The personal online ramblings of Lucian Teo, who started writing when he learned how to live, and started writing HTML when he thought he was going to die.
The passing of the opposition political figure J.B. Jeyaratnam last week has stirred a lot of emotion in the Singapore blogosphere. Hundreds of Singaporeans turned up at his funeral. Alex Au even thinks Jeya could end up being Singapore’s own Che.
I must admit I do not know much of the man. Like most, I have seen him peddling his booklets outside shopping malls, where curious tourists would stop to browse and paranoid Singaporeans would avoid him. I know he paid an immense price for his efforts to champion individual freedom and human rights in Singapore; and that the powers that be have been extremely heavy-handed in meting out disproportionate (from my opinion at least) sentences.
I suspect most Singaporeans, like me, do not know what Jeya stood for. What exactly did he oppose?
Crowd reactions aren’t always about the issues. Like fans of the musical Les Misérables, the reason for the fight is lost in the emotion of the revolution. Support always sways to the underdog.
It doesn’t help that even in the time of mourning, little was done to reconcile the man to his homeland. Goliath chose to pen a letter of condolence which for all purposes and intents manifested itself as the utterance of a true Philistine. The Straits Times chose to label him as being oblivious to his irrelevance to Singaporeans. The bashing of a man now deceased leaves an extremely bad taste in our mouths.
It is obvious that Jeya’s work is far from irrelevant. Jeya’s fight for individual freedom was perhaps ahead of his time, but what he stood for then is now increasingly relevant to the Singapore people.
Perhaps it was necessary to concentrate our efforts on maintaining harmony and economic progress during the formative years of our nation, but it is high time we took a good look at why the “building of a democratic society based on justice and equality” should no longer be neglected in order to “achieve happiness, prosperity and progress for our nation”. (Quotes from the Singapore Pledge).
I’ll be attending PSFK Conference Asia 2008 in October and the programme lineup is amazing. It looks to be the perfect mixture of creatives and techies.
I’m especially looking forward to meeting Charles Ogilvie, the designer of Virgin America’s inflight entertainment system. Virgin America wowed me with its new take on air travel, and a large part of that was because of the touch screen, always-on, Linux-based entertainment system.
What I am about to write somewhat pertains to education, so the standard disclaimer applies: this is solely my view and not that of my employer’s, you know the drill.
The Singapore papers reported recently that Singaporean students were turning away from scholarships that came attached with conditions (in this case being in the employ of the sponsor for a specified number of years) and choosing instead scholarships that came without those conditions.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out.
In the Straits Times online forums, 2 responses were published:
In 2000 I enrolled in the University of Arizona. I did not apply for a scholarship of any kind, but they offered me a bond-free scholarship via an email. I replied to ask if there were any conditions attached, specifically a bond of employment. While the details were that I had to maintain certain grades in order to keep the scholarship money going for the whole duration of undergraduate study, there was no bond of any kind. They wrote back, saying they were giving me the scholarship because they believed I could contribute to society after graduation. Not American society. Humankind.
I flew back the moment my undergraduate studies were completed. I made a promise to a girl in Singapore and I did not want to keep her waiting. So I left America and the University of Arizona. I left the people who provided me the most fulfilling phase of my formal education. Even today my heart feels the weight of gratitude towards the university, the country of America and her people. Maybe that is the “moral obligation” Mr Jason Chiam speaks of. Maybe he would consider me an ingrate for returning so soon, but Arizona has never solicited a single cent from me, nor has she made me feel guilty for the unpaid debt.
I decided to pay it forward, hoping to apply myself in the improvement of my home country. As many of you know, I now work for the Ministry of Education, helping her communicate in the increasingly complex spectrum of online media parents and students use today. I have endeavoured to go the extra mile, often engaging in efforts to improve the online communications of the Singapore Government as a whole. This is me paying it forward. Not out of moral obligation or for a fixed term stipulated on a piece of paper. I am driven by the faith shown in me by an organisation and a people not at all related to me.
Jason and Corrine are probably right to point out that some scholars feel entitled to a free education free of responsibility and obligation. But we need to bear in mind that it is a cultural problem not solved by the chains of forced labour.
Scholarships and bonds (I’ll use the term to describe the conditional scholarships) are totally different in nature. The former is crafted with hope and in good faith, the latter carved in the hard letter of the law. The first is a gift, the second a contract.
That our students no longer feel beholden when presented a gift of good faith is a failure on our part. We have not taught them gratitude. We haven’t given them many opportunities to learn. Our purely pragmatic perspective of the world doesn’t allow us to give without expecting anything in return. Our bonds are carefully calculated and embedded with repayment clauses to reduce risk because we view these top students as human capital, not humans. After years of conditioning, many of our children have forgotten the beat of their own heart.
It is all business, and they take what they can.
Moral responsibility isn’t a bond. Perseverance isn’t gritting one’s teeth while in chains. The claustrophobia of being bound to words on a page, signed while barely adolescent, destroys the human spirit. The display of the intrinsic good, human to human, just as the folks of Arizona showed me, will live in me all my life.
