More on Lee's failed language policy.

This was a comment on my blog about mandarin. This comment was from the perspective of an Indian Singaporean. Because of the ethnic Chinese majority in Singapore,some of us always think about the 2nd language issue as a Mandarin only language issue.

But the second language issue affects other ethnic groups as well and we shouldn't forget that the Tamil language issue is pretty stupid too. In fact, new PR turned citizens from India are affected by this stupid policy more than the recent immigrants from China. Unlike the former PRC nationals who are used to mandarin, a lot of the new Indian immigrants are used to Hindi and not Tamil.

In the early years of our education system, Lee didn't enforce a Hindi only policy on the ethnic Indians like he did with a Mandarin only policy on the ethnic Chinese. One can only speculate his intentions.

Interesting reading. I'm Indian, but I can relate to the language issues faced by the Chinese here.

Tamil is one of the official languages in Singapore and is taught as "mother tongue" to many Indian Singaporeans. This is fine for the majority of local-born Singaporean Indians (who are descended from South-Indian Tamils), but a big problem for the increasing number of Indians who hail from other regions of India. Indeed, Tamil itself is a minority language in India, and the national language is Hindi. When you think about it, this is perhaps an even stranger situation than the primacy given to Mandarin over Chinese "dialects" in Singapore, since far more Indians (from India) speak Hindi than Tamil.

I've witnessed the ironies of "mother tongue" instruction first-hand in school - one of my classmates was from a North Indian family where Hindi was spoken. He struggled to learn his enforced supposed "mother tongue" Tamil. The irony becomes all the more stark when one considers that, in terms of objective utility, his true mother tongue, Hindi, might've been a better bet if he'd wanted to converse with a native Indian. But he was never given that option. At any rate, I hear things have changed since, with the provision of greater latitude in choosing which "mother tongue" to learn.

The last point I wish to make is just an interesting addition to this business of written scripts. Just a different spoken languages (or "dialects") can share the same written script, the same spoken tongue can be written in different scripts. Hindi (the national language of India) and Urdu (the national language of Pakistan) are, to all intents and purposes the same language in spoken form, but the former is written in a Sanskrit-based script while the latter is written in an Arabic-based script.

See also:

Lee Kuan Yew was wrong

The myth of your Mandarin Heritage

The Demise of Cambrdge University.

You know the quality of a university has gone down once it starts advertising in the Straits Times (as giving a world-class degree) and having an open house in Singapore.

Not to be taken seriously.

It sucks to be a journalist in Singapore.

Saw this post on the Temasek Review about the miserable lives of journalists in Singapore. Skeptic feels sorry for this profession. How can they wake up every morning and look at themselves in the mirror?

In other parts of the world, writers can find work in an environment that mirrors their political/moral inclinations. Whether you are right or left, there is a place for you. But in Singapore, unless you are a former ISD member, you would have to write things that go against your beliefs. It must be really sad to use one's writing skills in such a manner.

Imagine writing for a newspaper that is known for its horrible local news reporting. As a journalist, what can you write about? Local news can be split into 2 kinds of news: Pro-government pieces that extols the many virtues of the PAP and really boh liao articles(example) that couldn't interest most people. Either one of them is garbage work that gets mocked on the internet by bloggers like me. ;)

(The really boh liao pieces are by this middle- age auntie who uses the Straits Times as a personal diary to frequently talk about her withering ovaries. Look, most Singaporeans are not really interested that you bumped into yet another ex-boyfriend. What do you expect? Singapore is so small. You want to avoid them, just move to New Zealand! You are more likely to bump into sheep.)

If I were the writer, I'll try and find a job with an overseas news bureau like Reuters or the Associated Press. At least I can look myself in the mirror every morning with the full knowledge that I made an honest living.

Looked down by the public, despised by the opposition and controlled by the government, it really sucks to be one of them.

SPH: An insider speaks
I had no illusions about the independence of the local media when I first started my job in StraitsTimes, under SPH. I knew that my work would be edited, and possibly censored for political safety, and I was mostly fine with that – no media channel anywhere in the world is entirely free from some form of editorial trimming, after all. But there is such a thing as a free press but certainly not one in Singapore.

What I didn’t bargain for was individual self-censorship, unspoken policies and rules, and the stoutness with which people swallowed their journalistic dignity and integrity (because it does exist, even strongly, in some places) to toe the company line. Incredible as it seems, reporters in Singapore do have the same fierce pride in their work as reporters anywhere else; only pitifully and sadly they cannot demonstrate their beliefs. After all its a job.The omnipotence of the CPF. Its on the cards that there will be a general election in 2010. It’s hard for me to swallow the indignation I feel whenever I see the local media doggedly ignoring its news sense. We have seen it all before. We will see it again. And again. We see it every day.

Articles and TV programmes are edited to balance out pro-opposition views; awesome camera opportunities – like the opposition rallies – are studiously left out of media coverage; banal and unfair quotes and tactics are highlighted and headlined simply because they are tools of the ruling party and the lap-dog media will comply. But the truth will out. The voting public are not as blind as they seem. For those that WILL get the chance to vote, that is.

There are many things journalists see that the eyes of the public are not privy to, and that we would like to report on but can’t. Please remember that when you read an article or watch a broadcast that seems particularly, emetically subjective. And help spread the word that a lot of us in the media are sorry that we can’t do the job we want to. It may not mean a lot to you, but it sucks for us that for every day, people’s opinions of us plummet – despite the fact that we work our asses off in 14-hour days with no breaks on weekends or public holidays to bring you OUR (or it THEIR) version of the news. We are just doing a job..for THEM.

And for those who think it’s as easy as quitting your jobs and following your conscience – grow up. This is a job. It puts food on our tables. We can all get up and leave, but it’s ridiculously easy to replace us with more party-line-spouting drones. And it’s also likely that we’re doing something about it, in our own little ways, even if it’s as small as writing about and expressing our dissatisfaction with the system from the inside. But we cant tell you about it.

After all, walls have ears inside here too. And some of those ears are positioned to hear everything, sometimes for some who want to just get on with company at the expense of dobbing their own friends. But that is another sad story. Clearly the pressure coming from the head is overwhelming, and it is no surprise whatsoever that that pressure should translate down the chain, so that the executives chastise the editors, the editors chastise the journalists, and so on, if anyone steps out of line, and that perpetuates self-censorship because ‘you might as well mutilate your own article before they get to it, and in any case there’s no point in drawing attention to yourself’.

Will it make some people squirm after reading this.
Doubt it. There is no soul.

Sino-Singapore relationship. The view from the PAP.

This article in the PAP's magazine Petir sums up the view that the PAP have about their relationship with China. They think they are so damn important that China wants to learn everything from them.

What does China want to learn from Singapore? The investment strategies of our Sovereign Wealth Funds or perhaps our world class foreign talent policy or maybe the expertise in opening an industrial park? I bet it is none of the above.

However, there is one thing that the PAP is very good at and the communist party really wants to learn about this one thing. It is about maintaining totalitarian control in the face of globalisation. That is the only thing that China is interested in learning from.

In fact, I think the Chinese officials who are sent here will learn many more bad things about Singapore that they will choose not to repeat in their own country.

As Chinese Nationals staying in Singapore for a brief period of time, they could experience first hand the resentment the locals have against them; which would teach them the perils of having a too open policy.

Another thing they would avoid replicating is the inability of Singapore government officials in conducting business. Who cannot forget the failed joint Suzhou project with China in the 1990s, or the back-lash over Temasek's investment in Thailand or the billions lost in investment overseas.

Singapore learn from China? I think it should be the other way around. It is this naive and arrogant attitude that burned many Singaporean business-men and EDB officials in China.

No wonder the people in China think Singaporeans are stupid!

Suzhou the spark in Sino-Singapore ties
Every year, delegations from China make the trip here to learn from Singapore and the PAP. Why the fascination? Petir finds out

The idea seems almost absurd: A country with thousands of years of history learning from one whose existence is measured in mere decades. Nevertheless, things have reached such a stage between China and Singapore that nearly 4,000 have come for the “mayor’s class”, a masters programme in Managerial Economics that Nanyang Technological University started in 1992 for China officials likely to become mayors. These days, the Chinese government is focusing on the factors that have kept the PAP in power for 50 years and studying how the Party operates. The interest in things Singapore was sparked 15 years ago, when the two countries got together to set up the Suzhou Industrial Park. Since then, scholars and journalists besides officials have flocked here to study the Republic’s political system, housing and more. The friendship, however, goes back to 1978, when China started reforming its economy and looking to learn from others.

That November, vice-premier Deng Xiaoping visited. During his trip, he visited the Jurong Industrial Estate and met with Deputy Prime Minister Goh Keng Swee. It led to Dr Goh being appointed economic advisor to the state council of China in 1985. Serious study began after 1992, when Deng called for China to learn from Singapore’s best practices. The landmark Suzhou project was a result of this.

The park allowed Singapore to share its experience and thinking with China. It also laid the foundation for other bilateral projects between both countries. The most recent is the plan to develop an eco-friendly township in Tianjin. This builds on Singapore’s expertise in urban planning and infrastructure development.

Ties go beyond such physical developments. In 2002, Zeng Qinghong, an alternative member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) Central Committee and a member of the CPC’s Central Committee Secretariat put it in a nutshell when he received in Beijing a delegation led by PAP Central Exco member Lim Swee Say.

He said: “The CPC values learning from the PAP’s experience of governace. This has become an important element of the exchanges between both parties.” To this end, Chinese officials have sat in at meet-the-people sessions and noted PAP MPs’ familiarity with citizens’ concerns. They have gone back and launched their own regular meetings with the public. As China’s political reforms continue, they keep returning to observe how Singapore handles other issues.

Dutch among lowest cannabis users in Europe-report

When will people learn that criminalising a substance is the best way to promote its use. It happened in the 1930s when america started prohibition. The only people who profited from prohibition were the criminal bootleggers.

Skeptic remembers an incident many years ago when he lived in the Netherlands for a few months. He was sharing a house with some house-mates, one of them was an Italian who smoked a lot of weed. When he asked him why he did it? He said that he couldn't do it back in Italy.

This response was in stark contrast to his Dutch acquaintances who always complained about 'those people with German licences plate' who would drive over the border to buy weed over the weekend.

Dutch among lowest cannabis users in Europe-report
AMSTERDAM, Nov 5 (Reuters) - The Dutch are among the lowest users of marijuana or cannabis in Europe despite the Netherlands' well-known tolerance of the drug, according to a regional study published on Thursday. Among adults in the Netherlands, 5.4 percent used cannabis, compared with the European average of 6.8 percent, according to an annual report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, using latest available figures. A higher percentage of adults in Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic and France took cannabis last year, the EU agency said, with the highest being Italy at 14.6 percent. Usage in Italy used to be among the lowest at below 10 percent a decade ago. Countries with the lowest usage rates, according to the Lisbon-based agency, were Romania, Malta, Greece and Bulgaria. Cannabis use in Europe rose steadily during the 90s and earlier this decade, but has recently stabilised and is beginning to show signs of decline, the agency said, owing to several national campaigns to curb and treat use of the drug. "Data from general population and school surveys point to a stabilising or even decreasing situation," the report said. The policy on soft drugs in the Netherlands, one of the most liberal in Europe, allows for the sale of marijuana at "coffee shops", which the Dutch have allowed to operate for decades, and possession of less than 5 grams (0.18 oz). Nearly a fifth of the 228 coffee shops in the Dutch capital of Amsterdam, a popular draw for tourists, are scheduled to be shut down because they are too close to schools. The full report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction is available at r.reuters.com/vef87f (Reporting by Reed Stevenson; Editing by Elizabeth Fullerton)

Surely, there must be a better way to select leaders?

Imagine you hold a special competition every year to choose the 'best' people to lead an organisation. Everyone can take part and the selection process is purely based on the outcome of the competition. Is it open and meritocratic? Yes, it is. No one is stopped from taking part in the competition and it is based purely on the individual's abilities.

Now imagine that competition is a 100m race where the fastest men are chosen to lead you. The competition is still open and based on ability. But the question is not whether it is based on meritocracy but whether it is an appropriate way to choose the next generation of leaders.

That is the flaw of our scholarship system which seems to equate academic ability with the ability to lead. Mr Teo emphaises the importance of 'intellectual ability' in the selection process but he seems to neglect the importance of common sense in selecting our future leaders (despite his claims to the contrary).

This is what he had to say about the scholars learning important life skills. I don't even know why he is even bragging about it. This is some of the gems he said.

Another recalls how she had to do many things herself – photocopying papers for meetings, receiving and serving visitors and taking lots of minutes during meetings, sometimes as many as three sets a day. She had to be very nice to the typists in the Typing Pool in order to ensure that her work did not end up at the bottom of the pile.

It is sad that a 20 year old scholar had to learn how to deal with people as an adult.

In the next two paragraphs, you learn of the cultural shock of the scholars dealing with the plebes for the first time.

A Police scholar started as an Assistant Investigations Officer, doing frontline work on suicides, thefts, molestations, etc. The posting taught him people skills because he had to work with non-scholars and developed his empathy for the public when he dealt with crime victims who sought his help.

When another officer started work, he had a subordinate who was old enough to be his father. Their ideas were often at odds, but he soon realized that while he had lots of knowledge, his subordinate had a lot more wisdom. Over time, he learned to complement his own analysis with his subordinate’s suggestions.

These anecdotes are a sad reflection of the fact that most of our scholars/elites study in the same schools and interact with the same bunch of people for most of their pre-adult lives. Skeptic wished that the background of our leaders were more varied like in other countries.

I blame this sad state of affairs on Lee Kuan Yew and his blind devotion to the Mandarin System of Imperial China. A system that used poetry and music as one of the gauges for government posts. Part of the problem is that the PSC view of intelligence is very different from real intelligence and common sense.

In Singapore, if you can solve a problem or answer a question based on some predefine rule, you are deemed smart. That is what our PAP cabinet, which is packed full of former scholars, is very good at. They are very good at implementing policies using time-tested methods like CPF reduction and wage suppression. But ask them to solve a problem that requires thinking out of the box and you see that some of them are really dumb.

There are actually two distinct kinds of mental ability. In one, you are merely recycling things that were already thought of by someone else. In the other, you have to solve a problem entirely from scratch. These two kinds of mental abilities are independent of each other and our academic system only tests the first. I am not saying that all scholars lack the second one. There are some scholars who are good at both, it is just that those with the inability for the latter tend to end up in our PAP cabinet. ;)

Furthermore, there is another gap in the PSC's thinking. Even if the PSC is able to test real intelligence, they still have the misguided notion that raw problem solving skills is the same as good management skills... sighh

That is why I feel that contrary to Mr Teo's assertion, the PSC doesn't help solve Singapore's problem but contributes to it.