has chiseled upon scars of a past innocence, of blissful oblivion
whose remnants now crowded by haphazard lines etched in nonchalantly
by the pen of experience and painful awareness.
You’re never the same, isn’t it ever clear?
not the hand that scribed the last letter,
not the mind that so informed the hand
not the heart that sighed its sorrow last
not the being who existed a split second past.
For just as we never step into the same river twice
we never see the same reflection twice.
But if you shall mourn what has been and what will be,
dry your tears and heave a sigh,
gather your rosebuds while you may,
write a poem you’ll soon forget,
have your breakfast and carry on.

Cacoon

Nestled in the cacoon that time has woven she tosses and turn, throwing herself
at the cold translucent walls that relentlessly bruises her shriveling dry body
as she fights, gasping for space, imagining and re-imagining that hole
from which light will pour in at last, making visible
the thin glistening gossamer threads that has her imprisoned in indifferent comfort,
from which she shall break free, fly away or die.

On the role of our President

Not long ago someone asked me about the role of the president in a supposedly very important interview about the difference between a nominated and elected President in Singapore, his roles, and whether he should be allowed to voice his personal opinions in public. I was in some measure stumped (although I did give a very unreflective reply), because although I did read about the upcoming presidential elections in the papers, I haven’t actually given serious thought about it. Besides knowing a little about the custodial and ceremonial roles of the president I haven’t had the imagination or curiosity to think deeper about what this role can be.

But it is an important question, and this is an important election even though it is unlikely to be as defining and critical as the watershed election in May this year. Some people see this as an extension of that election, some as a “second referendum” of sort, but it should be clear that this election is really quite different. It is not about any political parties, it is about an individual who is going to serve as the head of state of the nation, who will be the face of Singapore during foreign missions, and who will need to – despite the independence he presumably has – work with the government to tide through uncertain times ahead. An election – rather than a nomination by the parliament – sets the stage for a more participatory democracy in Singapore, and is in line with the (marginally) more liberal political climate in Singapore now.

Tony Tan recently argued that a nominated candidate should be running for a post that already is rather than a post that should have been. He is calling for respect for the clear parameters of the president’s power, a point sufficiently emphasized by other Tans as well, though it was unclear what these parameters were. The constitution is there, but interpretations vary.  On paper, the President has very limited power except in five narrowly defined areas: the spending of past reserves, key public service appointments, Internal Security Act detentions, Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act restraining orders and Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau investigations (Straits Times, 22 July 2011, President’s free speech: Lessons from Britain, by Elgin Toh). He holds custodial powers and not executive powers, which means that he is in no position to advance any of his policy agenda, and can only veto government actions in the above five mentioned specified areas.  It’s interesting to note that the President used to have veto powers over “any defiance and security measure”, but this provision was removed in 1994 on the ground that it the power to declare war rests on the Prime Minister and his cabinet, so Singapore cannot risk a tussle between the PM and the President. Criticisms that this makes it easy for any rogue government to circumvent constitutional safeguards were ignored.

Since the President “must act in accordance with the advice of the Cabinet or of a Minister acting under the general authority of the Cabinet.” On all other matters, one cannot expect the president to have much influence over public spheres of debate. On hindsight I wouldn’t have agreed with my interviewer that an elected president has any more independence than a nominated president because that’s really for the president himself to decide. The only one meaningful difference seems to be that an elected president is directly answerable to the electorate, while a nominated president might be more inclined to toe the government’s line since his powers had been accorded by the parliament.

Maybe this explains my own impression of the President since young: a ceremonial, symbolic figure that features in every school hall and general office, who occasionally gets media attention (e.g. during President’s Challenge) and goes around shaking hands during Istana open house. Nobody really knows why the president is important; but there is always this strange, nebulous allure with a figure like that. It is also why my friends and I sometimes feel envious that Britain still has their monarchy to showcase a fairytale come true once in a while during royal weddings.  (though the more rational side of me still questions why the British electorate tolerates such extravagance when their economy is close to being in the doldrums)

But coming back to the role of the president – no clause in the constitution says that the President should be dumb, so that theoretically means that a President can voice his own opinions on day-to-day affairs publicly without contravening the constitution which prohibits the President from interfering with politics of the government, but not the expression of his opinions on them. That means there is potential for a president to nudge public opinion in the direction which he thinks is in line with Singapore’s interests, and still be above politics. That means he can do so much more than merely overlooking school assemblies in silence through a photo frame, shaking hands and walking down the files of soldiers during NDP.

But there is danger in the President being “the people’s voice”, as one presidential hopeful Tan Kin Lian seems to aspire towards. Ideally that should be left to the MPs – they are supposed to represent the people and voice out their concerns in parliament. Having a duplicate figure for the same role risks open confrontation on who can represent the people best, and it is dangerous to envision a president with his own sphere of hard power, something that can be potentially divisive for the country (or comical, a la Putin and Medvedev). The best we can hope for is an elected president who utilizes soft power (that the constitution cannot deny) to effect meaningful influence. This means seeking to attract, inspire and persuade, and rather than being “the people’s voice” – a manifesto that suggests a president should bend to populist pressures – he should be someone who can synthesize the differing viewpoints on the ground, exercise his own wisdom and lend legitimacy to credible narratives or viewpoints that might not have been accorded the attention they merit by the parliament.

My ideal president will be someone capable of threading the fine lines between “working with the government”, “independence” and “moral leadership”. The Straits Times’ recent interviews (view here: http://media.straitstimes.com/st/home_razor.php#?w=576) saw the 4 Tans challenging each other with their own understanding of what the president should do. Some candidates are inclined to pit these ideas as mutually exclusive polar opposites – having a cordial working relationship (or what Tan See Kay calls “emotional attachment”) does not necessarily compromise on the independence of the President in performing his function, and moral leadership does not mean one needs to play maverick and appear anti-establishment. In fact a President is likely to function better if he can gain the respect of both the people and the government. The art is in knowing how to exert impactful influence with subtlety.

So the role of the president really depends on the elected president himself, what influence he sees fit to exert, and how he does that acrobatically. The constitution stipulates many dimensions of his role, but there is also a lot left unsaid and which remains to be penned out in invisible ink by the he who will soon appear on the photo frames of every Singapore school hall.

And geez I wish I could vote.

Disappointment

”Seek not to have that everything should happen as you wish, but wish for everything to happen as it actually does happen, and you will be serene.” – Epictetus.

What terrible advice. It’s as good as saying lower your expectations everytime you don’t meet them, and on you go on a declension to lower and lower expectations. How can anyone be so serene and acquiescent when you do in fact have choices and the power to change?

Why I Hate Reading Maps

by Gabriel Gadfly

I have unrolled a map
onto my kitchen table
and put one finger
where you are and
another where I am.

The space between
is only inches. That close,
I could feel you breathing.
I could reach out and
run my fingers through
every strand of your hair,
touch your lips and
barely need to move.

In the corner of the map
there is a guide for judging scale:
every inch a hundred miles
full of roads and rivers and trees,
the guide a sharp reminder
that you are where you are
and I am where I am,
inches apart.

For the sake of creation

“If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something”  - Kurt Vonnegut, “A Man Without a Country”

Here’s the thing: we don’t CREATE enough. The process of creation seems to have been consigned to the gallows after a child enters school, in which he is taught the rules of a game called life (often told, also, that he is in no capacity to change them), what is right and wrong fashioned in terms of ‘what gets you the carrot or else the stick’, and instilled within him a sense of discipline. That means not colouring outside of the black lines that bound a picture, leaving exactly two square spaces before anything in chinese, writing a “creative” piece using a list of “creative” phrases (such as “It is a beautiful afternoon. The sky is azure blue and dotted with magnolia clouds”) set down by the teacher who says it is a “non-exhuastive” list without really telling the child what that word means. But we were still creating, only within certain boundaries. As we climb up the academic ladder, those boundaries become smaller and smaller, until every creation bears semblance with every other creation. Not least because they are borne out of the same cookie-cutter. In Chinese we call that “千篇一律”.

The cookie-cutter is, however, constantly evolving – because the needs of the society, the economy are constantly evolving. As you grow older you are taught to think critically, and depending on where you end up after you roll your dice at the PSLE game you are taught different modes of thinking. If you’re lucky you land yourself somewhere that teaches you how to think, if you’re less so you’re taught what to think – or not to think at all. And what of creation? It becomes a means to an end which is in turn a means to another end. But hey, at least we’re still creating.

Ironically enough, the real tragedy sets in after you leave school and enter the workplace. The essays you write (cookie-cutter style as they may be) , the things you invent (even if it was only to get that grade) will come to matter less and less, because somehow your future workplace doesn’t need you to go on flights of fancy expounding the idealistic beliefs of your naive self. All these you will have to padlock in a secret box of yours, tucked into a corner to collect dust so that one day, as you unpack it during spring-cleaning, you will come to marvel at what you were once capable of creating, and let out a long sigh when you realize that you have long lost that ability.

And why? Because as you grow older there are a thousand other things that matter more than creating things for the sake of it. You have your bills to pay, your children to tend to, your bosses to please, your portfolio to look after… and you get inundated in “making a living”. Creation becomes a mere recreation, something on the side-line that you like to believe keeps that bit of soul in you alive. But it doesn’t hold the same meaning as the child engrossed in inventing the next big game plan with his trove of monsters and rangers, held in rapt attention by the his very own creation. And god knows how many pulitzer prize winning authors we have lost to the financial industry, and how many potential Steve Jobs we have lost to the public service in Singapore.

I haven’t gone through all that adult stuff, but I’m already beginning to realize. Much as the more idealistic part of me says I can live my own life the way I want to, and keep creating things that matter to myself and others, I know too well that another thousand others like myself have forgotten about these resolutions set down once upon a time. I’ve tried to hold on to my pen, with some effort, but god knows how long more I can do that. Not a problem in the next four years, but I’m not too sure about the next forty. I can only wish that I’ll always remain curious at heart, who always feels the impulse to create something new, something that will surprise myself and who knows, others too – in a good way.

So it’s an atlas moth.

A mahogony brown beauty on the white-washed wall outside my apartment on a sultry morning. Up close and personal.

Multiculturalism or cultural excess?

Death knells for ‘multiculturalism’ has never been louder. In France and Germany, multiculturalism has been deemed – embarrassing as it might be to acknowledge – a failed experiment.  People everywhere living under the forces of globalization increasingly find themselves less tolerating of the influx of foreigners and with them cultures and ways of life that appear diametrically different. It isn’t xenophobia at work here; perhaps there is some of it, but most concern themselves with very pragmatic matters: jobs, costs of living, integration. Politicians everywhere have tried to use multiculturalism as the standard justification for liberal immigration policies, championing merits of its cousin: diversity.

Both “diversity” and “multiculturalism” are so in vogue that it is hard to imagine anybody seriously against it without being slammed as a xenophobic big-head. Yet the reality points to increasing resistance and rejection of ‘diversity’ in a world that is irreversibly globalized. Just how should we prize diversity? How much is ‘cultural vibe’ or a ‘melting pot’ (to quote the official clichés) really worth? Why do we celebrate diversity in the first place? I found myself asking these questions when I was writing about immigration in a recent paper (now published here) and later on when presenting a short presentation on meritocracy. The answers to these questions may impinge on so many aspects of what we take for granted in Singapore and elsewhere: the government’s “multiculturalism” policy (as part of its 5M philosophy), social justice, integration, right down to trickier issues like affirmative action, and whether you ought to go all incensed because your daughter didn’t get that place in her dream university or scholarship on grounds that has little to do with objective personal merit.

Let’s first put the whole idea of multiculturalism into perspective. One can take different attitudes to this matter, and for the sake of some clarity this may be represented as such:

<—— cultural intolerance —–cultural tolerance —- cultural accommodation—

celebrating cultural diversity — cultural relativism——>

On the extreme left we have the dogmatic who sees good only in monoculture, often exaggerating differences between cultures and who would not hesitate to take any elements that might compromise the homogeneity or ‘purity’ of its own culture. People who are cultural tolerant are more benign, but the us vs them mindset nonetheless persists, while people who are cultural accommodating may acknowledge the differences, but live and let live – many in this category might be driven by a fear of monoculture and intolerance which are often associated with violent culture wars.  Positive affirmation of diversity comes only in the fourth category, in which people actually see differing culture as worthy of celebration, which is quite different from cultural relativism which takes a hands-off attitude of indifference. The upshot of cultural relativism is that settled moral views of all cultures are necessary right –a position which in my opinion speaks of a refusal to take stands and intellectual laziness; it is also a self-defeating position: if some cultures endorses intolerance of other cultures, it remains committed to endorsing intolerance which runs up against the very essence of ‘relativism’. (so if you ask me, I would very much like to exclude cultural relativism altogether)

Where does multiculturalism lie on the spectrum? There’re probably two ways of looking at this. On the most fundamental level, multiculturalism refers to a society made diverse by mass immigration – it is a state of affair rather than an attitude. A society that is actually multicultural in the long run probably falls under any category except cultural intolerance (in which case multiculturalism is highly unsustainable). On the other hand, multiculturalism might also refer to the policies government employ to manage such diversity. To the extent that it promotes integration the society tends rightwards towards accommodation and celebrating cultural diversity (rather than cultural relativism, which is really philosophical suspect position to take). Most governments have aimed for ‘celebrating cultural diversity’ as the ideal. But why should cultural diversity be celebrated?

Rather, should cultural diversity be celebrated at all? The intuitive response would be yes, since biological diversity is celebrated and in fact crucial for natural selection to work out better adapted species. There are of course many non-biological reasons.  Historically, creative innovative cities and were nearly all cosmopolitan; this was true of ancient Athens, medieval Florence, post-revolutionary Paris, fin-de-siècle Vienna and modern cosmopolitan cities like New York and London that drew talent from all corners of the world. In a modern knowledge-based economy, the economic value of new ideas, different types of experience, diverse ways of thinking about problems are increasingly high. Even if the skills that foreigners bring in are not markedly superior, diversity in itself creates opportunities for economic growth. A regular injection of newcomers can enhance economic dynamism and cultural vitality, something a population growing organically on its own may not be imbued with. This argument alone makes diversity very appealing, and countries pursuing economic growth cannot help but introduce some narrative of ‘multiculturalism’ to manage the increasing diversity amongst the populous. Hence the romantic notions of “a rich tapestry of human cultures” (which I must say is quite aesthetically appealing as a metaphor), “variety is the spice of life”, and the oft-featured word ‘harmony’.

But the utter failure of state policies in promoting multiculturalism in Europe tells us that there are very real tradeoffs to diversity. We see how it has resulted in fragmented societies and the rise of radical rhetoric across Europe: In Germany, the increasing isolation of second-generation German Turks has made some more open to radical Islamism; in Britain the promotion of multicultural policies led to the de facto treatment of individuals from minority groups not as citizens but simply as members of particular ethnic units. “Multiculturalism” policies inadvertently created opportunities for a rancorous chorus of populist politicians to scapegoat immigrants and stoke fears among the public of the perils of diversity. Some of these stem from carelessly considered policy decisions, others have to do with the fact that there are tradeoffs attached to diversity.

No matter how often politicians invoke metaphors of ‘melting pot’ and ‘rich tapestries’, here’s one hard fact: diversity undermines unity, and there are limits to how diverse a society can be (beyond that it hits the tipping point, falling into cultural intolerance). People living in a community over significant periods of time acquire a common identity and a way of life that forms the tacit bond fostering unity and cohesion which are essential for any community’s long-term survival. It is the us-vs-them mindset that creates different moral social categories and standards, and which explains the tribal tug every society feels. It’s not xenophobia; it’s what has kept societies going for hundreds or thousands of years – only when citizens feel mutually obligated can a society function healthily, and too diverse a polity dilutes such unity and confidence.

The melting pot metaphor is a beautiful metaphor in some sense, hinting at desirable compromises that integrates and assimilates different cultures. But the reality is seldom as pretty as the analogy. Just as too many cooks spoil the broth, too many diametrically different elements spoil the melting pot. The preservation of distinct ethnocultural identities in a single polity is not always easy, or even desirable. What governments should recognize is that there is a limit to how much diversity a society can tolerate – excessive diversity brings about problems that can make an originally receptive and welcoming society sceptical and therefore less culturally accommodating. Singaporeans, for example, are not a xenophobic bunch to begin with; but problems arise when the magnitude and speed of immigration is left unchecked, hampering timely integration of newcomers.

The upshot is this: there is no convincing reason to adopt a generalized valuing celebration of all cultures within any society (especially when sinister features abound in some). Because slogans of celebration are naturally simplistic and broadly all-encompassing, it is important that they are not misread as indiscriminate celebration of every conceivable culture that society happens to chance upon. Cultural tolerance, accommodation, celebration remain good antidotes for cultural intolerance, which historically have led to catastrophic crimes against humanity. Such positive and tolerant outlooks should be promoted, but instead of celebration or disparagement as default positions, citizenries and governments can take a more nuanced approach. This involves continually calibrating their judgements based on a whole range of features in a diversity of cultures, according to evolving societal conditions, contexts and times. And where celebration is warranted it should not the celebration of diversity per se but the valuing of particular worthy features of different cultures. At the end of the day it is a melting pot we’re pursuing, not a hotchpotch; cooks tending to the broth would do well to be selective about what they throw in to the bubbly mix.

perhaps Patagonia

Digging through some poetry that I kept for myself, I found this little gem which – when gazed into – speaks all of my dream to me. The day I stand breathless cold facing the peninsular of endless snow-covered peaks I will write my own Patagonia. Sans the word perhaps. 

Patagonia

Kate Clanchy

I said perhaps Patagonia, and pictured
a peninsula, wide enough
for a couple of ladderback chairs
to wobble on at high tide. I thought

of us in breathless cold, facing
a horizon round as a coin, looped
in a cat’s cradle strung by gulls
from sea to sun. I planned to wait

till the waves had bored themselves
to sleep, till the last clinging barnacles,
growing worried in the hush, had
paddled off in tiny coracles, till

those restless birds, your actor’s hands,
had dropped slack into your lap,
until you’d turned, at last, to me.
When I spoke of Patagonia, I meant

skies all empty aching blue. I meant
years. I meant all of them with you.

When the still morning meets a gentle zephyr

That is no gust – a slight zephyr perhaps – but sure it does send

Trees a-swaying and dancing in voluptuous salsa

Breathing music into the morning air and orange confetti

Falling in voluminous clouds in a tropical snowsquall of

Falling leaves.

 

A wave of repose behind the window panes, a quiet serenity

thin as a gossamer thread. Yet they are all out there -

The woman sauntering by and the butterfly fluttering by –

I cannot reach nor feel nor taste and smell,

Yet see I can, in all its grandeur and gaiety

 

Behind the window panes I know

I am breathing with all it all, feeling each pulse of life,

Each ebb and flow that has to end

with leaves falling gently to the ground

from which I was born.

5th Singapore International Piano Pedagogy Symposium

5^th Singapore International Piano Pedagogy Symposium

20 – 24 June 2011, Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music

If musicians were time-travellers traversing across time and space playing music from times of old to the avant-garde, then the 5^th Singapore International Piano Pedagogy Symposium had been a most intriguing time machine. Themed “Beyond Piano Teaching: Discovering the Past, Serving the Future”, the symposium brought together piano pedagogues and in a delightful sojourn to the past in a bid to rediscover the present. For five days participants immersed themselves in an exciting array of workshops ranging from lectures and masterclasses by a distinguished panel of presenters, to a fun-filled Baroque dance workshop by eminent dancer Paige Whitley-Bauguess.

The exploration of the past, present and future began – as was most appropriate – with the past. “Teachers are time-travellers that keep going back to the past to keep it alive”, so said Dean Kramer and Claire Wachter in their keynote address, a perfect preamble that was to linger in most minds for the entire symposium. Examining piano music from various time periods, Kramer and Wachter threw new light on the perennial question of whether composers were the product or maker of the cultural zeitgeists that were later neatly defined as “baroque, classical, romantic, 20^th century”. What emerged was the bold suggestion that it was the creative genius of various master composers that defined their epoch and that meant each work deserves interpretation not merely according to stylistic rules belonging to any time period, but according to the intentions of its creator.

It was therefore unsurprising that Kramer and Wachter lends a personal touch rather than didactic interpretations in subsequent lecture-demonstrations on music by Beethoven, Chopin, Lizst, Schumann and Scarlatti. The take-aways were not so much “answers” but new perspectives that were well-worth pondering over. Equally thought-provoking had been the many concurrent sessions running throughout the week, from pedalling techniques and pedagogy methods to aural training, music scholarship, contemporary music, and discovering insights from particular compositions and pedagogues.

What was interesting – and in fact admirable – had been the particular attention paid to broader issues pertinent to the local context. In particular, discussions on the place of piano examinations in Singapore today had forced a re-evaluation of the underlying premises behind gearing up students for examinations. The closing forum saw participants entertaining flights of fancy (if you had a chance to go back in time in history, where would you go and what would you do?), Kramer sharing candidly about his experience learning under legendary artist Vladimir Horowitz, and important questions on the relevance of classical music in this modern age dominated by pop and rock.

The most memorable moments, most participants would concur, were spent dancing to the familiar tunes from Baroque dance suites and recreating a merry folkdance party scene reminiscent of scenes in Jane Austen’s novels. Listening to a baroque suite never felt the same again. And as the time machine landed gently back to the present at the end of five days, the time travellers – these teachers and pedagogues – have already begun on another journey to “serve the future”.

Chan Chi Ling

Chiang Mai

Before long it was time to leave for the North of Thailand, the “New City” that is Chiang Mai. Travelling in a sleeper train for 12 hours can be quite an experience, especially when you have nice neighbours to talk to and share food with. That we didn’t manage to get first class tickets (which gives you a private cabin space instead of sharing it with 30+ other people) turns out to be a blessing in disguise. We slept on the upper deck of the train cabin, a snug and comfy space with just enough room for one body flip, or one-and-a-half if you’re skinnier. And what’s a train ride without a book? J composed music while I finished reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle on the train and got started on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which was a really apt title for anyone “on the road”. Protagonist Sal’s adventures and journey to the west and back played out quite magically on a bumpy train ride.

“I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones. The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centrelight pop and everybody goes “Aww!”

In my little train cabin I wondered if I would meet a person like that, and what I would say to him. Or do with him.

Then, Zzz.

Woke up to a never-ending stretch of mountains, padi fields, forests and a growling tummy. In-train food was obviously overpriced in Thai terms but had some sandwiches nevertheless, just so I had the carbo to sustain me throughout the day. Sat down for a little chit-chat with the neighbours, two spirited mother and daughter from Bangkok who happen to own a whole international hotel chain and studied in Switzerland and the US; they were more than happy to share their stories in a bid to kill time, and we were more than happy to listen to them. I had much less to share; afterall, my story was only about to unfold.

Before long the train halted, the train horn sounded and we arrived, disembarked, said goodbyes and began the next half of our journey. Because a handicrafts tour happened to be part of the hotel deal we started with that (we were too tired to do any planning so going with the flow became the natural option). It was, as to be expected of anything by a tour agency, touristy in nature. Leather factories, honey shop, cotton factories, silverware shops… we made it a point not to buy anything since any touristy place is obviously going to be overpriced; and Thais being really nice and courteous people will never coerce you into buying anything you have no appetite for – something I am very, very thankful for on hindsight, having had nightmares of China hawkers and shop keepers touting and hounding you for money to buy something you have absolutely no interest in (the next time I go shopping in china I must prepare a LEAVE ME ALONE tag in Chinese)

Our first serious destination was Anussaan, a food street tucked in the middle of a night bazaar. Here was rows of eateries and restaurants situated in a compact complex, much in the fashion of a monopolistic competitive market (sorry I haven’t gotten over econs) with plenty of product differentiation :p The only that caught my eye was the restaurant that hung a banner of a picture of THE HOLY GRAIL: Mango Sticky Rice. Boy I’ve been looking for this since I was born! Khao niaw mamuang, that’s what they call it in Thai. To my great delight they have a whole think-menu of other stuff, and I finally cast my bets on a steamed fish with lime, a SGD$1 fried rice and Tom Kar Kai (spicy chicken coconut soup) which was brave of me since I don’t eat spicy food. What came didn’t disappoint:

And there was only one word fit for the Mango Sticky Rice: Divine.

Day 2 in Chiangmai was when the real adventure begins. With two other New Zealanders we headed to the far South of Chiangmai, host to the Maewin waterfall and a number of hill tribes in the mountains. Up the hills we trekked as the mozzies feasted on us, though I was too distracted by the beautiful scenery to really give a damn. A poetic picture it was: Mountains stretched far across the padi fields, climbed high into the misty clouds as farmers’ backs facing the cloudless sky hard at work; Two happy dogs chasing each other in a field of yellow flowers, wagging their tails in delight as they frolicked about, oblivious to the real world out there; cattle grazing in quiet tranquillity before the steep mountains, nibbling away in indifference – as all cattle do. All I lacked was some paint and an easel.

Somewhere remote in the mountains lived villages of native hill tribes living a life of simplicity and no doubt hardship. Already these tribes are diminishing because the younger generations have all moved to the cities which promises better prospects than the backbreaking work they would otherwise be destined to do at home. Those who remained relied on tourism on top of farming for sustenance. One wonders how long they will last before modernization gathers more pace and engulf the last men and women standing in these villages, along with the traditional way of life that has been preserved well into the 21^st century. In the Karen tribe I see a bare-footed young boy with eyes riveted on the ground, playing with a big red hairy caterpillar with unrelenting focus, picking up stones and pebbles in an attempt to squash it.  That was probably his version of XBOX or PSP. Fortunately he didn’t have one or he would become one of those deprived children, whose eyes would not leave a tiny black screen, clutching on to that gameboy for his life. It’s a tragedy, the way some of our city children grow up living in an ersatz virtual world thinking everything in the black screen was real and the only thing worth living for.

We continued the other quarter of our journey on elephants, which was positively the most inefficient mode of transport thanks to their voracious appetite. The forest path was relatively straightforward, but we ended up travelling in a zig-zag fashion because Siti the elephant was continuously foraging for food, climbing up steep hills and making abrupt u-turns that nearly threw me off it, and going in the wrong direction so that the herder had to hook up its huge ears and lead it by the nose ear. It was more adrenaline-pumping than a roller coaster ride because here was a female elephant and god knows when its mood swings; a memorable experience, nevertheless.

We made it to the MaeWin waterfall, but tides were high and water rushing forward at great pace so it was impossible to take a dip in it (not that we intended to anyway). But it sure made a cool area for temporary respite. Going further south we came to the other side of the raging river, a tamer one with fewer rapids so it was fit for bamboo rafting. Gliding down the river, admiring the sunlight bouncing from the waters, listening to the songs of the cicadas, I was then reminded of this poem:

江 雪

柳宗元

千 山 鸟 飞 绝,

万 径 人 踪 灭。

孤 舟 蓑 笠 翁，

独 钓 寒 江 雪。

Night fell, and we were back to civilization in the city centre of ChiangMai, a place that has preserved some of the atmosphere of an ancient village alongside modern urban sophistication. For a person quite indifferent to shopping the Sunday Night Market was surprisingly attractive, and enthralling  with all the colourful handicrafts of the indigenous people and tantalizing aroma of street food. The place was a lot less touristy and cliché, and it would have been a fruitful shopping experience had it not rained that night. We ended up dawdling our time away in a little eatery, listening to a live band jam, eating mango sticky rice (yes, again) and drinking some really sweet tea. Then we trudged back in a yellow poncho, our feet soaked wet but happy still.

The next day was another last minute decision to visit the Wat Phrathat temple in Doi Suthep, a mountain that climbs high into the clouds, so that it is autumn above and summer below. The journey up was long and windy, circling round and round the mountain in our ascent. It was dizzying, and for the unfortunate ones with altitude sickness this journey can be a difficult one. But at last you will reach one of the most sacred site for Thais, the Wat Phrathat temple. Compared to the Grand Palace in Bangkok it is a lot quieter, more serene, and its peaceful backyard perfect for meditation. The jedi was a familiar sight, but in the absence of noisy crowds it gains a more dignified disposition. Looking down at the vast tracts of land and buildings below from the backyard can make you feel momentarily like Gods of the Olympus with the whole world beneath your feet– here was grandeur, majesty and splendour, but with a quiet humbleness and reticence.

In the night when the sky and land and mountains meet, the Doi Suthep would glow in the distant like a burning star, overlooking the land of smiles and happiness we call Thailand.

Bangkok

After slogging for the past two years doing these things and that I decided to go on a holiday to take a breather and just… chill. I figured that if I didn’t do that now I’d never get a chance to; afterall, how many times in your life do you get a eight months holiday with full liberty to plan how to use that time! Post-A levels is one, the next time will probably be retirement.

So off I went to Thailand. It was – as with anything that concerns myself and myself only – a last minute decision. For weeks I teetered between going and not going (I would have made a good Hamlet’s sister)  so that flights and lodgings were settled only 3 days before flying off with the little money I had from teaching. But at last the plan took off, and off I went to the Land of Smiles, which incidentally boasts the longest name in the world:

Krung-thep-maha-nakorn-boworn-ratana-kosin-mahintar-ayudhya-amaha-dilok-pop-nopa-ratana-rajthani-burirom-udom-rajniwes-mahasat-arn-amorn-pimarn-avatar-satit-sakattiya-visanukam.

That works out to mean: The great city of angels, the supreme unconqueralble land of the great immortal divinity (Indra), the royal capital of nine noble gems, the pleasant city, with plenty of grand royal palaces,
and divine paradises for the reincarnated deity (Vishnu), given by Indra and created by the god of crafting (Visnukarma).

Now Bangkok is a city of extremes and superlatives, a city you never react to indifferently. A place where it is impossible to keep your eyes closed at any moment because it is so busy, so noisy, so full of sound and fury. You simply cannot ignore the cacophony of car horns sounding on the roads, the big neon billboards up the eclectic mix of buildings, the mixture of smells that confuse your olfactory senses, and the sight of a world in which everybody has something to do. It’s a city that keeps you on your toes, especially when crossing the road itself is a leap of faith amidst the clutter of eclectic vehicles from tuks-tuks to metered taxis to cars to motorbikes to bikes and walking homo sapiens. All huddled together with little regard for traffic rules. (“what traffic rules?” Says the thai, “we drive under the protection of our God; if fate has it that our car crashes then so be it” ) Here’s a place with the unspoken rules of organization, where chaos is the new order and clutter the new definition of spatial freedom, and where fate, destiny and determinism trumps.

Every soi (what Thai call ‘street’) has a life of its own, and a characteristic taste of its own. This I mean it in the most literal sense – Thailand street food has to be the most mind-blowing in the lonely planet. Every bite is a gastronomical surprise – mostly pleasant ones. Despite being an adventurous foodie I have been exceptionally conservative in my choice of food this time for fear of upsetting my tummy (even when I am armed with an arsenal of ultra-carbon and pochai pills). Nevertheless the food there would satisfy the most conservative of foodies. Over the first two days I had the best chicken skewers with sticky rice I’ve ever tasted since I began using my tastebuds, and the sweetest mandarin juice I’d ever let trickle down my throat. The chicken skewers tops the chart this time (it’s infinitely better than the average Singaporean Satay) with its juice and tenderness.

Then there were other less traditionally Thai food like crepes which can be a nice afternoon delight.

But street food is only a prelude to the real deal. Where should one even begin? Let’s start from the top – all the way up the 88 storey high Baiyoke Hotel Building. Thanks to Akkra we had a sumptuous international buffet at an extraordinary price of 390 baht (approx SGD$16). Knock out. Sometimes I do think that all cash-strapped foodies in the world should just move to Thailand and eat their way through for the rest of their lives. And I’ll leave it to the pictures to tell the story at Baiyoke:

I have W.N to thank for another other-worldly treat on Day 2 – Krua Apsorn, an unpretentious little eatery tucked away in Samsen Road between Wat Rachathiwat and the National Library. With its simple setting with ordinary tables and chairs there is absolutely nothing distinctive about it in terms of appearance. It’s the food that really did it. And apparently the restaurant has been well-cherished among royalty, local foodies and finicky diners for decades. Not surprising given what it offers – inexpensive menu and remarkably delicious food prepared by a veteran chef who has worked in the royal compounds before.

I wish I had ordered everything from the menu (one easily could with more people) but there was only three of us. But what came was enough to drive our tastebuds crazy.

Gaeng luang bai bua (sour and spicy yellow curry with lotus stems)

Hoy malangpoo pad cha (stir-fried mussles with basil leaves and chilli)

Deep fried chicken wings – fried to absolute perfection!

And we have the star of the night: the stir-fried crab meat with yellow chilli, topped with string beans, basil leaves and garlic. And a generous portion of tantalizing crab meat.

Everything cost us only 600+ baht (SGD$24) In Thailand the best food are also the cheapest.

And in case you’re wondering at this point that all I did in Thailand was eat you’re quite right (that was the key objective), but visiting the palaces and temples in Bangkok can be such a feast for an eye too no visit to Bangkok would be complete without them. So with Akkra-tuns we visited the spectacular Grand Palace, home for the Thai King, the Royal court and the administrative seat of the government in the past.  I’m never a person into temples and palaces, but I must say the visit did not fall short of being fascinating. Entering the palace felt like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz walking into the Emerald City except here it was all gold and bronze.

If only there were less tourists and the place had been quieter the Wat Phra Kaew (Temple of the Emerald Buddha) and the Grand palace complex itself would have lived up to its name as the spiritual heart of the Thai kingdom (well it is, regardless). It certainly didn’t help that some tourists (from a particular country well-known for that) were shouting at their top of their lungs to each other and treating the place like a fancy theme park. A brief moment of solace can be found in the Wat Phra Kaew where the greatly revered Emerald Buddha dating back to the 14^th century resides, where Thais sit in quiet meditation and priests guard the place with dignified solemnity.

Venturing further one comes to the Royal Reception Halls, one of the finest building with the most eclectic styles in the entire complex. Here was a place for important ceremonial occasions like coronations, and its European-style architectural features tells of a history of Western influence despite the fact that Siam has remained the only Southeast Asian country that avoided colonization by Western powers back then. The main halls on the ground level have been converted into museums featuring an intriguing display of olden day weapons and firearms.

More interesting were the long stretches of wall murals that based on Thailand’s national epic Ramakien, derived from the Indian epic Ramayana. The epic is told in pictures accompanied by a small line of Thai at the bottom; among the three of us only Akkra-tuns knew Thai but even then old Thai was not easy to comprehend. But as they said pictures tell a thousand words and with a little bit imagination the story easily comes alive.

End off the day with some coconut freeze, and that gives you a perfect day to remember.

Next post, we take a 12-hour sleeper train to beautiful Chiangmai

On the ukulele day

On the ukulele day the sandy beach was clear
As the wavelets came a-singing and the breeze came near
Caressing the trees against the coconut beat
In a mumbo jumbo dance the lovers did meet.

On the ukulele day his sandy toes were tipped
Tapping and strumming and singing a lilt
With his darling a-resting upon his lap
Said I love you deary and softly she slept.

On the ukulele day he whispered a tune
Into her ears he called to wake up soon
For on the ukulele day the sun set only once
And it’d be silly to miss his only chance.
Silently nervously he took out a ring
Which in the twilight sparkles did bring
Yet still she stayed in her slumber so deep
No ukulele – ever – could wake her from her sleep.

Across the Universe

The most poetic of The Beatles – transcendental, spiritual, for the most intimate private moments spent alone with oneself.

Words are flying out like
endless rain into a paper cup
They slither while they pass
They slip away across the universe
Pools of sorrow waves of joy
are drifting thorough my open mind
Possessing and caressing me
Jai guru deva om
Nothing’s gonna change my world

Images of broken light which
dance before me like a million eyes
That call me on and on across the universe
Thoughts meander like a
restless wind inside a letter box
they tumble blindly as
they make their way across the universe
Jai guru deva om
Nothing’s gonna change my world

Sounds of laughter shades of life
are ringing through my open ears
exciting and inviting me
Limitless undying love which
shines around me like a million suns
It calls me on and on across the universe
Jai guru deva om
Nothing’s gonna change my world

Off to the rallies!

Elections this year is more exciting than I thought it’d be, particularly because walkovers is no longer the buzzword (as it was for the 2006 elections), and competition is in the air. On the ground the temperatures are rising as parties got going and rallies got moving; for the first time we got an entertaining and actually insightful array of commentaries, satires, parodies online via social media networking sites; and finally we’ve got political candidates who’re a mere half-decade older than ourselves. People are actually talking about it, even for youngsters like me who aren’t voting this time. And what an exciting chessboard we’ve got here – an A-team opposition vs a popular foreign minister… it is, to quote Straits Times today, an emotional dilemma. I would be put on a spot if I lived in Aljunied.

So how can we miss out on the rallies! Went down to Clementi Stadium for Reform Party’s first ever rally with H. yesterday, were greeted by a row of yellow-shirts and their gimmicky logo (which somehow reminds me of a brand of organic food rather than a political party). I was pleasantly surprised by Ho Soak Harn’s opening speech – it was considerably more eloquent and despite the rhetoric (which was to be expected anyway) it actually did have substance and concrete proposals that made some sense. Quite a far cry from what I had imagined rallies to be – sounds of fury, cries for change, shouts that sought to inflame the impressionable, cheers that might signify nothing at all. As the rally proceeded I realized what RP was really trying to do was to cater to different profiles of the electorate – for the young and educated they had Soak Harn deliver a ostensibly more composed speech with substance and concrete criticisms / proposal details; for the older electorates they had their (rather) senseless cheering, impassioned shouts and provocative jibing… and boy, those uncles and aunties were fanned to great spirits I must say! Kenneth Jeyaretnam was seen to be walking in his father’s footstep, their striking resemblance tactically emphasized to remind voters of J.B Jeyaretnam’s legacy.

Issues raised were familiar ones – ranging from foreign immigrants, housing costs, ministers’ pay package, rising costs of living… with income inequality garnering the loudest applause when one speaker capitalized on the fact that the stadium was sandwiched between a luxury condo and blocks of 3-room flats, pointing to the stark contrast between standards of living between the “haves and haves-not”. Quite a smart move..

And as H. and I were leaving we came to a mass of yellow umbrellas and yellow-shirts shouting – “umbrellas for sale, good for all weather especially thunderstorm and lightning!” Very cheeky I must say.

Homecooked’s always best.

Home-cooked food can be such a joy. For 19 years I’ve had what’s probably the best home-cooked food in the universe and it’s a shame that I only just learnt to appreciate the beauty of it all – it’s prepared by someone who loves you and whom you love, someone who has absolutely no intention of profiting from you through her cooking, and someone who cooks only to see me eat it (and if only I had been wise enough to appreciate it, reward her with a oily grin). It struck me – just moments ago – that I am going to be missing it for four whole years (which works out to be 365 x 4 plus 1 for the leap year = 1461 days) when I’m far away from home eating western fare and junkies.

Which explains why I’m starting to catalog my mum’s home-cooked food from now on – photo memoirs are good hedge/insurance against senile tastebuds. Sometimes pictures of food look better than they actually taste, and if I could bring these with me and relive those savory moments at home that would make me at least a happier kid abroad. One day I’d dig them all out again, recall how my mum cooked them, and try them out myself. My kids might have to be guinea pigs (sorry in advance, whoever you’re gonna be!)

It’s not about the money, money, money…

Somehow this little girl’s rendition come across so much more sincere (than Jessie J’s) and the message so… timely.

Price Tag

Seems like everybody’s got a price,
I wonder how they sleep at night.
When the sale comes first,
And the truth comes second,
Just stop, for a minute and
Smile

Why is everybody so serious
Acting so damn mysterious
Got your shades on your eyes
And your heels so high
That you can’t even have a good time

Everybody look to their left (yeah)
Everybody look to their right (ha)
Can you feel that (yeah)
We’re paying with love tonight
It’s not about the money, money, money
We don’t need your money, money, money
We just wanna make the world dance,
Forget about the Price Tag
Ain’t about the (uh) Cha-Ching Cha-Ching.
Aint about the (yeah) Ba-Bling Ba-Bling
Wanna make the world dance,
Forget about the Price Tag.

We need to take it back in time,
When music made us all unite
And it wasn’t low blows and video hoes,
Am I the only one getting tired
Why is everybody so obsessed
Money can’t buy us happiness
Can we all slow down and enjoy right now
Guarantee we’ll be feeling Alright.

jumping flea

And so another week went by before I knew it, and a part of me winced at the prospect of Monday again – not that I ever had Monday blues, but because it always meant waking up to my nokia alarm ringtone again. The past week has been pretty eventful, with plenty of teaching as usual and some really enjoyable moments at the Stanford Admit Reception and flea market @ scape! Earned a 500% profit on my investment in the flea market store though my friends laugh when I told them my starting capital was a good $5. Sold away some handmade figurines and many random things I made when I could still call myself a kid, plus other things I didn’t need anymore but which were in perfect condition. In general good fun with my wonderfully arty friends – and boy what a pleasure it was to see their pretty handicrafts on sale. I’d buy them all if I had the kaching!

Then there was getting lost at Woodlands – have I told you so many parts of Singapore remain so foreign to me? – but thank god I had my ns-obiang nokia phone to call the saviour who was always available even in sleep. So despite having dropped off some 3 stops earlier and having to walk some miles along the road I finally made it to the stanford reception – which was hosted at a beautiful villa with pretty fountains. Really happy to meet everyone in Stanford Class of 2015, and what a joy it is to see some familiar faces too! There was much chatting and sharing, and some advice that I’m really, really thankful for.

A pity that my camera has not been able to partake in my adventures or this post could have spoken a few more thousand words…

Primarily Piano

Primarily Piano

Saturday, 2 April 2011, 7.30pm Conservatory Concert Hall

Primarily Piano is back again – the second one this year – with a palatable palette of sounds for the evening. The first had been a fine success but this author was unfortunately too busy to give a review on it so here’s one on the second

The night began with Year 3 student Sabina Im’s fine rendition of Rameau’s Gavotte & Six Variations in A minor, an exquisite curtain raiser that was baroque in character yet strangely anachronistic in technique and harmony. Not surprising perhaps for a composer who wanted above all to be renowned as a theorist of the art, and who tries to ‘conceal art with art’.

Schuman’s Scenes from Childhood, Op.15 – a classic favourite among many pianists (this author included) – was to say the least, lovely. There was a sense of poised agility in Zyrene Estallo’s playing, accompanied with sensitive tone shadings and a well-measured touch. Her Traumerei was dreamy but not a simplistic ‘building castle in the air’, and one senses careful calculation and deliberation in her delivery. With that she left us on a wishful note, wanting for the other 6 pieces in the collection. Only that the dream bubble was popped in an instant with Lawrence Holmefjords’ determinedly intrusive entrance with Frank Martin’s Vivace from Preludes (1948), a steely fist-clenching 12-tone movement that saw Lawrence transformed into a bespectacled mad scientist at work: urgent, furious, a little chaotic despite the orthodox rhythmic values – but with no lack in emotional content. On the whole a brilliant piece that leaves one pondering why Frank Martin remains so rarely performed and recorded.

It is interesting to note that the concert was predominantly shrouded in the key of A minor with all pieces hitherto mentioned in the same key. Hence a shift in tone colour was ushered in by Budianda Tioanda’s entrance with his Sonata No. 4 in C minor No.2 (Andante assai), a deeply ominous piece with strongly diatonic melodies, polyphonic textures and complex harmonic structures. Against the repeating thirds in the bass broad, arched melodies sounded hauntingly, at times inexplicably doleful yet so beautiful one wished sounds could be caught in the hand and kept as memorabilia. A sweet sadness reigns in what seems to be Budianda’s most profound performance heard so far. The brief digression (in key) ended as we returned to A minor again with Debussy’s Prelude from Suite Bergamasque, performed by Year 3 student Thimoti Malonda. Opening triumphantly, its playful harmonies danced along in vigorous dynamic contrasts until it pushes toward a climatic end which Thimoti delivered with panache and confidence. Though more sensitivity to various shades of tone colour would be desirable, it was on the whole a well-executed performance that brought the audience through an array of intriguing sounds and colours.

Then came the only piece in major key that night – Chopin’s Ballade No.2 in F major, performed by second-year pianist (and aspiring conductor) Raymond Chan. The beautiful sotto voce section in the opening was most memorable, contrasted by the succeeding Presto section that was jam-packed with drama and furore. In spite of a slightly brash tone in the middle sections, Chan’s playing exuded a sense of freedom that was never so profoundly experienced in his previous performances. Equally exciting was Kabalevsky’s Rondo in A minor, Op.59 performed by Young Artist Li Churen, whose brilliant cascading opening would take anyone by surprise. Her petite figure and young age belies her capacity for huge sounds and an impeccable command of technique that was quite awe-inspiring. Despite her complaints of a less-than-razor-sharp precision after the concert one cannot deny (and neither should she) that it was an absolutely riveting and exciting performance. A well-deserved winner of the recent Bang & Olufsen Pianorama Competition!

The second half of the concert began with Ge Xiaozhe’s unassuming entrance with the andante movement of Schubert’s Sonata in A minor, Op. 143. His playing stood out as one with great conviction; even in the most contemplative moments there was a sense of certainty as far as direction was concerned. His quiet confidence was neither ostentatious nor pretentious, for he appeared to be playing more for himself than for an audience most of the time, and that in some way suited the contemplative nature of the andante movement. The Allegro Vivace was an unending ribbon of recurring motifs to which Xiaozhe accrued new dramatic contrasts with every repetition, leading up to a most emphatic end. Immediately after came the most contemporary and rhythmically interesting piece of the evening – Vine’s Sonata No.1 (Half note = 48) – for which Year 4 student Azariah Tan gave a convincing performance. The beginning was not unlike a byzantine labyrinth of growing vines, and it was not until the middle sections that a discernable theme emerged in full view. This gained momentum as it neared its midway climax, but was soon reduced to a quieter, improvisatory final section.

Adding to the weight of the program that night was Lizst’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1, a concert favourite most known for its passion, sensuality and dramatics. Right from the blood-stirring beginning,  pianist Zheng Qingshu brought us a-waltzing in a cathartic wild dance with intoxicating and scintillating melodies of the most seductive strains. Despite a good technical mastery, the programmatic elements of the piece could have been better revealed had she played with wilder abandon. No less exhilarating was the final item of the evening – Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 3 in A minor, Op. 28 performed by Jonathan Shin. Charged with a feral energy threatening to burst free, the entire piece seemed like a tussle between restraint and unbridled savagery, producing a momentum that propelled everything towards a sarcastic and ironic image. To this end Shin charged through with motoric drive, experiencing only a brief respite in the middle sections marked by a beautiful, alchemistic melody. The final charge saw him break free of the ruling momentum, culminating in a triumphant brilliance that left the audience on tenterhooks.

So ended a concert replete with minor keys (though it was certainly no minor concert) – on an incandescent and bravassimo note, leaving performers and audience alike with another night of music to remember, and anticipation for the next Primarily Piano.

Chan Chi Ling

I don’t remember the word I wished to say

by Osip Mandelstam

I don’t remember the word I wished to say.
The blind swallow returns to the hall of shadow,
on shorn wings, with the translucent ones to play.
The song of night is sung without memory, though.

No birds. No blossoms on the dried flowers.
The manes of night’s horses are translucent.
An empty boat drifts on the naked river.
Lost among grasshoppers the word’s quiescent.

It swells slowly like a shrine, or a canvas sheet,
hurling itself down, mad, like Antigone,
or falls, now, a dead swallow at our feet.
with a twig of greenness, and a Stygian sympathy.

O, to bring back the diffidence of the intuitive caress,
and the full delight of recognition.
I am so fearful of the sobs of The Muses,
the mist, the bell-sounds, perdition.

Mortal creatures can love and recognise: sound may
pour out, for them, through their fingers, and overflow:
I don’t remember the word I wished to say,
and a fleshless thought returns to the house of shadow.

The translucent one speaks in another guise,
always the swallow, dear one, Antigone….
on the lips the burning of black ice,
and Stygian sounds in the memory.

To the Tyrants

Tyrants! Bloody tyrants listen!

You who are deaf shall hear us a final time and then no more.

We the people have risen

Broken the silence, the chains, the manacles!

Now we walk down the streets, high held our heads.

We fear no more.

We bow no more.

 

This is no awakening – for we were wide awake

When you butchered our brothers, burnt our fathers,

Left our mothers to the gutters,

We ate fear, bitter as gall.

Now we spit, and we roar.

We die but once, and we shall fall

Though not until you’re under the pall!

 

A Libretto for J.S on the Libyan uprising, 9 March 2011

 

Growing beyond growth

Nothing preoccupies the modern political process more than economic growth does. The very term ‘growth’ and its corollary connotations of progress, improvement and prosperity convinces us – before any argument or debate takes place – that it’s something worth pursuing. It’s only natural that economies ought to grow, just as human beings do (or think we do). Beyond that it is certainly more appealing to think that the world is evolving towards a better and more prosperous future than to imagine a picture of stagnancy; the enlightenment idea of progress has the ideological pillars of capitalism firmly planted in the soil: the engine of progress is undoubtedly economic growth, the expansion of volume of goods and services at human’s disposal.

It’s certainly not without cause: economic growth has lifted millions out of poverty, improved standards of livings, opened up an unprecedented array of opportunities for people to realize their potential as human beings. Until the past 200 years, standard of living has been very much like a horizontal line, almost stagnant. And where it did change, changes were virtually imperceptible and most people expected to die in the same economic conditions that prevailed when they were born. Since the industrial revolution during the 19th century, total output has increased 40-fold, per capita real output increased eightfold. People are experiencing changes at an unprecedented speed and of a nature never before seen. Increase in income gradually became the very object of life in modern society to which all men and women are dedicated – both for the real improvements that it promises and the excitation & effervescence it generates. Who doesn’t want a better tomorrow?

So economists became the priests of an increasingly influential cult. They became relentless advocates of growth as the solution all problems. If there’s inflation, grow the economy so that aggregate supply shifts rightwards to offset price increases brought about by demand increase; if there’s unemployment, grow the economy and jobs will come naturally as wind. if there’s a BOP deficit, grow the economy by making factors of production more productive and therefore more competitive in the international economy; if income inequality’s rising, grow the economy, still, so that everyone is better off instead of making some worse off through redistribution. In my A levels economics exam growth was the final solution for all economic problems, or so said the notes. (well to be exact it didn’t say it was a perfect silver bullet but it was the best out of everything else, just like how democracy is the worst form of government except all those others that have been tried from time to time) And benefits of growth are not taken to be so self-evident that hardly any textbooks bother explaining why growth should be pursued.

 

But there are costs to growth, and these are magnified when countries pursue growth at breakneck speed or remain indifferent to the nature of the growth that’s taking place – eyes kept peeled only at the GDP figure, blind to environmental degradation, depletion of natural resources, costs of structural changes which can lead to social instability and welfare losses.

 

In Singapore’s case (as in many where else) we seem to have been trapped in a false dilemma: to grow or not to grow? Either we grow and make everyone better off with higher disposable income and therefore greater prosperity, or we don’t and tumble down a road of inevitable decline and stagnancy. But recent works I’ve come across (not least cos of work at cpe) have shed new light on the nature of this problem, convincing me further that our understanding of growth has been artificially represented in the above-mentioned false dilemma.

 

That growth is desirable has been predicated on two major assumptions: growth makes people wealthier, and people are happier when they are wealthier. In short, more is good and richer is better. Presumably that’s why it’s restrain is so much to ask of us mankind when growth is bumping against physical limits so profound, like climate change and peak oil. There is now a large body of evidence casting serious doubt on the dual assumptions, but which is until very recently systematically ignored by policy makers and most economists yet consistent with folk knowledge that money cannot buy neither a happy life nor a happy nation.

 

For one, economic growth does not necessarily make people wealthier; beyond a certain point it can generates inequality and insecurity that is unsettling and counterproductive. Growth means perpetual structural changes and this means there will always be winners and losers at any one time period. In the short run some people lose their jobs, those at the bottom may experience stagnant wages for decades due to ‘competition from globalization’. In the long run everyone might be better off, but in the long run the people who lived through the short run are dead. Every short run can mean a whole lifetime in the economic time scale.

 

For two, more is not always better; rising incomes do not always mean greater happiness. While there is a strong and powerful argument for more economic growth in countries where large populace lives in abject poverty, the case for more rapid economic growth in developed countries seems to be losing traction. For instance, studies have shown no correlation between average appreciation of life ranking and GDP per capita or (surprisingly) even HDI. This imply that it is unlikely that in itself additional income makes much difference to wellbeing in developed countries. Other studies – John Hicks’ ‘law of diminishing marginal significance of economics’, for example – suggest that as incomes rises, income and economic factors become less important in welfare.

 

Further, even if higher income means greater happiness for the individual, it is not entirely clear if it holds true for society in general. Recent findings suggest that more equal societies are more happy societies: Robert Frank, in his recent book “Falling Behind” illustrates how psychological wellbeing depends not just on one’s level of income, but also on the perceived gap between one’s actual and desired income, one’s actual and expected income and ones actual income and the incomes of others. Academics like Michael Argyle would go even further to say that income inequality is a stronger predictor of national happiness than income levels precisely because people have reference dependant yardsticks of wellbeing. In other words, if economic growth causes the rich to be richer than no one is better off; for society as a whole to be better off the rich will have to be less rich. To be frank I am surprised this is even news that economists marvel about because the gut feelings of fairness and justice is something so instinctive, intrinsic so deep-seated within the human psyche! And economists have to take this long to realize something so basically human.

 

And at the end of the day perhaps the founding fathers of economics still knows best. “Towards what ultimate point is society tending by its industrial progress. When the progress ceases, in what condition are we to expect that it will leave mankind?”, asked JS Mill, who confesses that the idea of the stationary state is not that unthinkable afterall:

“I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and trading on each other’s heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phrases of industrial progress… the best state of human nature is that in which, while no one is poor, no one desires to be richer, nor has any reason to fear being thrust back by the efforts of others to push themselves forward.”

The first lesson of economics has always been on scarcity: the central problem of economics is figuring how limited resources might be used to satisfy unlimited wants. From day one I had found this statement to be inherently illogical: by definition finite resources can never satisfy infinite wants – the two variables are like parallel lines that will never converge no matter how much we delude ourselves. Economics makes itself a dismal and futile enterprise by even trying to bring them in line. But there’s one thing we can change, and that is ourselves: we can be contented by controlling our wants, by knowing what we’ve got, knowing what we need, and what we can do without. We human beings need to grow – in wisdom and in understanding – before growth outgrows us to eventually lead us by the nose.

 

Allegrophobia

I was late. Positively late, and the typical Pavlovian response of mine was to panic. It’s called allegrophobia. My heart starts racing, blood rushing, eyebrows knitting, wrist-raising every few seconds to the eye level to catch a glimpse of the time. Only to realize I didn’t bring a watch – which is not atypical of me. Forgetfulness is my middle name. My eyes darted around in search for watch somewhere on the train, received only by freely hanging wrists adorned with wristbands and trinkets, no watches. I guess people increasingly choose to live in a timeless world where mad rushes and pandemonium is accompanied by a refusal to acknowledge the chariot of time. Or maybe phones have taken over the function of telling time. Poor old grandfather clocks – ever so stoic and consistent yet now shed their previous status as a necessity.

My mind wandered aimlessly while another part of it calculated every minute and second that whizzed by and imagined arresting time, putting it on a leash and freezing it with dry ice. Then kill it. Before it kills me, at least.

There’s this horrifying story by Roald Dahl whom I read a lot as a child and got all freaked out but insisted on reading (what a masochist). It was an awful, awful story, that story – The Way Up to Heaven was it, and that was the story that turned me into a goose at the end of it, oh all those goosebumps! Mrs Forster had a pathological fear of being late, missing a train, a plane, a boat, or even a theatre curtain. She would risk everything to be punctual – and I fathom she would jump off the cliff when the clock strikes twelve on 14 mar night if a death’s train to hell too.

So Mrs Forster was planning to fly to visit her daughter; terrified that she would miss her flight she departed early, only to find her flight delayed till the following day when she arrived. She returned home and spent the night there. And I’ll leave Wikipedia to tell you the rest of the story:

The following morning as Mrs. Foster prepares to take her car to the airport, her husband announces that he should be dropped off at the club on the way, which terrifies her, it being somewhat out-of-the-way. Before they leave, he pretends to have forgotten a present he had intended for their daughter Ellen, and to Mrs. Foster’s dismay he ventures into the house in search of it. As she grows increasingly impatient whilst waiting in the car, she notices the present hiding in the crack of the seat where her husband had been sitting and “couldn’t help noticing that it was wedged down firm and deep, as though with the help of a pushing hand “, and tells the chauffeur to call him down. He tries to enter and notices the door is locked. She decides to go herself, but then, with the key in the door she suddenly freezes, as if listening intently. After a few seconds, she returns to the car, says there is no time, and is driven off to the
airport. She makes her flight with a few minutes to spare. Things go well in Paris, and she writes her husband each Tuesday. When she returns to Idlewild Airport she is mildly interested to find her husband has not sent a car to meet her, but she gets into a taxi and arrives home. She sees the mail has built up, and smells a peculiar odour. Noticing that the elevator is not in order, she calmly dials for a repairman and waits at her husband’s desk for his arrival.

So Mr Forster was condemned to death. The terrifying thought? Mrs Forster heard her screams for help before she left for the airport and had decided to ignore them. Call it allegrophobia, call it evil, call it devillish.

And there I was, so positively late. Mind wandering to a world with teleports – so we have no buses elevators down, no flight delays, no oh-it-was-raining-and-I-couldn’t-get-a-freakin’-cab, no excuses of being late. Damn, what a wonderful world that would be. The way up to heaven would have been less painful, for poor Mr Forster at least.

Spirits of the dead

Thy soul shall find itself alone —

Alone of all on earth — unknown
The cause — but none are near to pry

Into thine hour of secrecy.
Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness — for then
The spirits of the dead, who stood
In life before thee, are again

In death around thee, and their will
Shall then o’ershadow thee — be still
For the night, tho’ clear, shall frown:
And the stars shall look not down
From their thrones, in the dark heav’n;

With light like Hope to mortals giv’n,
But their red orbs, without beam,
To thy withering heart shall seem
As a burning, and a ferver
Which would cling to thee forever.

But ’twill leave thee, as each star
In the morning light afar
Will fly thee — and vanish:
— But its thought thou can’st not banish.
The breath of God will be still;

And the wish upon the hill
By that summer breeze unbrok’n
Shall charm thee — as a token,
And a symbol which shall be
Secrecy in thee.

Edgar Allan Poe

objet du désir

She is jealous of that mannequin – yes, that one; see what she’s wearing?

She wants that little black dress.
But then her brown wallet is thinner than she is
Or the glass that separates her and her objet du désirInto the boutique she walks,
With an air of awkward confidence –

Size S, please.

And the dress is in her hand,
Its smooth satin swimming about in provocative caress
Had her skin been less calloused it would have slipped off her hands

The dressing door creaks, slams shut; her heart skips
a beat. She slips into it
rips off the brastrap tightens her butt zip it all up
feel it embrace her waist kiss her skin hug her breasts
stops –
looks into the mirror that now speaks:

It wants you.

She grabs her handbag and stops breathing
swings the door open takes a quick peek
All clear it is and out quick she walks
A leopard with prey in mouth sauntering proud
Like the kill is meant to be and rightful owner she

No looking back

She walks out of the shop and hears a gasp, some gasps
But none from her it was the music it was the people it was everything but her
Her heels clicks loud and clear against the granite floor
Turns left swings right and up the stairs

No looking back no looking back no looking back

And then she’s lost amid the crowd but so is everyone else.

False victories

The cancun climate talks were doomed to fail. So said EU president Herman van Rompuy – not openly, of course (it was wikileaks’ doing – again). And so it did. I have come to learn that real UN summits and assemblies are not very unlike the model UN summits we students organize and attend: delegates fall asleep, the president makes or breaks the whole session (and often does the latter), at any point of time more delegates are steeped in half-comprehension than there are enlightened ones, and resolutions/accords are passed for the mere sake of passing to project the image that something is being done (to justify all that hullabaloo?) Delegates enter an assembly with the goal of passing a resolution, which in itself is taken to be a great achievement because consensus or agreement of the majority is more the exception than norm in the UN. Whether they are actually good resolutions is not so much a question of objective goodness or reasonableness, but more a game of alliance and compromise, diplomacy and politics.

So it comes as no surprise that some (very) bad UN resolutions actually passed:

• 1993 Bosnia resolution, the safe haven resolution which was supposed to
  protect the civilians of Srebrenica. Not only did it fail to do that, a short
  time afterwards there was one of the largest scale killings in Europe since
  WWII
• Resolution 914 in which the Security Council decided to actually reduce the
  size of presence in the country despite concrete evidence of an impending
  genocide. We all know what happened after that.
• Resolution 661 imposed after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait which essentially was
  a comprehensive economic embargo that led to hundreds of thousands dying from
  malnutrition and famine.

And these are just the 3 famous ones out of god knows how many. To make things worse, most UN resolutions remain in effect forever; few are actually retired. There were, for instance, a lot of resolutions imposing restrictions on weapons of mass destruction, purchases of chemicals/pesticides for the Iraqis passed during the Saddam Hussein’s time. Now that Iraq is under a new government, these conditions should by right be lifted for the benefit of Iraqi development. But political inertia would make this a far more complicated and difficult process than we could imagine. Someone has to initiate the change, and change means turning stones and lifting boats, potentially opening up a Pandora’s Box where people start rewriting legislation over Middle East resolutions all over again. Just as how it is never easy to pass a resolution, it is never easy to retire a resolution.

The climate deal was reached in Cancun on December 11, having marshaled the votes of all nations present escept Bolivia – who was naturally accused of being obstructionist, obstinate and unrealistic. In an open letter, Bolivian ambassador Pablo Solon stated his country’s stand:

Many commentators have called the Cancún accord a “step in the right direction.” We disagree: it is a giant step backward. The text replaces binding mechanisms for reducing greenhouse gas emissions with voluntary pledges that are wholly insufficient. These pledges contradict the stated goal of capping the rise in temperature at 2C, instead guiding us to 4C or more. The text is full of loopholes for polluters, opportunities for expanding carbon markets and similar mechanisms – like the forestry scheme Redd – that reduce the obligation of developed countries to act.

(the rest of the letter is worth reading – read it here)

One wonders whether the Cancun accord is yet another false victory and empty vessel. I think it is. It certainly doesn’t help if the accord brings standards down instead of raising them, and despite the surface ‘political consensus’ and unity we have reason to listen to what Bolivia and the many underrepresented countries have to say. Often their courage to speak against the international community (sometimes for good reason, though not always) and offer their side of the story comes at great expense: after Bolivia rejected the Copenhagen accord, US cut their climate funding.

Copenhagen didn’t do any good, neither did Cancun. It all reminds me of the hours of lobbying and debating we spend during MUN conferences, only to arrive at a resolution absolutely falling short of what is satisfactory. Because some delegates were sleeping, some implicitly coerced into voting the way they did, others were eager to end the summit off in victories (albeit false ones) rather than disappointment. It didn’t really matter in our cases since the resolutions don’t actually take effect. It’s scary to think that the movers and shakers in the real game aren’t necessarily a lot more enlightened.

 

Leisure

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this is if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

William Henry Davies

Homo economicus

Work at the Centre for Public Economics has been fun to say the least, especially with wonderful colleagues and projects I take a personal interest in. (though my friends would probably ask: what has labour economics got to do with YOUR life?) Well it has. Now I know why my mum hasn’t got a significant salary rise in 10 years, why pay always lags behind productivity rise and inflation, while some there’s this “10% of the population” quietly getting so filthy rich they need 10 lifetimes to finish using those cash, why inequality is here to stay.

Some things I also came to learn: Economics is quite helpless when it comes to giving valuation for intangibles: how much is a life worth? How much is national pride worth? How much is education worth? Or your love for the girl next door? It’s always hard to place a value that correctly represents the intrinsic worth of many things. And indeed it is counter-intuitive – If everything can be neatly weighed and measured quantitatively (including how much you are worth as a person) then ‘priceless’ would disappear from the dictionary altogether. If there’s a barometer for everything then there’s no need for literature either. Or love poems with those corny (but secretly appealing) hyperboles which always try to compare love’s worth to other things but always ending with the same hint that it is ultimately beyond valuation. And for good – if it can’t be measured, it can’t be. There’s no telling how much something is worth, except when you weigh it all out by feeling with your heart. And numbers don’t come in handy here, words do (and often fails).

Though of course – economists aren’t meant to do these things. They use their own sets of instruments they call ‘cost-benefit analysis’ among other things, which unlike the human heart is cold, calculative, exact because it is also lifeless and unchanging ceteris peribus. But it’s necessary. When they observe human beings in aggregation, taking the macro lenses, they render every being out there identical with the assumption that they’re all equally rational so they can be reduced to a number, for convenience’s sake sometimes. Surely they can’t get into every individual’s mind in search for answers; that’s left to psychologists. Though interestingly behavioural economics in recent years has sought to integrate insights from psychologists with neo-classical economic theory, there’s something I find quite paradoxical: the generalizations of human behaviour in behavioural economics might be useful in factoring in behavioural accounts, but they remain generalizations – and I’m not sure how strong these generalizations really are. Over the past 2 weeks of reading papers after papers on behavioural experiments I realize that every conclusion that came out of each study is upheld with an uncertainty that seems to make the conclusion self-refuting. For every experiment there is a counter-experiment, for each claim there is a counter-claim. At the end of the day I was left stranded, with no answers as to how human beings actually behave – not that there’s no evidence, but too much contradictory evidence.

In retrospect this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. It’s human beings we’re observing here – and what are we? The human species is made up of seven billion subspecies, each consisting of one specimen.

 

After a long hiatus…

Well. That did it – after some 8 crazy years in high school and JC all I got was an email:

Dear Chi Ling,
On behalf of the Undergraduate Admission Committee, it is my pleasure to offer you admission to Stanford’s Class of 2015!

 

Over the past few years I had had to make many decisions. Some more important, some less, but all secretly leading me to a somewhere out there about which I have no idea. When I got my PSLE results I decided I would enrol myself into Nanyang for the most superficial reason: I saw the beautiful school campus on newspaper one day and that sealed the deal. (before that I had no idea it existed; my dream school then was Juying Secondary School because it was right beside my primary school and it looked bigger and had more water coolers in it) When the time came for all Sec3 students to decide their subject combinations I went with the flow and took triple science (which seemed the cool thing to do then cos all my best friends were taking triple science) but two weeks into the school term I realized I felt nauseous every time I flipped open the physics textbook so for health reasons I got myself transferred into whatever alternative there was, which at that time was Literature. And that I came to love IMMENSELY, both because of the teachers and because words, prose, poetry are the most incandescent things that could move me besides music. But I never saw myself as an Arts student because Biology and Chemistry were so intriguing (more the former), interestingly conceptual and precise it suited my left-brain inclination. Then there was the rashly made decision (unfortunately many too fell for it) to accept a scholarship that would make studying China Studies in JC compulsory – to be perfectly honest I never had any regrets or qualms about it, it’s just that I have friends who absolutely have no interest in the subject but were forced to take it up and slog through it for 2 whole years. Then the decision to drop Mathematics and take up KI which was probably the most awesome decision I have ever made in my academic life because I knew life would be a total hell cauldron otherwise.

Then A levels came and I decided to work hard for the final national exam I’d be taking in my life, so that meant 3 months of having no-life and not-much-fun, except the brighter moments I had studying with friends. On hindsight those past 3 months appear almost a blank, as if I had locked myself in a vacuum (which explains the inactivity in this blog) where my true interests had to be put out of view. I remember penning down a long list of things-to-do (many of which I haven’t gotten down to doing), which later became my only source of refuge because the more I look forward to those the more reasons I had to pull through As as well as I could.

When it was all over, there wasn’t the euphoria moment I had been looking forward to, but my head kept running through a book title (which, incidentally, was brought up at a recent graduation ceremony by a guest speaker):

What got you here will not get you there.

So here I am, on a new starting point again, treading the waters and preparing to ride the next big wave. This time, it’s bringing me to California.

 

We all need these reminders once in a while.

—–
Written by Adrian Tan, author of The Teenage Textbook (1988), was the guest-of-honour at a recent NTU convocation ceremony. This was his speech to the graduating class of 2008.
—–

I must say thank you to the faculty and staff of the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information for inviting me to give your convocation address. It’s a wonderful honour and a privilege for me to speak here for ten minutes without fear of contradiction, defamation or retaliation. I say this as a Singaporean and more so as a husband.

My wife is a wonderful person and perfect in every way except one. She is the editor of a magazine. She corrects people for a living. She has honed her expert skills over a quarter of a century, mostly by practising at home during conversations between her and me.

On the other hand, I am a litigator. Essentially, I spend my day telling people how wrong they are. I make my living being disagreeable.

Nevertheless, there is perfect harmony in our matrimonial home. That is because when an editor and a litigator have an argument, the one who triumphs is always the wife.

And so I want to start by giving one piece of advice to the men: when you’ve already won her heart, you don’t need to win every argument.

Marriage is considered one milestone of life. Some of you may already be married. Some of you may never be married. Some of you will be married. Some of you will enjoy the experience so much, you will be married many, many times. Good for you.

The next big milestone in your life is today: your graduation. The end of education. You’re done learning.

You’ve probably been told the big lie that “Learning is a lifelong process” and that therefore you will continue studying and taking masters’ degrees and doctorates and professorships and so on. You know the sort of people who tell you that? Teachers. Don’t you think there is some measure of conflict of interest? They are in the business of learning, after all. Where would they be without you? They need you to be repeat customers.

The good news is that they’re wrong.

The bad news is that you don’t need further education because your entire life is over. It is gone. That may come as a shock to some of you. You’re in your teens or early twenties. People may tell you that you will live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. That is your life expectancy.

I love that term: life expectancy. We all understand the term to mean the average life span of a group of people. But I’m here to talk about a bigger idea, which is what you expect from your life.

You may be very happy to know that Singapore is currently ranked as the country with the third highest life expectancy. We are behind Andorra and Japan, and tied with San Marino. It seems quite clear why people in those countries, and ours, live so long. We share one thing in common: our football teams are all hopeless. There’s very little danger of any of our citizens having their pulses raised by watching us play in the World Cup. Spectators are more likely to be lulled into a gentle and restful nap.

Singaporeans have a life expectancy of 81.8 years. Singapore men live to an average of 79.21 years, while Singapore women live more than five years longer, probably to take into account the additional time they need to spend in the bathroom.

So here you are, in your twenties, thinking that you’ll have another 40 years to go. Four decades in which to live long and prosper.

Bad news. Read the papers. There are people dropping dead when they’re 50, 40, 30 years old. Or quite possibly just after finishing their convocation. They would be very disappointed that they didn’t meet their life expectancy.

I’m here to tell you this. Forget about your life expectancy.

After all, it’s calculated based on an average. And you never, ever want to expect being average.

Revisit those expectations. You might be looking forward to working, falling in love, marrying, raising a family. You are told that, as graduates, you should expect to find a job paying so much, where your hours are so much, where your responsibilities are so much.

That is what is expected of you. And if you live up to it, it will be an awful waste.

If you expect that, you will be limiting yourself. You will be living your life according to boundaries set by average people. I have nothing against average people. But no one should aspire to be them. And you don’t need years of education by the best minds in Singapore to prepare you to be average.

What you should prepare for is mess. Life’s a mess. You are not entitled to expect anything from it. Life is not fair. Everything does not balance out in the end. Life happens, and you have no control over it. Good and bad things happen to you day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Your degree is a poor armour against fate.

Don’t expect anything. Erase all life expectancies. Just live. Your life is over as of today. At this point in time, you have grown as tall as you will ever be, you are physically the fittest you will ever be in your entire life and you are probably looking the best that you will ever look. This is as good as it gets. It is all downhill from here. Or up. No one knows.

What does this mean for you? It is good that your life is over.

Since your life is over, you are free. Let me tell you the many wonderful things that you can do when you are free.

The most important is this: do not work.

Work is anything that you are compelled to do. By its very nature, it is undesirable.

Work kills. The Japanese have a term “Karoshi”, which means death from overwork. That’s the most dramatic form of how work can kill. But it can also kill you in more subtle ways. If you work, then day by day, bit by bit, your soul is chipped away, disintegrating until there’s nothing left. A rock has been ground into sand and dust.

There’s a common misconception that work is necessary. You will meet people working at miserable jobs. They tell you they are “making a living”. No, they’re not. They’re dying, frittering away their fast-extinguishing lives doing things which are, at best, meaningless and, at worst, harmful.

People will tell you that work ennobles you, that work lends you a certain dignity. Work makes you free. The slogan “Arbeit macht frei” was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. Utter nonsense.

Do not waste the vast majority of your life doing something you hate so that you can spend the small remainder sliver of your life in modest comfort. You may never reach that end anyway.

Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.

I like arguing, and I love language. So, I became a litigator. I enjoy it and I would do it for free. If I didn’t do that, I would’ve been in some other type of work that still involved writing fiction – probably a sports journalist.

So what should you do? You will find your own niche. I don’t imagine you will need to look very hard. By this time in your life, you will have a very good idea of what you will want to do. In fact, I’ll go further and say the ideal situation would be that you will not be able to stop yourself pursuing your passions. By this time you should know what your obsessions are. If you enjoy showing off your knowledge and feeling superior, you might become a teacher.

Find that pursuit that will energise you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working.

Most of you will end up in activities which involve communication. To those of you I have a second message: be wary of the truth. I’m not asking you to speak it, or write it, for there are times when it is dangerous or impossible to do those things. The truth has a great capacity to offend and injure, and you will find that the closer you are to someone, the more care you must take to disguise or even conceal the truth. Often, there is great virtue in being evasive, or equivocating. There is also great skill. Any child can blurt out the truth, without thought to the consequences. It takes great maturity to appreciate the value of silence.

In order to be wary of the truth, you must first know it. That requires great frankness to yourself. Never fool the person in the mirror.

I have told you that your life is over, that you should not work, and that you should avoid telling the truth. I now say this to you: be hated.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. Do you know anyone who hates you? Yet every great figure who has contributed to the human race has been hated, not just by one person, but often by a great many. That hatred is so strong it has caused those great figures to be shunned, abused, murdered and in one famous instance, nailed to a cross.

One does not have to be evil to be hated. In fact, it’s often the case that one is hated precisely because one is trying to do right by one’s own convictions. It is far too easy to be liked, one merely has to be accommodating and hold no strong convictions. Then one will gravitate towards the centre and settle into the average. That cannot be your role. There are a great many bad people in the world, and if you are not offending them, you must be bad yourself. Popularity is a sure sign that you are doing something wrong.

The other side of the coin is this: fall in love.

I didn’t say “be loved”. That requires too much compromise. If one changes one’s looks, personality and values, one can be loved by anyone.

Rather, I exhort you to love another human being. It may seem odd for me to tell you this. You may expect it to happen naturally, without deliberation. That is false. Modern society is anti-love. We’ve taken a microscope to everyone to bring out their flaws and shortcomings. It far easier to find a reason not to love someone, than otherwise. Rejection requires only one reason. Love requires complete acceptance. It is hard work – the only kind of work that I find palatable.

Loving someone has great benefits. There is admiration, learning, attraction and something which, for the want of a better word, we call happiness. In loving someone, we become inspired to better ourselves in every way. We learn the truth worthlessness of material things. We celebrate being human. Loving is good for the soul.

Loving someone is therefore very important, and it is also important to choose the right person. Despite popular culture, love doesn’t happen by chance, at first sight, across a crowded dance floor. It grows slowly, sinking roots first before branching and blossoming. It is not a silly weed, but a mighty tree that weathers every storm.
You will find, that when you have someone to love, that the face is less important than the brain, and the body is less important than the heart.

You will also find that it is no great tragedy if your love is not reciprocated. You are not doing it to be loved back. Its value is to inspire you.

Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone. You either don’t, or you do with every cell in your body, completely and utterly, without reservation or apology. It consumes you, and you are reborn, all the better for it.

Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.

 

The Value of Art

Unlike in Science where inquiry reaps tangible results that is instrumental to technological progress and the empowerment of human beings in controlling nature, it is not clear at first glance what real value the aesthetics offer society. A world without art or aesthetics is perhaps imaginable for some who claim that human beings will survive all the same without it. The same people would agree with Oscar Wilde when he says that “Art is really quite useless” – but is it really? The concept of value is exceptionally vague when it comes to the aesthetics not least because of the subjectivity that is involved in aesthetic judgement and thus its value. This essay will suggest a pluralistic view on value as applied to aesthetic knowledge while making a distinction between artistic and instrumental value and maintaining that only the latter is crucial in ascertaining ‘value’ with respect to society. In examining its instrumental value, this essay uncovers art’s value in providing important perspectives to society through illustrative and interpretative demonstration and come to appreciate the fact that art, while not strictly indispensible, is certainly valuable.

The first question that demands discussion is this: what do we mean by ‘value’ when it comes to the aesthetics, and can it be determined? Taking the non-essentialist point of view, a work of art can have many different kinds of value – a cognitive value, a social value, an educational value, a historical value, a sentimental value, a religious value, an economical value, a therapeutic value; it can possess as many kinds of value as there are points of view form which it can be evaluated. There might not be one unitary value that renders art intrinsically valuable, and no single value that is definitive of the artistic evaluative perspective. For instance, Bach’s Prelude & Fugues can be artistically valuable in its intricacy and elegance of formal construction, but at the same time embodying a sentimental or therapeutic value that is personal to the listener, and even a religious value since it is well-known that Bach’s music was (presumably) ‘inspired by God’. It is hence reasonable to take a pluralistic view on the concept of value in aesthetic knowledge.

From the litany of possible sources of ‘value’ outlined above one can distinguish artistic value (which includes cognitive and sentimental value) from instrumental value (including educational, historical, economical, social value) In the latter case art is somewhat a medium, a means to an end rather than ‘art for art’s sake’. That an artwork has excellent formal qualities and balanced colour tones may make it artistically valuable, but it is hard to see its relevance to improving society per se, so it may not necessarily be of value to society. However, art may possess instrumental value if it carries a message that may inspire improvements in society – for instance, John Lennon’s Imagine is famous for its message of peace and love – then its value to society is certainly clearer. The determination of its value is however not a quantitative one simply because it is impossible to ‘price’ art objectively (disregarding auctions of artwork, which in no way project the objective value of art). But it is nonetheless possible to demonstrate that art and aesthetics have instrumental value to societies.

Foremost, art holds significant epistemic value because it provides insight into complex, diverse subjects – most notably the human condition – where general laws of science are elusive and non-existent. Society pursues not mere propositional or scientific knowledge; as human beings we all seek to learn more about ourselves, our emotions, our relations to each other and our place in the world. But these cannot be fully understood by subsumption under general laws; we rely on perspectives, rather than theories in understanding these phenomena. For instance, reading Pride & Prejudice tells me that first impressions are a poor guide to a person’s character – something that science cannot teach me through theories. Neither can the mere statement that ‘first impressions are a poor guide’ sufficiently convince me of its truth. In the vein of the exemplification theory, the novel in this case exemplifies a perspective and thus becomes a source of non-propositional knowledge, shedding light on a particular corner of reality and hence allowing us to achieve a better understanding of our behaviour, attitudes, and society in general.

Historically, art has also held a special place in society as a catalyst for social and political changes, a reflection of culture and the spirit of the time (‘zeitgeist’). We can observe how people live in the past through observing paintings or art produced from the past, just as how anthropological studies find evidence from art and craft of the past. But art goes beyond being a passive reflection of the past – it participates in the shaping of society, and might even possess immense power as a catalytic element in political revolutions. The wave of 20th century art movements like Dadaism, Surrealism and abstract expressionism – among others – ushered in post-modernism (at least in the cultural sense or in representing its spirit). Many of those artwork are symbolic of the rebellion against order, stifling regimentation and hypocritical ‘high-culture and finesse’, preferring instead chaos and fragmentation totemic of post-modernism. Particular artworks also hold special value – Theodore Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, for example, was a powerful social commentary unprecedented at the time, drawing attention to unpleasant truths of how the human instinct to survive superseded all moral considerations, plunging civilized man into barbarism. Similar subversive and deconstructivist art seek to question aspects of society and provoke reflection on present-day politics and values. While art does not necessarily reveal an explicit truth, it highlights a perspective that have implicit power in generating reflection and catalyzing social & political changes. Even if art represents the opposite of truth (or half-truth) – as in the case of propaganda – it is itself a use (and thus in some sense of value), and on hindsight telling of the political climate of particular points in history.

One might well argue that all that art represents can be equally well-expressed in other non-aesthetic forms. The portrayal of violence in Picasso’s Guernica might be expressed in passionate prose – why not? To some extent art is not an indispensable medium, but such undermining of art’s value fails to see that art – although like speech a medium – is not entirely the same. While Guernica translated into an essay might tell us about the violence of aerial bombing and of war in general quite convincingly, it cannotdemonstrate in the same way that the painting does. Neither might it be able to capture the imagination and minds of people as viscerally as a picture, or a song. What is suggested here is not that art is a superior medium of expression; the point is that art provides a different perspective, a different means (interpretative demonstration) for us to access knowledge of reality – and should thus be valued in its own right. To reject art’s potential value to society is to reject countless perspectives and mirrors by which we can perceive reality and come to understand ourselves.

On another note, the undermining of art’s value might stem from an unfair comparison of art and science as sources of knowledge. As mentioned in the beginning, science achievements in technological progress seem to dwarf that of art, which might have led some people to thinking that art has no real value in society. Such comparisons are ultimately meaningless because there is no common ground for the comparison of ‘real value’. Science measures that in terms of technological advancement, art in terms of rather indeterminate slew of yardsticks. The turbidity of what constitutes ‘value’ in the latter is a problem, but does not justify a denial of art having any value for society at all. On the contrary, one ought to appreciate the plurality of what constitutes value in art.

The enormity and plurality of art’s instrumental value cannot be more emphasized. While particular art works – such as Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” (a photograph of a small plastic crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine produced with a grant of $15000) – are controversial in terms of what value it offers society (especially when taxpayer’s money are in question), one should not categorically conclude that all art is really quite useless. This essay has proven that art serves specific functions, whether intended or not – and its instrumental value in inexhaustible aspects of society cannot be callously disregarded. The truth is that art has become so entrenched in society’s culture that it is arguably an intrinsic part of what makes up society and culture. What constitutes ‘value’ in knowledge is sometimes quite arbitrary because of its pluralism, but this should not translate to an understatement of art’s value. Rather, the fact that it is valuable in so many respects should be adequate evidence of its wide-ranging uses and brevity of concerns. Ultimately, while art may not be indispensible, it is certainly irreplaceable. To say that art has no real value in society is to throw away an irreplaceable mirror and perspective. Society does that at its own peril.

 

In a library, with a forsaken book.

The white dust rose in whirls

smelling of the ages gone, of forsaken

words

from a distant somebody who speaks but does not talk.

A perduring classic, a touchstone –

a stone that one would touch

to renew long-abandoned faith in humanity

or taste the rawness of what they call

the human condition.

 

But there it remained –

untouched,

sedentary on a shelf,

by the day and by the night,

its spine discoloured with osteoporosis,

dust seeking refuge as worms eat their way through

the papery yellow pages writhing

in pain of thirst for eyes to land

upon it most beauteous parts.

 

A hundred years past and still it does not die.

Would it ever? If it turns to dust, would it?

Words that once lived lives on for a long, long time -

As long as the wind blows,

As long as man have ears,

And a heart to listen.

 

So you are pulling your hair out over no problems at all.

Wittgenstein once noted how his works shows ‘ how little has been done when these problems have been solved” The reason behind this is simple – they’re philosophical problems, and philosophical problems are in effect no problems at all. What he has done is to show that philosophical problems are no problems at all but puzzles believed to be problems – muddles believed to be mysteries – because the philosophers who addressed the, did not see that they were due to a certain kind of illusion. So philosophy dispels illusions in this respect (but in that very process create more illusionary problems, IMHO) Construing philosophy as a set of symptoms of the wayward intellect, his aim is to relieve us of the agonies they cause by showing their illusoriness. So philosophers embark on what they call a philosophical journey, go one huge circle making lives difficult for themselves by means of jargons, then end up at the very point they started out with – feeling a little complacently enlightened: Eureka! I’ve found that there’re no problems with this problem! Wonderful.

What is art? What is truth? What is knowledge? What is morality? These are all perennial questions that have gripped the minds of philosophers, but to me the only ‘problem’ worth dealing with is the last one - what is morality? The first three are no problems at all – nice ideas to play with as a cat plays with his ball of yarn, but ultimately of little consequence and difference to our lives.

What is truth? Does it matter if we reach a definitive view on what makes ‘truth’? What is truth but word? A truth is made to be true – even if there are objective truth, what use might we be if we have no access to it? Down with Plato’s Ideal world of perfection. Objective truths are very fine ideals to play with – we intuitively have the desire to know the truth, the indubitable truth that is 100% certain and absolute because deep inside us we desire a sort of order over relativistic mess and chaos. But where, on this moonlit and dream-visited planet, are they to be found?

What is art? Ask this question 200 years ago and you get a different answer from what is generally accepted (is there?) today. Ask the same question 200 years from now and you would most probably get a different answer too. Questions like these cannot be discussed in the narrow confines of philosophy – it has to take up anthropological and cultural dimensions because they are so steeped in the spirit of the time (zeigeist) that it is meaningless to come to any over-arching ‘artistic truth’ (to me this phrase is total rubbish – ‘artistic preference’ would be more reasonable)

What is knowledge? How do we know that we know? What makes my belief ‘knowledge’ and not just mere idiosyncratic ‘belief’? On the epistemological level all these sound very important questions that should not be easily dismissed. It is important to derive your knowledge from a reliable process and source, rather than believing everything that comes your way with glazed and naïve acceptance. But while philosophers have discussed extensively on theories of justifications, truth and knowledge, they have little bearings on our practical accumulation of knowledge. One problem lies in how philosophers are sometimes (often, actually) not the very people who create knowledge in the knowledge domains – few philosophers who write about science are themselves scientists (except a few that I know of – Hilary Putnum, for instance) who understand the intricate workings of the knowledge domain. It is not up to them to decide what counts as knowledge and what doesn’t, though they can on the sidelines comment on how people in the field accord information the status of ‘knowledge’.

What is morality? A very important question concerning what is right and what is wrong. It is, in my opinion, the only field in philosophy that should be taken most seriously because it has serious implications on how human beings behave, what society should encourage and denounce. It is the very face of human society. If I believe that what is good or right is determined by whatever is good or right for most people, then I am a utilitarian who will want society to act with utilitarian principles – and if I’m not aware of the need for justice, then that spells the end for the ‘minority’ and their interests. Morality and ethics is in my mind the most meaningful and important of all. They’re ideals that can be applied. It makes a visceral difference to my life, and to many others’.

I’m not trying to refute the very point of philosophy or philosophers here (who I am to do that huh) – human society needs to have people sitting on armchairs reflecting on their behalf. But there’re times where I feel that philosophers kick up a big fuss over some problems that are really, not problems at all – so that even if they arrive at the conclusion that they’re really not problems, it’s a big deal.

The teaching of the Vedantic school of Hinduism often proposed that problems that beset mankind are not real problems at all but illusions to be seen through. Analogously, it’s the classical Indian (Chinese too, actually – whichever came up with it first) example of a rope mistaken for a snake or serpent. When it is seen for what it is, the potential dangers dissolve, but very little has been accomplished in showing that it was not real. All that is involved is a certain minimal displacement of perception and intelligence. And yet the change if momentous when things are seen for what they are (aka, the truth emerges, we’re enlightened) The whole world, say the Hindu thinkers, is illusory in this sense, and the problem is not to deal with the problems to which it appears to give rise, but to see through them to a different order of reality. If we compare the achievement of these thinkers to the practical activities of snake hunters, their achievement is minimal. But in terms of the radical restructuring of vision, their achievement is immense. They have solved no problems as such, simply showed that there were no problems to solve. That’s often what philosophy is about: There was no snake, and so no problem. “The deepest problems” wrote Wittgenstein, ” are really no problems”.

Some people find a perverse sense of pleasure in finding problems and then proving that they’re no problems afterall. These people are called philosophers.