Looking for Words

And here’s the transcript of President Barack Obama’s Fourth of July speech taken from the White House website.

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Ban Ki Moon and Goh Chok Tong

Singapore’s Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong could have been in the position of the man he is shaking hands with — UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon.

Maybe the thought did not occur to him when he gave a dinner in honour of the UN chief in Singapore last night. But Mr Goh was seen as a possible successor to the former UN secretary general Kofi Annan three years ago.

Singapore’s Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, however, said at the time that Mr Goh was not interested in the job. Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper reported in April 2006 that Mr Lee was asked by a reporter: “Rumours have it that Senior Minister Goh Chok is considering taking up the post of the United Nations secretary general. Would you support him?”

Mr Lee replied: “I think you’ve got to ask him that. All I know is that he is not interested in the job. Answering to five masters and often unable to satisfy two or three at any one time… it is a tough job.

“From what I’ve understood from him, I think it’s not a job that would add to his happy years after office.”

The “five masters” Mr Lee sarcastically mentioned are the five permanent Security Council members – all of whom backed Mr Ban in his bid for the post.

South Korea spared no expense to have Mr Ban elected in October 2006. The Times reported days before the election:

The South Koreans have been waging an aggressive campaign on behalf of Ban Ki Moon, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the front-runner to replace Kofi Annan as UN chief at the end of the year. The inducements range from tens of millions of pounds of extra funding for African countries to lucrative trade agreements in Europe…

Mr Ban announced his bid in February and has since been criss-crossing the globe trying to win support. A month later South Korea announced that it would treble its aid budget to Africa to $100 million (£53 million) by 2008… Seoul’s generosity seems to have worked. Yesterday Elly Matango, the Tanzanian Ambassador to Tokyo and Seoul, said that his Government had decided to support Mr Ban.

This month President Roh and Mr Ban headed the most senior South Korean delegation since 1961 to visit Greece, another Security Council member. Overseen by hundreds of South Korean businessmen, the countries signed agreements on trade, tourism and maritime transport.

Now Mr Ban is in Myanmar seeking the release of the the democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.

Interestingly, Mr Goh, also visited Myanmar recently.

I admire Mr Goh — he would have made a good UN secretary general. With his ability to connect with people, he would have possibly been less low-key than Mr Ban. And he would have been equally diplomatic, a good mediator. There is also his proven skill in crisis management, seeing Singapore through the Asian financial crisis.

But, as Mr Lee said, he did not want the job. A pity. For there is no denying the importance of the United Nations. As the 2006 election showed, countries vie for the honour to fill the UN secretary general’s post. The opportunity comes but rarely. There have been only eight UN secretary-generals so far.

Mr Ban is already in the middle of his five-year term. But the next UN chief is unlikely to be an Asian.

My goodness, Indians are voting in favour of same-sex marriage in a Times of India online poll. Add to that the Delhi High Court ruling that same-sex sex between consenting adults is okay, and you are blown away by the change in attitudes. The law against homosexual sex violates fundamental rights, ruled the High Court.

But the Indian government is in no rush to change the law, say news reports.

Speaking as a non-gay, I can understand the government’s reluctance to be dragged into another culture war with the religious hardliners already decrying the High Court’s ruling.

Still, there is no turning back the tide. Unless the High Court ruling is overturned by the Supreme Court, the law as it stands has been found unconstitutional. So it will have to be changed.

It is certainly outdated. Introduced by the British nearly 150 years ago, it is seldom enforced. I have never heard of any Oscar Wilde-like case in India. If it’s not used, what’s the point of having it in the law books?

The Times of India reports:

With Delhi High Court legalising gay sex, India on Thursday become the 127th country in the world to decriminalise homosexuality while 80 nations still consider it as an offence.

The process of legal sanction to homosexual acts began in 1989 when Denmark became the first country to grant a status on a par with married couples to same sex partners which was soon followed by other European countries.

Netherlands became the first nation to give full civil marriage rights to gay couples in 2001. Belgium allowed gay marriages in 2003. Spain too legalised full marriages for gay couples in June 2005.

In July 2005, Canada legalised same-sex marriage. New Zealand in 2004 recognised civil union between gay couples as valid and same sex union was recognised in 2005 in South Africa.

I was surprised to find homosexual acts (between males) are still illegal in Singapore. They are legal in Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Indonesia (except in Aceh), East Timor and the Philippines but not in Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and Myanmar, according to Wikipedia.

GayLawNet says:

In October 2007, the Singapore government declared that private, consensual, adult homosexual sex would no longer be prosecuted but that its illegality would remain.

After a month in America travelling coast to coast and two weeks in India, it’s good to be back in Singapore. America is great and India an emerging giant, but there’s something engaging about Singapore.

On the flight to India, I saw Indian undergraduates studying in Singapore who were going home for their summer holidays. In the Indian city of Calcutta (Kolkata), I heard of others fresh out of high school who have been accepted in Singapore universities. Those taking student loans may have to serve a bond and work in Singapore for a few years time to pay off the loans. Some may decide to stay on.

One out of five of Singapore’s 4.8 million population is a foreigner – and that’s excluding permanent residents. Ethnic diversity has become the norm for the world’s major cities. At least 30 percent of the population are immigrants in cities like Vancouver, Auckland, Geneva, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Perth and Sydney. Immigrants make up more than 40 percent of the population in Miami, Amsterdam and Toronto and a staggering 80 percent in Dubai.

The figures are from the book, The Flight Of The Creative Class – The New Global Competition For Talent, by Richard Florida. The book is four years old, published in 2005, but the current global downturn has not yet cut off the flow of people going overseas for work or study. I saw Bangladeshi casino workers in Atlantic City. At Delhi airport, I saw three planes set out for Dubai and Muscat in about half an hour.

Florida’s book is relevant to Singapore. He says the same things that we have been hearing from our leaders in Singapore about the need for global talent.

He praises Singapore as one of the "first-tier cities" like New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Chicago, Los Angeles, Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Milan. He writes:

Singapore’s government has developed a targeted strategy to spur a more broadly creative economy by investing in core creative clusters, pumping funds into higher education… Its strategy also includes investing heavily in artistic and cultural activity… In the meantime, it has made significant strides towards becoming a ,more open society by allowing gays to work openly in civil service jobs and relaxing its restrictive censorship laws.

Technology, talent and tolerance are essential for growth, he adds.

Not that he thinks the new high-tech economy is an unmixed blessing. It increases the income gap between skilled and unskilled workers, he writes; in America, income gaps are highest in cities like San Jose, New York, Washington DC, Raleigh-Durham, Austin and San Francisco. That is bad for the economy as a whole, he adds, since it restricts upward mobility.

Florida writes:

The creative economy is the Schumpeterian growth engine of our age, and the socioeconomic dynamic it sets in motion is the modern-day equivalent of the divide Roosevelt faced – the growth of two divergent classes: the creative and the service sectors.

He adds:

We need a strategy that is the modern-day equivalent of the New Deal – one that stimulates the creative engine while at the same time extending its benefits to a broad base of people.

Florida, who has taught at George Mason University and Carnegie Mellon University and is now associated with the University of Toronto, also posts his ideas on his blog – Creative Class.

The Singapore Grip by JG Farrell

Anyone who loves Singapore should read The Singapore Grip by JG Farrell. He won the Booker Prize in 1973 for The Siege of Krishnapur about the 1857 War of Indian Independence. The Singapore Grip, first published in Britain in 1978, is also a historical novel, describing Singapore at the time of the Japanese invasion during the Second World War.

The author vividly describes the fighting in what was then Malaya and the fall of Singapore, the burning and the looting, the humiliation of the British, who were outgeneralled and outfought by superior Japanese forces, and the manner in which civilians and soldiers alike tried to escape from the island as the Japanese approached Singapore. The narrative captures the whole spectrum of human behaviour from cowardice and selfishness to selfless courage. There are some stoic heroic figures and a very attractive Eurasian woman who gain your empathy.

But best of all are the descriptions of Singapore before it was devastated by the war – the colonial bungalows at Tanglin, the carnival atmosphere of the Great World, the taxi dancers and the prostitutes, a dying house where the Chinese went or were left by their relatives to die to prevent misfortune at home, the world of the rich colonial businessmen and the relationship between the races. Especially memorable is the description of a plane landing in Singapore. The author gives an aerial view of Singapore as the plane begins its descent – it’s marvellous.

I have been reading the book again because I am already beginning to miss Singapore.

I will be away from Singapore for more than a month, returning towards the end of June. This will probably be the last post till then.

So I will end with this – a vivid description of the city I love as it was long ago. These are the opening lines of The Singapore Grip:

The city of Singapore was not built up gradually, the way most cities are, bya natural deposit of commerce on the banks of some river or at a traditional confluence of trade routes. It was simply invented one morning early in the nineteenth

Image via Wikipedia

century by a man looking at a map. "Here," he said to himself, "is where we must have a city, half-way between India and China. This will be the great halting-place on the trade route to the Far East. Mind you, the Dutch will dislike it and Penang won’t be pleased, not to mention Malacca." This man’s name was Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles: before the war his bronze statue used to stand in Empress Place in a stone alcove like a scallop shell ( he has been moved along now and, turned to stone, occupies a shady spot by the river). He was by no means the lantern-jawed individual you might have expected: indeed he was a rather vague-looking man in a frock coat.

Although people had once lived there, the island of Singapore, when he arrived, was largely deserted except for a prodigious quantity of rats and centipedes. Rather ominously, Raffles also noticed a great many human skulls and bones, the droppings of local pirates. He wasted no time, however, in negotiating for the island with an alarmed native and then proceeded, his biographer tells us, to set up a flag-pole thirty-six feet high. "Our object," he wrote in a letter to a friend, "is not territory but trade: a great commercial emporium, and a fulcrum, whence we may extend our influence politically as circumstances may hereafter require." As he stood there on the lonely beach and gazed up at the flag with rats and centipedes seething and tumbling over his shoes did Raffles foresee the prosperity which lay ahead for Singapore? Undoubtedly he did.

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No, we don’t have a Barack Obama in Singapore but we have some highly articulate, capable ministers who can hold their own in their fields against almost anyone in the world. Just watch Singapore Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugartnam speaking in Switzerland on the government’s role in the light of the financial crisis. This clip appeared on the popular Singapore blog, The Online Citizen, which also has a writeup on what he said.

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Why was terrorist Mas Selamat Kastari’s arrest first reported in the Straits Times?

One would have expected the government to announce the news, especially after the scandal he caused by escaping from a Singapore prison more than a year ago.

Granted he was rearrested in Malaysia by Malaysian police. But they were tipped off by Singapore intelligence, Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister and Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng was quick to say after the Straits Times reported the arrest today.

So Singapore can take credit too for his arrest. All the more reason why the government could have broken the news.

But instead the news surfaced in a newspaper that is not known for investigative stories, particularly regarding the government.

The terrorist was arrested on April 1, the Straits Times reported quoting “regional intelligence sources”.

The report was quick to give credit to Singapore intelligence. It said:

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Amidst all the economic uncertainty and swine flu jitters, Singapore has some good news at last.

The 2002 Bali bombing suspect Mas Selamat Kastari has been rearrested more than a year after he escaped from a Singapore prison in February 2008.

Singapore Deputy Prime Minister and Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng and his security apparatus, which suffered a blow when he escaped, can now congratulate themselves.

For the fugitive was arrested in Malaysia on April 1 following a tipoff from Singapore, reports the Straits Times quoting unnamed intelligence sources. The Malaysian Star newspaper naturally highlights the role played by the Malaysian police.

It’s surprising he was picked up in Johor, just across the Causeway from Singapore.

The minister explained why his arrest was not reported for more than a month. The authorities wanted to question him in secret.

The minister said the Malaysian authorities were tipped off by Singapore late last year. So the Malaysians kept him under surveillance for four months or more before finally arresting him?

And all this time the Singapore government kept mum, meekly swallowing public criticism about the terrorist on the run? The temptation to crow he had been found must have been there, especially in the face of all the bad news about the economy.

His arrest is a scoop for the Straits Times, which came out with the news today.

But who else could the intelligence sources tip off? The Straits Times is the only major newspaper in Singapore. The only possible alternative was the Singapore news channel, Channel NewsAsia. But this is not a picture story. It plays better in a newspaper than on television.

It is not even known when the terrorist will be handed over to Singapore, reported the Straits Times. He is being held under Malaysian security laws.

The local blogosphere naturally has gone into overdrive. Hopefully, the various postings can be found in this Google Blog Search RSS feed.

There is plenty also on Twitter. Here are all the tweets found through Twitter Search and here’s the Twitter RSS feed.

India After Gandhi: The History Of The World’s Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha

Ramachandra Guha

Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi: The History Of The World’s Largest Democracy is a riveting account of India since independence in 1947.

The narrative never flags. Historical figures are brought to life and history re-enacted in its pages. It makes you appreciate the greatness of Gandhi and Nehru as well as India as it is today.

The leaders may have shrunken in stature, the country pulled in different directions by political parties representing various groups and communities, but democracy has deepened, not weakened, says Guha. The coalition governments that have come and gone over the past two decades are a sign that the country today can be governed only by consensus. No one can do another Indira Gandhi.

She was Nehru’s daughter in her secular outlook. Nobody can say she discriminated against any community though she was forced to fight Sikh separatists and sent the army after them into the Golden Temple, their holiest shrine, for which she paid with her life – killed by two of her Sikh bodyguards.

But, apart from their secular outlook, father and daughter had little in common. Nehru respected democracy, the independence of the media and the judiciary. The Congress party in his time was also more independent, run by powerful politicians who did not necessarily listen to him though he was the prime minister and their leader.

Nehru had friends even among his political opponents. Guha writes in absorbing detail about the countless actions taken by Gandhi and Nehru to keep India secular. He makes you admire them simply by describing what they did.

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The American Future: A History by Simon Schama

Simon Schama

The American Future is a labour of love by the British historian Simon Schama, who clearly admires America. This is a loving exploration of American history highlighting the dreams and ideals that created the country and continue to animate it.

Schama also notes the darker currents — of racism, for example, that led to segregation, xenophobia and colonial adventures like the occupation of the Philippines during which US forces tortured Filipino freedom fighters with impunity.

But America has never lacked voices condemning prejudice and inhumanity. From the abolitionists fighting against slavery to Mark Twain’s condemnation of the Philippines adventure to the Freedom Riders and other civil rights workers, America has never been short of idealism and tolerance.

This is the America that Schama celebrates. The book begins with an eyewitness account of Obama’s victory in Iowa.

Schama describes the joyous scene. It did not happen overnight. He describes how a grizzled white farmer who had once supported Kennedy campaigned for Obama – and how a high school senior seeing the big group of Obama supporters on the caucus floor switched his support from Hillary Clinton to Obama.

Schama catches the wave of American idealism that periodically throws up a Roosevelt, a Kennedy, an Obama.

Civil War

The idealism takes its toll. Schama describes the bitterness and enormous cost of the Civil War.

The Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, DC, where more than 300,000 people are buried, is a memorial to fallen heroes.

But it was once home to the Confederate general Robert E Lee. He was the son-in-law of George Washington’s adopted grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, who built the house.

It was turned into a graveyard by Lee’s former friend, Montgomery C Meigs, a fellow West Pointer and engineer who had helped build the Capitol building before the war.

Meigs, who served as the quartermaster-general of the Union army, could not forgive Lee for joining the rebels. Turning it into a graveyard made the house uninhabitable, writes Schama.

Meigs’ own son, who died in the war, was buried there – and so was he, long after the war.

Schama also writes about the black churches and black colleges as well as white pastors who took up their cause. We encounter heroic abolitionists who went from town to town, braving mobs and speaking against slavery.

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