I mean I want to see

READING Marilyn Yalom’s Birth Of The Chess Queen: A History now and it’s superb. A Spanish Hebrew text, attributed to Bonsenior ibn Yehia, possibly twelfth century, possible later:

She sits at the top of the high places above the city. She is restless and determined. She girds her loins with strength. Her feet stray not in her house. She moves in every direction and into every corner. Her evolutions are wonderful, her spirit untiring. How comely are her footsteps as she moves diagonally, one step after another, from square to square!

Yalom draws parallels between the rise of the chess queen and the ascent of female sovereigns in Europe.

I wonder if there are any good books about the history of chess in Asia. We don’t have the queen figure in Chinese chess — we have a river (楚河汉界) and a palace board, and cannons and elephants instead of bishops, and generals instead of kings. The general and his advisors cannot leave the palace squares. We play on the intersections instead of on squares.

And in China, weiqi (Go) was perceived as the popular game of the aristocracy, while xiangqi (Chinese chess) was the game of the masses.

I love how chess has provided matter for reflection on the most mystifying aspects of human existence — war, love, society, religion, even death. Omar Khayyam (died 1123): “We are in truth but pieces on this chess board of life, which in the end we leave, only to drop one by one into the grave of nothingness.” John Wales, Franciscan monk: “All the world’s a chess board.” Death being the great equaliser, a king could fall to the bottom of the sack and go to hell, while even a poor peasant might ascend to heaven.

Chess between courtly lovers: love as a combat between two worthy adversaries, and a ritual played according to rigorous, complex rules.

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“The elevation of the chess queen and bishop to new levels of strength meant it took fewer moves, on average, to complete a match. Chess was now no longer suited to leisurely encounters between ladies and gentlemen that could last a day or more, with interruptions for eating, drinking, dancing and singing. Now chess was fast and fierece, with the game becoming less social and more competitive.”

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Anthony Saidy’s The March Of Chess Ideas: Romantic, Scientific, Hypermodern, the New Dynamism. Developing and seeking open lines for pieces. How the amateur sees pieces and movement, the expert sees sixty-four squares with holes and lines and spheres of influence, and the genius apprehends a unified field within which space and force and mass are interacting valences: a Bishop tears the board in half and a Pawn bends the space around it the way mass can reshape space in the Einsteinian universe.

“Play the opening like a book, the middle game like a magician, and the endgame like a machine.”
- Rudolf Spielmann.

“I always loved complexity. With chess one creates beautiful problems.”
- Marcel Duchamp

The immortal game between Anderssen and Kieseritzsky in 1851, and its middle game: choosing whether to continue to escalate threats or start answering them, to the endgame, when the thrilling, maddening complexity of middlegame has been supplanted by a barren geometric landscape where one simple blunder can easily cost either player the game. The very best players know from experience, intuition, and calculation how a particular multiple-threat board arrangement is best acted on.

From the Romantics to Wilhelm Steinitz’s Scientific school, with a painstaking approach of trying to gain tiny advantages over time.

As metaphor, model and allegory, chess performs powerful cultural work. How Nabokov and Calvino write multi-leveled structured works, tricking the recipient with unexpected moves and elegant solutions of plot development. What really matters isn’t the catalogue of individual words as much as the system that binds them together. Rules, governed by logic, were the key to understanding and administering complex worlds. Logic and its consequences.

I love chess and the idea of chess: Memory, logic, calculation, creativity. And so much of “talent” is the ambition to succeed. Discipline, focus, patience and persistence. It’s a playing field for life, where one can develop sportsmanship, character and even grace. People who meet across a chessboard have an opportunity to interact on a very civilised level.

We live in an age where the truth is harder to come by because it is surrounded by facts, slick presentations and tools of distraction. One common response to our splintered, postmodern, slippery-truth age is not to think but to instead fall back on a fixed set of beliefs, a strict ideology. Chess helps our minds expand, grow comfortable with abstraction, learn to navigate complex systems. I love chess knowing that there are and always would be entire levels of play beyond my ability.

When I’m next in London I’ve to visit Simpson’s on the Strand, where the Immortal Game was played.

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- Bobby Fischer’s Game of the Century against Donald Bryne, 1956.
- Paul Murphy vs Duke of Brunswick and Count Isouard, Paris 1858. “Opera game”.
- Wilhelm Steinitz’s Battle of Hastings vs Curt von Bardeleben, Hastings, England, 1895.
- Akiba Rubinstein’s “Polish Brilliancy” against Gersh Rotlewi, December 1907, Lodz, Poland.
- Kasparov vs Anatoli Karpov, Linares, Spain, 1993.

Many serious chess players talk about chess largely in artistic terms, comparing brilliant games to masterful paintings or great symphonies. But they do acknowledge one key difference. Unlike music or painting, chess requires of the viewer an initial period of instruction before revealing its aesthetic quality. A pity indeed for us chess novices. But we can study the history of play as well. Each era learns from past eras, and develops a new level of sophistication.

I’d be sure to teach any kids I have how to play chess step by step, going through these games and get them castling by the time they’re two :)

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Under the Chinese silk comforter with my mug of tea, cubed mangoes, and Donne and Auden. It really doesn’t take much to make me contented — good books, tropical fruits, solitude when needed and blabbing on forever and a day here, sucking in knowledge in my usual dilettante manner — I could be an egghead gameshow/pub quizzing contestant.

I truly need time alone to recover from socialising. Am also physically recovering — spent some time in the pool getting lessons on the front crawl. It’s literally at a crawl, as I get tired kicking up and down and learning how to move my arms in the correct, graceful manner.

- Talking to D long distance, picking up where we left off. We talked and talked and talked. We talked till our voices were hoarse. I can talk about secondary school stereotypes or politics or handbags or office cattiness with you at dinner parties, but with D I can really talk. Talk about everything from the frivolous to the philosophical, getting down to the core of what’s really happening with our lives, taking the mickey out of each other, feeling understood. It’s like an old shoe that knows every countour of your foot.

He’s very Apollonian, has the cool logic of a mathematician yet is open and curious and loves art, music, Shakespeare.

One of my favourite poems is Auden’s Under Which Lyre which compares “pompous Apollo” with “the sons of Hermes” who love to play:

But jealous of our god of dreams,
His common-sense in secret schemes
To rule the heart;
Unable to invent the lyre,
Creates with simulated fire
Official art.

And when he occupies a college,
Truth is replaced by Useful Knowledge;
He pays particular
Attention to Commercial Thought,
Public Relations, Hygiene, Sport,
In his curricula.

Precocious Hermes and pompous Apollo: D is neither and both, and helped me see what a combination would look like. We have a great deal of affection for each other, and after spending some years apart there’s much to learn about the other — not simply what’s called “catching up” but in some senses learning anew. We can even talk about the past — there isn’t really even any need to feel bitter or apologise — we laugh about the happy things and the silly things — do you remember the time we did this, or that, and laugh about them without pangs of self-pity or nostalgia. Simply shared, happy memories at the point where there’s no hurt or blame or fear. I love that we’re friends again. I’ve missed that friendship. It was so easy, so deliciously easy, so marvellously free of bullshit, of indirectness, of dancing around wasting time.

And oh, I like men. I like men tremendously. I’m close to the school and university girls, but some of my closest chums are men. Love them. Love men.

- Singing Singapore songs a capella in the cab and watching an American friend cover his face in disbelief as we belted out “Count on me Singapore, count on me Singapore”. He then started shaking with laughter as we sang “There was a time when people said that Singapore won’t make it…..but we did etc etc” in our best dramatic voices. Then it was an orgy of singing Sound Of Music songs and favourites from musicals all the way home.

- That I feel loved, loving and lovable.

THE Clinton Foundation — where I’m volunteering — has helped provide access to anti-retroviral drugs for some 2m HIV-infected people in 13 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. How does it work?

Since 2000, the cost of the drug cocktail needed to treat AIDS has fallen from $10,000 per patient annually to $300. This is largely thanks to competition from generic medicines, produced by firms such as Cipla, a drugmaker in India. Innovative drug firms holding patents on these medicines have also cut their prices for poor countries.

The foundation brokered an agreement with three Indian companies — Cipla, Ranbaxy and Matrix — and a South African one, Aspen, to offer two key anti-retroviral drug cocktails for as little as 38 US cents per person a day, or less than half the price of the most affordable drugs now available in some of the target countries.

The key is to bring sound business analysis to the problem. Industry executives volunteered to pore over these companies’ operations for five months, looking for ways to save on production costs while preserving quality. These savings have been passed along as lower final prices, with a small profit margin to keep companies interested.

The attraction for a firm like Cipla, says Yusuf Hamied, its chairman, is that the foundation’s scheme offers the possibility of high-volume, predictable contracts which encourage firms to increase production for otherwise uncommercial markets.

While there is welcome progress across many fronts in Africa, much more needs to be done. The same is true of other regions where the disease is now taking hold. Africa’s unhappy distinction of being the world’s epicentre of HIV, the infection causing AIDS, is being challenged by Asia, from where 40% of the disease’s growth is forecast to come over the next few years.

In Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea (PNG), about 60% of hospital beds are now occupied by AIDS patients. Already in China, contaminated blood transfusions in some villages have claimed the lives of most young adults, leaving only children and their grandparents alive. If China is to contain its AIDS epidemic, it will need help, lots of it, from international agencies and from NGOs. AIDS everywhere presents a range of problems that are not susceptible to solution by a single agency. One big task, for example, is that of giving information. Many Chinese are still deeply ignorant about AIDS. The stigma attached to the disease is potent, despite widespread sympathy for the peasants of Henan, and despite the efforts of a few brave people like Pu Cunxin, one of China’s best known actors, who campaigns tirelessly against prejudice.

A very different problem concerns treatment. China produces only five anti-retroviral drugs with which to concoct treatments for HIV-positive people. The Clinton Foundation is helping, but more drugs are needed for those who find these “first-line” ones do not work, or work only with intolerable side effects.

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Nigeria & kleptocracy: It makes me so mad to read about how mineral wealth is divided among the few while tens of millions live in squalour, with the officials, bankers and oil executives on the one side and those waiting for the crumbs to fall on the other. Millions of peasants left their fields in pursuit of a little piece of the country’s oil wealth. When successive oil booms bust, many were thrown out of work. Government could no longer afford to pay street cleaners, bureaucrats could no longer afford domestic servants, and the restaurants, nightclubs and shops formerly fuelled by petronaira closed down.

In a country like this, you see the vital importance of sound public policy, of generating wealth for the people, of integrity in governance.

It makes me think of Myanmar, another country fabulously rich in natural resources: hydrocarbons, minerals, timber. In Myanmar, a tiny, pampered middle class enjoy luxury hotels, golf and shopping malls in Yangon; the generals bask in comfort in the mountain fastness of Naypyidaw, their absurdist capital. Talk of kleptocracy. It makes me so mad I want to spit.

How are we to engage with Myanmar when its engagement seems to take the form of a rapacious capitalism with amoral partners? Development could bring about swift changes to the political landscape, as eventually happened in Indonesia. Development, in other words, could be the fastest path to democracy.

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A: Do you mean to say you’re single?
B (roaring): YES! WHAT DID YOU THINK?
A: Oh I’ve always thought you were attached.
B: To whom?! To what?!
A: There were the string of gentlemen visitors you had, plus Mr Steel Trap, and Mr Planter’s Peanut…
B (who’s had several people assume these things): No! No! And no!

B: I’m tired of dating Dangerous Steel Traps. I prefer people I can rely on.
A: You mean walk all over and stamp on.

*

Reading up on Oportunidades, a welfare programme serving 5m poor Mexican families. It’s one of the best-known examples of an increasingly popular kind of social assistance called conditional cash-transfer (CCT) programmes. Unlike traditional welfare schemes, which dole out money without demanding anything in return, CCTs will only pay out if the recipients ensure their children regularly attend school and health facilities or schools alone. It’s what Singapore has with Workfare.

These programmes have swept across the developing world. In 1997 Mexico was one of only three countries to have a CCT programme. By 2008, as the World Bank documents in a new report, virtually every country in Latin America had one. So did Indonesia, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, the Philippines, Bangladesh, India, Turkey, Cambodia, Pakistan and Kenya. Some of these programmes are huge: Brazil’s Bolsa Familia serves 11m families.

Part of their attraction stems from the fact that making transfers conditional makes them more palatable to the middle class whose taxes finance them. It also helps their credibility that most CCT programmes have rigorous evaluations built in (by their nature, they need to know whether recipients have kept their side of the bargain). Governments like them because they make recipients more likely to support the ruling party (though so, probably, do conventional transfers).

CCTs do an excellent job of getting money to the poor. Children covered by them get more schooling and use health facilities more often than they would otherwise have done. Some fears have proved unfounded: poor people have not responded to cash payments by cutting back on paid work.

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Devouring Ricklefs’ Indonesian history book — who knew Aceh was one of the three major powers (the other two being Portuguese Malacca and Johor) confronting one another in the early sixteenth century? In the early seventeenth century, Aceh was to emerge for a time as the most powerful, cultivated and wealthy state of the western Indonesian archipelago.

Where to even begin if I want to anthologise SE Asian works? I’m still at the stage of learning Indonesian where I can say “That is not a durian. That is a mango.” Very useful in literary and aesthetic analysis, I’m sure.

I DREAMT that I was the Dalai Lama at a peace concert, and I was surrounded by children, had a Japanese translator, and kept sliding off my seat.

And the concert segued into a dream in which Mr Leo (whom I’ve not seen for years) sidled into the background and did some plumbing work so all the water ran clear.

I wonder what my subconscious is trying to tell me.

*

Bought a lovely silver bike today, and biked all the way to Changi Village of the nasi lemak and Ipoh hor fun, past the dreary Loyang industrial estate. I’ll try a round-trip to East Coast Park on the Park Connector if I get up early enough. And it’s good that I live a stone’s throw away from the sea, assuming the stone is thrown by a very powerful robot, so I’ll get to do some seaside cycling as well. Hurrah for oodles of free time.

ONE of my favourite spots in Beijing for books, brushes, seals, and other literary manners. It’s a charming tree-lined lane with some nice tea-houses along the way too. Was sipping oolong and tieguanyin and chatting about seasons and winter in the city with a store-owner, setting down the heavy armfuls of books that I’d bought earlier. Mmm I still remember the scent of the lovely new tieguanyin.

Windows of a bookstore.

Chinese Crap-O-Rama

Brushes for sale

This place makes for a nice stroll!

Oh I miss Beijing!!

The grounds of the Temple Of Heaven, one of my favourite places in Beijing.

Playing cards on the grounds.

Playing gourd-shaped flutes.

Calligraphy.

I struck up a conversation with this old gentleman about the water supply in Singapore. I miss the lovely lovely people in Beijing!

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Reading Turnbull’s latest edition of her Singapore history book, and Taufik Abdullah on Indonesia Towards Democracy. I’m gaining a better understanding of how large — it has a huge domestic market with some 240m people — and how diverse Indonesia is, the problems with her development, how she has shown remarkable powers of recovery after a long dictatorship and economic collapse. Despite the apocalyptic visions of a decade ago, Indonesia has been a huge success.

But while separatist tensions have eased, it remains prone to sectarian and ethnic violence. Mr Yudhoyono has not met his promise in 2004 of halving the number of people living below the government’s poverty line. More than 15% of Indonesia’s 240m people are poor. Unemployment is high, at about 8%, and the workforce is growing faster than in any other country apart from India and China.

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It’d be interesting to compare Indonesia and Nigeria, where I may be headed next year. At independence, in 1945 and 1960 respectively, both Indonesia and Nigeria were extremely poor; most of their people were subsistence farmers. But then both struck oil, and after the sudden quadrupling of the oil price in 1973-74 both were deluged with floods of petrodollars.

Indonesia turned oil income into productive investment, whereas Nigerian oil income was either siphoned abroad or used for prestige projects.

Said an Economist article in 2000: “The oil money came so suddenly, and in such vast quantities, that the government did not know what to do with it. In 1960, oil accounted for 1% of federal government revenues. Since then it has risen to about 95%. It was easy money. Foreign firms found and extracted the oil; the Nigerian government simply opened its coffers and watched the dollars gush in. The generals, assuming that the boom would last forever, spent carelessly. They also helped themselves and their friends to a big wad of the cash.”

The more I read about Nigeria, the more I’m saddened by the scale of its failure. Through foolish investments, graft and simple theft, its vast oil fortune has been wholly squandered.

And Abuja — this capital city was conceived as a symbol of national unity, a new capital in the centre of the country, unburdened by connections with any of Nigeria’s many squabbling ethnic groups. Instead, it became a symbol of the profligacy of the regime of General Ibrahim Babangida (1985-93), which sank billions into the project and produced a glittering ghost town. No ordinary Nigerian can afford to live there, but no state governor can afford not to make regular begging trips to the capital.

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Sometimes I miss America, where students march against war and for justice and equality, where immigrants seek opportunity and prosperity, and people believe they can repair the world and go out to do it. Of course we need to season the Alden Pyles with Thomas Fowlers, but there’s a lot to be said for optimism. There’s nothing false about hope.

Was reading Barack Obama in the bookstore the other day, I’ve nothing but respect for how he went out into community organising. He has more than sincerity, which politicians often have in spades (see Blair) — there’s authenticity. And who can’t help but love Michelle Obama?

TORRENTIAL rain with Donner und Blitzen. And half of my life seems to be spent in buses that can be overtaken by a tot on a plastic tricycle. This time, I was going down Orchard Road, which has been transformed with head-spinning rapidity into a scene of tinselly Christmas Crap-O-Rama that I consider the height of tack.

And the godawful Christmas music they play in shops! Wailing dorkass pop singers who try to jazz up carols by having them accompanied by a rock band and scooping simperingly on every second note. Ugh! Make it stop!

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In other news, a good guy friend dragged me out to play football in the smooshy fields, saving me from a drooling and benumbed day of staring morosely at the floor & listlessly flipping through the pages of an Indonesian history book. We ranged from the superfit mane-tossers to the rheumy old nags who should be put out to pasture or turned into glue. I did myself proud and managed to shuffle around for a bit and actually made contact with the ball. & I didn’t need to drape myself all over lampposts and wheeze for my life, which is an improvement over the last time I tried raising my heartbeat rate.

A raucous dinner with the players, who are all corny smart-asses. I mocked my friend’s infrequent, reluctant and cursory observances of personal hygiene. We exchanged stories of cutting holes in mattresses and pouring hot water over fishes as children. I also picked up one word of Korean, which I’m told meant hello, but you never know, it might have meant something different, such as “Are you respectable and free from disease?”

A: He is very intelligent. He has a BA with First Class Honours.
B: Big deal, I have a double BA, with First Class Honours too.
A: But his is in Physics. Yours is in Stream of Babble, and Brooding Instrospection.
B: Big deal, we’ve been out of college for a gazillion years.
A: He is very good looking.
B: Ah, now we’re talking.

Practice.

THESE are practice drafts for Lunar New Year next year…I’ve not done calligraphy properly for some time and it’s time to sit down and get serious. Discipline! Muscle! Training!

What with reading and language learning, applications and volunteer work commitments (don’t let that fool you, I am often a conscienceless miscreant when I’m not sweetly mopping the fevered brows of lepers), life is full.

Check out Heifetz’s left-hand pizzicato and awesome technique.

& I’ve always adored Argerich.

*

It may be the weather, but it takes just two pages before I fall heavily, droolingly asleep over War And Peace.

Considering that I started reading it five months ago, it’s probably not the weather.

A: Were you Gandhi for Halloween?
B: I was Jesus.
A: But I saw the round glasses.
B: Oh I took them off. Basically I didn’t know what to do and just decided to wrap a bedsheet around myself.

One of many sets of old folks playing Chinese chess on a crisp fall morning.

If you really want to do something worthwhile you must feel strongly for it

- Li Lanqing

READING this excellent book by Li Lanqing, the man who orchestrated China’s remarkable reform of education during his two tenures as Vice Premier from 1993 to 2003. There’s nine-year compulsory education for every school-age child, and it’s a system catering to more than 300 million regular students — an overall student population that outnumbers the population of most countries.

I’m at that part where he talks of his decades of practical experience, “etching the notion of reform deeply” into his mind. He talks about how China decided to take advantage of preferential and interest-free loans for education and agriculture. Of Guangdong’s aim to catch up with and overtake the “Four Asian Tigers” — “a well-developed educational system and an adequate pool of talented people are essential conditions”.

By tradition, Chinese intellectuals are undeterred by hard work or poverty, but are very sensitive to any slur to their dignity or integrity. So respect comes first. Only when people hold teachers in high esteem can they see the need to raise their salaries.¹

I believe everyone should follow the fine tradition of respecting teachers and valuing education. Everyone, no matter how high in rank, must hold teachers in esteem and refrain from patronising them…The diligent work of grassroots educators often goes unsung, which is reason enough for us to care for them and make their contributions known. (p. 39)

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A: How’s the ah pek…oops, Apec…conference?

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YOU know how strongly I feel about kids who come from disadvantaged backgrounds (auto-rant here)…

Those of you in the US may know about The Fresh Air Fund.

I was contacted to help publicise their partnership with OneSight and its traveling optical clinic. Together with OneSight’s Vision Vans – and a team of local doctors and volunteers, OneSight provides free eye exams and eyewear to thousands of children in need each year. This summer at Fresh Air camp, OneSight’s staff screened 3,295 children and counselors, gave 1,757 eye exams, and made 1,629 pairs of glasses, with 1,458 of them on-site and 171 specially driven in. Information here. Good job.

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(On Hippie-dweeb university interviews)
A: Oh, I ask questions like “What is modernism?”
B: I wouldn’t be able to get in…What is modernism?

I do like the interview process…I’m really not very cloven-hooved cruel and I don’t ask hard questions for the sake of seeing kids squirm. There’s enormous pressure on high school kids — they’re only 18 and not fully formed yet. My philosophy is to give them a chance…Admissions is often a difficult process, it’s seen as cold and impersonal with lots of form filling, and can be terrifying at worst. What we do is put a human face to the process, and it’s vital that us interviewers represent the culture of kindness, individuals that’s tolerant of others that I experienced in Hippie-dweeb university. About 13-14% are admitted, and for the other 80+ per cent, their impression is often formed by contact with us. So I don’t want to be this stuck-up griller…I love Hippie-dweeb university a lot, and I hope some of that love carries over when I speak about it. We take kids from different backgrounds and countries and value-systems and beliefs and we whish them all together. I love that. We’re No. 1 for happiest students — we don’t stand together and sing songs most of the time, but it’s a lot to do with choice and freedom and a vibrant campus community — that’s fiercely subjective, but it’s not all hype. I’ve made lifelong friendships there with people from all across America and all across the globe.

Some of my interviewees took time off from A-level preparations or army life to come out to meet me, and having had friends go through army, I know it’s hard to get hold of newspapers and magazines when you’re in camp, and when you’re out of camp you just want to sleep. And goodness, A-levels, no wonder some of them took some time to settle into the flow of conversation.

They’re generally a well-spoken lot who could give good reasons why they applied to Hippie-dweeb university, and while a couple seemed scripted (that’s when the “What is modernism?” “What would you say to cynics about student activism?” etc questions came in) everybody was painfully earnest.

WHEN you’re going through that rough patch and the world seems to have it in for you, logic is not necessarily the first thing that will appeal to you. You’ll want that emotional outlet, that “steam valve” that vents our emotions and makes us feel purged. And you will have that, but you have to choose the time and the place…with logic.

Most of the time, in my experience, when a person in a management position loses emotional control and “reams out” at an employee, the incident has the opposite effect of what must have been intended. Productivity goes down, as the staff inevitably spends a lot of time afterward discussing the incident, and not getting work done on time. The manager has decreased his authority, rather than having enhanced it, since he is now considered somewhat unstable by the staff, and not entirely rational. Rarely does such an outburst inspire respect and loyalty. Instead, a good number of your best employees may immediately start updating their resumes and look for a job with someone who can approach things with a calm demeanour.

By the same token, an employee who vents anger, frustration, or simply ambition at a peer or a supervisor is going to be seen as duplicitous, unstable, emotionally fragile, and unreasonable — at best. There isn’t any way that losing your cool in the workplace is going to enhance your reputation or your chances for increased success.

What to do when angry:

• Mr Fist, meet Mr Punching Bag: physical activity can have a cathartic effect when done properly.
• Be creative: See Singapore Complaints Choir. You can work through a lot of messy emotions through the creative process.
• Primal scream: Karaoke, singing in the bathroom, or similar. I find listening to The Sound Of Music soundtrack very cathartic…I sometimes sing along too :)
• Talking cure: Seek help — friends, therapists, counsellors. If you need help, get it. It never makes sense to ignore a problem.

In any case, there is one smart choice in anger, which is to prove them wrong. The anger sharpens your focus and allows you to zero in. Focus that energy on priorities, prospects and pitching so you can use anger as a tool to improve your performance. Forget about the energy drains or the people who come in, affix themselves to your neck and suck you dry.

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I’ve been finding out more about the Institute of Technical Education since the schools I’ve been raving over are all under the ITE umbrella. From this speech:

Internationally, ITE has also formed strategic partnerships with renowned global institutions to deepen and widen its linkages for learning, sharing and exchange for ITE staff and students. Currently, MOUs have been signed with 13 Institutions of Higher Learning in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Korea, Switzerland, UK and USA.

…The proportion of ITE students pursuing full-time polytechnic diploma programmes upon graduation has been increasing steadily over the years, from 14% just five years ago, to 20% currently.

…ITE graduates who have furthered their studies at the Polytechnics have also performed well. One good example is Richard Kong, an ITE graduate who went on to pursue a Diploma in Electronics and Computer Engineering in Ngee Ann Polytechnic. When I met Richard at the Ngee Ann Polytechnic graduation recently, he shared with me how, coming from the Normal (Technical) Stream in secondary school, he had been very motivated and worked hard to achieve his goals. Richard graduated this year with 32 ‘A’s or Distinctions out of 35 subjects. He received both the Lee Kuan Yew Award, which is given to the top graduate from a technology course at the polytechnic, and the Tay Eng Soon Gold Medal for being the top graduate formerly from ITE. In addition, Richard has also been awarded the Nanyang Scholarship to pursue an undergraduate program in Electrical & Electronic Engineering at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU).

& just cos I’ve benefited from a university education doesn’t mean that the road to success lies in a “branded university” education — there are many ways to the top.

- Much of Singapore’s growth relies on exports, as it is the most trade-dependent country in the world. Singapore’s trade amounts to alomost four times its gross domestic product, which is the total value of what it produces within its own borders each year.

- One out of every six American workers, or 17.5 per cent of them, are now unemployed or underemployed, according to the latest US data. This is the highest level on record and probably the worst since the Great Depression in the 1930s.

- There were more than 1.2 million foreigners in Singapore last year. 10 per cent are new PRs, while another 20 per cent are PRs who have been here for some time. As for the remaining 70 per cent of foreigners who are here on work permits, “they are not citizens and never will be,” said MM Lee. “They will go home after two years. They do the difficult jobs and without them, MRT stations will not go up.”

Now, the demographics are such that five working persons support one elderly person. In 20 years, it will be 1.5 for every elderly person, he said. “How does it work? How do we get the money to support them in hospices and hospitals?” he asked. Hence, the need for foreigners to power the growth to overcome Singapore’s looming problems and raise the Singaporean’s standard of living.

- China offered US$10b in concessional loans to Africa over the next three years. Aid offer announced by Wen Jiabao at Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (Focac). China has promised to build 50 schools and train 1,500 teachers for Africa to cater to its students. It will also send agriculture technology teams to help train 2,000 African personnel in this area.
One worry is that China is again stepping up its aggression to snatch up Africa’s natural resources to help feed its booming economy and will do business as before with regimes with bad human rights records. “The Chinese government and people have always respected the autonomous right of the African people to choose their own social systems. China’s support and aid for Africa has never been — and will never be — attached to any political situations.”
“Europeans view Africa as their own backyard. Of course, they feel uncomfortable about the arrival of the Chinese.” “China’s policy is based on mutual development. Few Western countries have a foreign policy like this. Most are about telling Africans what to do.”

- NUS President Tan Chor Chuan: We must keep our singular focus on talent. Not just recruiting and rooting top talent from overseas, but nurturing our own “home-grown” talent and creating the conditions that enable all talent to flourish and to excel. We must also continue to transform NUS education: to nurture graduates who are critical thinkers — creative, articulate, and globally effective; graduates who stand out and who are keenly sought after…
We must also build on our already excellent progress in research to make it really world class, with peaks which are among the leaders in the world. In the end, we must have two equally strong legs — in education and research — to succeed as a leading global university.
…At the same time, in Asia’s rapid growth, humanity will also face some of its greatest challenges: among others, environmental sustainability and the mitigation of global warming; public health and the pressures of rapid demographic shifts; and income inequalities and financial security.
Both the growth and the challenges of Asia hold great opportunities for NUS. There will be a pressing need for better research and understanding, and for more innovative solutions, ranging from clean water and energy to urban planning and building design.
NUS must, therefore, intensify its efforts to make itself a pre-eminent knowledge centre on Asia — a knowledge hub providing a new and more integrated understanding of critical issues in Asia, particularly of China and India.
The most critical challenges facing Asia, such as sustainable urbanisation and ageing, are multi-faceted and have complex interconnections. To address them adequately, we need research that is integrative, cross-disciplinary and addresses the key interconnections between issues.
We have embarked on the task of building five integrative research clusters in Finance and Risk Management, Biomedical Science and Translational Clinical Research, Ageing, Asia Studies and Sustainability. Each cluster provides a loose but dynamic structure which will bring together researchers in related fields, and promote integrative research among them. Each cluster pursues globally competitive research, with an appropriate Asian focus.
The new NUS Global-Asia Institute set up in September will provide the platform for integrative Asia studies, centred initially on critical issues for Asian cities. We will also create ways for researchers to work together across clusters on key, boundary-crossing research questions — effectively forming a “super-clusgter of research clusters”.
The super-cluster would provide a more effective interface between the deep pools of research talent in NUS, and partners, agencies and industry seeking large-scale integrative and holistic R&D and solutions.
NUS will also focus on further boosting our standing as a global university by extending our global reach. While we continue to pioneer novel models in global education, we will also look at expanding our NUS Overseas Colleges to more sites in Asia, the Middle East and beyond; and at setting up research centres based in China and India that are closely linked to our integrative research clusters.
All this will require much boldness and hard work..(leaps and bounds and demanding quest blah blah).

- Michael Richardson, Iseas: International trade has been an engine of growth for many Asian countries, enabling them to create jobs and raise living standards faster than other countries that were not yet ready to take advantage of surging trade opportunities. In pragmatic Asia, a nation’s standing is judged not just in terms of military power and diplomatic skill but also how it shapes up as a source of trade, investment and technollogy. By this yardstick, how does the US measure up against in particular Asia’s rising giant, China? …Unfortunately, the Obama administration has been hobbled in one key area where it should be showing leadership: trade policy. Beset by critics in Congress and the unions who claim trade agreements cause job losses and weaken the economy, the US is reviewing policy. The pace has been glacial. As Mr Michael Green, a former National Security Council official in the Bush administration, wrote recently: “The complete lack of a trade strategy leaves the US without any tools to counter the growth of exclusive regional economic arrangements within Asia.” These bilateral and multilateral trade agreements are often called “free trade” arrangements. In fact, nearly all are preferential trading arrangements that discriminate against non-members and distort global trade. They have flourished as negotiations to liberalise world trade have languished. By the end of last year, just over 400 bilateral and regional trade agreements have been notified to the World Trade Organisation. Another 400 or so are scheduled to be notified by the end of next year. Of the total, 326 are in the Asia-Pacific area. By far the biggest, the China-Asean FTA will take full effect in January next year. With a combined GDP of US$6 trillion and a merchandise trade volume of US$4.5 trillion, Cafta will be the world’s third largest trade bloc after the EU and Nafta….Meanwhile, US trade with the region has fallen, its investments have slowed, and it has become a small-time player in determining the future trade architecture of the region. The US is party to just 20 of the 800-plus trade agreements registered with the WTO.

Bauhinia purpure — aka Orchid Tree, Purple Bauhinia, Butterfly Tree — at the Marina Bay MRT station. It’s a small, deciduous, sometimes evergreen tree that grows to 10m high, and is often grown as an ornamental.

Indonesia: bunga kupu-kupu. Malaysia: Tapak kuda, Tapak unta. Thailand: Chong-kho. Vietnam: Mong bo hoa tim.

Skyline with hardworking foreign labourers in the foreground. There are many of them as there’s much construction in the area.

Those are not specks of dust on your screen. They’re kites.

Some pretty good architecture…

The large winding walkway with grass in the centre…

:) One of my favourite pictures of the lot.

Singapore skyline.

Another one of my favourite pictures…

My babe magnets!

Something so fun about kite-flying. I felt my spirits rising :)

There it goes, up in the sky…

By babes I mean small people. I handed the string over to about five sets of toddlers and children when I was there.

The kites were bought in China’s Temple of Heaven, and were popular with the children for the novelty factor: There were many of them and they flew close to the ground.

A: Have you considered a job as a censor?

I’ll add that to my list, which includes mushroom farming and hand model.

Civil service is a job that has meaning and purpose. It involves the provision of public value, not shareholder gain, with benefits delivered to citizens, not consumers. Good policies can change the course of events and improve the standard of living and quality of life for citizens.

As a public servant you are entrusted with the lives of your fellow citizens and are supposed to deliver public goods in the public interest. You are serving Singapore, not Boston Consulting Group or Citibank. You are tasked to improve the lives of Singaporeans, not raise the bottom line of your firm by making more profits from consumers.

READ today’s Review section which carries a speech by PSC chairman Eddie Teo. No other country in the world gives out so many scholarships to our best and brightest. Do we celebrate individual academic excellence in an excessive way sometimes?

Anyway, he says:

Our best scholars know they have to start from the bottom in order to reach the top. They realise that to gain the respect of others, they have to gain experience before they can make a meaningful contribution. They willingly go to operational jobs and get their hands dirty. To them, each posting is a challenge and an opportunity to learn new things, even if there are low moments. They learn to take the rough with the smooth. They know that implementation is unglamorous but vital to policy-making. They realise that they need to convince others of their competence through actual performance and should not expect their potential to propel them upwards. They know that no outcome can be due only to their own brilliance, but is the combined effort of their team. They do not look down on non-scholars because they know that many non-scholars have deeper knowledge and more wisdom.

Why is it important for scholars to start at the bottom? While learning the ropes and acquiring a sense of humility are worthwhile benefits in themselves, there is, in fact, a much more fundamental reason. Many scholars say they want to join the Management Associates Programme and become Administrative Officers because they want to “make policy”. But they fail to realise that a policy is only as good as how it is implemented. Policy-making and implementation go hand in hand. To make good policy, officers need a feel for the ground and an understanding for practical implementation constraints. You cannot conceive of good policies or make improvements to existing policies just from first principles or what you have learnt at university. You have to understand our society and economy, how things work, what can be done and what cannot. It is not enough to focus on formulating a policy without going into the details of how it should best be carried out. As a public servant, you are responsible for both. We do not hae a system where scholars think and non-scholars do. A scholar must be able to both think and do. A well-conceptualised policy will fail if it is poorly implemented. A public servant who does not anticipate ground reactions and think through the impact a particular policy will have on people is a poor public servant. An operational job enables you to learn first-hand how to implement policies and discover for yourself what the possible pitfalls are when you deal with the real world.

I asked a few permanent secretaries and deputy secretaries who had been scholars to share with me their recollections of the first few years they spent in the public service. What they told me may be of interest to you as you embark on your public service career.

A police officer started as an assistant investigations officer, doing front-line work on suicides, thefts and molestations, among others. 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.

Another started work as a statistician where she spent her first week figuring out what she was supposed to do. She shared a phone with a subordinate, and because she was more senior, the phone was placed on her desk. But she soon realised that her subordinate needed the phone more than she did, and she therefore placed it on the other desk instead. That experience taught her that function was more important than position.

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 realised that while he had lots of knowledge, his subordinate had a lot more wisdom. Over time, he learnt to complement his own analysis with his subordinate’s suggestions.

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.

MOST of the current generation of young scholars are responsible and dedicated, but a few have a poor attitude and misplaced expectations. Some are very choosy about their postings and tend to place their personal interest above organisational interest. Many management associates or MAs want to go to MTI or MOF for their first postings and get upset if posted elsewhere. One was so upset he resigned, breaking his bond. When some young MAs were asked to go to NTUC to observe retrenchment exercises and learn about what impact the economic recession was having on ordinary Singaporeans, one MA asked: “What is a retrenchment exercise?”

Why should the Public Service be worried that some scholars are like this? First, if our scholars seek to advance only their self-interest, it indicates that they may be unable to work in a team. Much of public service work today involves teamwork because Singapore’s problems are becoming more complex and involve many ministries, and no single individual can solve them. Besides, public policymaking is always the product of a group effort, of repeated discussions and revisions. From the first idea to the Cabinet paper, proposals will involve many people and countless drafts. Some young officers are not used to this and do not feel a close enough sense of ownership with the final product. This is the way government works and is, in fact, a strength of our system because this is the way we gather different perspectives and considerations into a well-thought-through solution. Second, if fewer and fewer young scholars desire ground postings, more and more of them may become divorced from ground issues and will start to lose their empathy for ordinary Singaporeans. The problem is not yet so widespread that it cannot be rolled back. There is still time for the Public Service to correct the trend.

…Dull days at forty, false friends at fifteen;
Let her have brave days and truth.
Let her go places that we’ve never been;
Trust and delight in her youth.

Ladies of Grace, and Ladies of Favour,
And Ladies of Merciful Night,
This is a prayer for a Blueberry Girl,
Grant her your Clearness of Sight.

Words can be worrisome, people complex;
Motives and manners unclear.
Grant her the wisdom to choose her path right,
Free from unkindness and fear.

Let her tell stories, and dance in the rain,
Somersaults, tumble and run;
Her joys must be high as her sorrows are deep,
Let her grow like a weed in the sun…

Truth is a thing she must find for herself,
Precious and rare as a pearl.
Give her all these and a little bit more -
Gifts for a Blueberry Girl.

- Neil Gaiman

*

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

- Macbeth

*

The parent who looks at the child’s face and sees only aspects of himself or herself there — his own wishes, needs, and emotions — has a narcissistic relationship with the child. The child is used by the parent as a container for his or her own problems. The child adapts to this situation. It is in his vital interest to do what the parent wants; to achieve, to minister, to protect from his worries.

…Depression can be felt when grandiosity fails, due to real or imagined loss of love or inability to keep on achieving at the same high level. Depression can also be projected outward; the grandiose adult can choose a depressed spouse whom he can care for, make dependent and admiring, and thus create a shaky prop for his shaky self-esteem. Or depression and grandiosity can alternate in the same person, in response to real or imagined achievements and fluctuations in the amount of admiration forthcoming from the external support system.¹

*

It is an ancient idea, to make a promise to another person, to oneself, or to one’s god. Our species has survived partly because of our great skill at negotiating and working together. Most of our laws are based on contracts, the paper form of a promise. Because their lives revolved around exchange and reciprocity, our ancestors had many contractual obligations, and Indo-European is thick with legal terms. There is wadh-, “to make a pledge”, literally “to lead someone back home”, which evolved into our wed (leading a new wife back to her husband’s home). There is a word which means vow, which has more religious than social connotations, a word for taking an oath, and even a specific word for compensating someone for an injury. What do we “throw” when we make a promise? What do we “send forth” into the world? Because a promise foretells how one will act, it allows us the relief of knowing a small shred of the future, of relaxing some of our anxieties. Without promises we would constantly be in a fret. They allow us to solve some of the future in the present, thereby controlling it, and making it seem less arbitrary, mysterious, beyond our grasp. A promise signals trust: We entrust the promiser with some measure of our anticipated happiness or well-being. Therefore a broken promise warrants punishment or shame…The equation written in our cells, in our bones, is that keeping yourself safe will lead to love: It is the oldest and simplest promise.²

*

A Prayer for my Daughter
William Butler Yeats

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
And later had much trouble from a fool,
While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,
Being fatherless could have her way
Yet chose a bandy-leggd smith for man.
It’s certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty’s very self, has charm made wise,
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there’s no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

June 1919

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APPLICATIONS have started, and I’m very excited…

There are some sites on SE Asian literature, and I’ll be heading up to the library to check out books on the region. In the meantime there’s learning Vietnamese and Indonesian.

From here:

I. Language Families of Southeast Asia (map)
Major Indigenous spoken languages:

* Sino-Tibetan: e.g. Burmese (Myanmar); Tai languages: Thai, Lao
* Austro-Asiatic: Mon, Khmer (Cambodian); Vietnamese
* Austronesian: Malay(sian), Indonesian; Philippine languages: Tagalog, Ilocano; Cham
* Papuan: Timor

Major Foreign languages:
Chinese dialects (spoken in Singapore and major cities of SEA)
English

II. Language Origins and Death

Originally Mon-Khmer languages dominated mainland SEA. The region was slowly inundated by Burmese and Thai migration from points in China. Vietnamese likewise pushed the Chams down and out (to Malaysia and Indonesia). Thai is just one of many languages of the greater Tai language family, which has its origins in southern China. Details, including a map of the 3 branches of the Tai language family, can be found at: http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Thai/LLF/profile.htm

Many languages spoken by small groups of indigenous peoples (e.g. Negritos) were obliterated. Death of languages continues due to war, cultural and economic domination, small population size. Colonial powers promoted European languages (French, Dutch, English, Russian) and neo-colonialist states later extended their power through “central/standard” language programs, e.g. Bangkok Thai and Bahasa Indonesia. Tagalog has not succeeded as the national “Filipino” language to the degree that Bahasa Indonesia or Malay have.

III. Typological Features

* Tonal languages: e.g. Burmese (Myanmar) Tai, Lao, Vietnamese
* Non-tonal languages: e.g. Khmer, Malay, Indonesian, Tagalog, Papuan

Definition: By tone we mean the relative pitch of a syllable/word. Differences in tone results in differences in meaning. There are two major kinds of tones:
1) register (high, mid, low pitch);
2) contour (rising, falling)