J.B. JEYARETNAM

Today, the 30th day of September 2008 is indeed a sad day for Singapore. The passing away of the Opposition icon, JBJ marks the end of an era for a man who stood and fought for what he believe in and paid a heavy price for doing so.
He will be forever etched in our history as the 1st Opposition member that broke the stranglehold on the nation by a single political party and proved to the nation that it could be done against seemingly impossible odds created by the powers that be.
I remember JBJ very vividly as I was fortunate enough to be living in the Anson constituency during the 80's when he won the by-election and created history in Singapore, but unfortunately I was not of voting age at that time.
His continued struggle over the years against the ruling party was something which I truly admire and I am sure many Singaporeans do too!
He had just came back from bankruptcy recently and had just started the new Reform Party to continue his legacy but alas time was against him. His spirit will live on forever in Singapore history and I dare say he meant much more to Singapore and Singaporeans than any other politicians, present or past including those in the over-crowded PM Office.
I think he had come full circle for the path which he had took and it is time to go home to the Lord. What injustice he had suffered down here in this tiny red dot which could not be made right, I am sure will be put right up there in due course.
Long live JBJ! You have made a BIG difference to Singapore and all Singaporeans in your lifetime.

TALKINGCOCK.COM is D BEST! Always a Bright Spark in the Cloudiest of Days!

Reproduced in full from http://www.talkingcock.com/html/article.php?sid=2639

Don’t Panic Over Chinese Milk: Civil Servant
Posted on Monday, September 22, 2008Topic: Local News
by K.K. Cheow

A civil servant has come forward to ask all Singaporeans not to panic over tainted Chinese milk.

Said Ministry of Elitism spokesman Mr. Louie Chin Ooh Lui, “Citizens should not be unduly concerned about toxic Chinese milk. There are many healthy alternatives in the market today.”

Mr. Chin, who used to pen a column for TalkingCock.com, was referring to the current scandal over Chinese dairy products found to be contaminated with melamine, an industrial product that can cause kidney problems and even death. This has been found to include not just regular milk, but yogurt, biscuits and even the popular White Rabbit brand of candy.

“But people should relax. The government has this under control,” said Mr. Chin. “Just switch to something safer. You don’t have to drink Chinese milk.”

For example, Mr. Chin said that there are ample supplies of milk from other countries. He dismissed any complaints about the difference in cost.

“So if you can’t afford imported milk, drink local milk,” he advised.

“Like breast milk,” he added, “I still do. Every day.”

As the jaws of the gathered journalists dropped collectively, Mr. Chin smiled and explained. “Oh, of course not from my mummy! I’ve never tasted her milk. I wasn’t allowed to. Her tits are pumped with so much silicone, she’s just as toxic as these Chinese cows. No, my daddy hired a wet nurse for me when I was born, from some kampung in Bedok or wherever.”

A misty look crossed Mr. Chin’s eyes, as he continued. “Dear old Ah Nai! Of course, nowadays, she doesn’t have to carry me up to suckle her breasts anymore. I mean, the wrinkly sacks hang down to her bloody knees now. So she just heaves them up and gives me a squirt in my morning coffee, that’s all.”

Mr. Chin encouraged everyone in the room to try breast milk as an alternative. “Sure, the taste of breast milk takes a little getting used to, but it does come in 100% organic packaging. It’s very eco-friendly.”

Mr. Chin also suggested other alternatives to milk. “You can also try the beverage of choice of many of us in the public service - blood.”

“Mm, blood,” said Mr. Chin licking his incisors. “Freshly sucked from the veins of a citizen. You can’t beat it.”

When a reporter expressed squeamishness at Mr. Chin’s suggestions, he shook his head contemptuously. “What’s your problem? You peasants swallow whatever crap we put out anyway!”

© http://www.TalkingCock.com 2001-2003. All rights reserved.

Harry Potter's Author - J.K. Rowling's Inspiring Harvard Commencement Speech : The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

Transcript re-produced from http://harvardmagazine.com/go/jkrowling.html

Text as prepared follows.Copyright of JK Rowling, June 2008:

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.
The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I’ve experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world’s best-educated Harry Potter convention.
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.
Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.
I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.
These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.
Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.
They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.
I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.
I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.
At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.
I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.
However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.
Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.
So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.
Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.
The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.
Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.
One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.
There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.
Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.
I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.
And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.
Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.
Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.
And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.
Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s minds, imagine themselves into other people’s places.
Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.
And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.
I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.
What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.
But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.
If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I’ve used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.
So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.I wish you all very good lives.Thank you very much.

Getting Old

Of late I have been getting the strange feeling that I am well past my sell-by date and the expiry date may not be that far away. I may not be that well prepared or equipped for expiry (or Death for want of a more definitive word) yet but many things that have gone before had made me less in fear of death. We may never ever be ready for that day to come but to live each day as if it were your last probably is the best way I know how to make my way through each day.
Why am I having that kind of feeling?
I am starting to recollect things that went before, the places I had been, the people I had met, the things that I had seen, that's why. So I should be listing those things down within this post in the coming weeks, maybe months, maybe years….who knows? But I am sure excited by the prospect of putting those things, which were cast to my memory, in words.

Added 18 Sep 08:

For the past days been listening to the song "Borrowing Time" from Aimee Mann's excellent unpronounceable "@#%&*! Smilers" album with the following verses that echoes the "getting old" feeling that I have been having:

"You ask a question in the mirror, alas no answer could be clearer.................

.............you'll come when your destiny's calling

Who wants the whole weight of the world, when it will drag you down.............

Get up, you're borrowing time."

Aren't we all borrowing time in this existence?

The Lucksmiths @ Baybeats 30Aug2008

On 30 Aug 2008 went to Esplanade to catch The Oddfellows (still my favourite local band after all these years!) at Baybeats 2008. Their gigs are rather rare these days with drummer Johnny based in Taiwan and the other three having their own commitments as age catches on but they still remain intact as a band. They were the local indie rock pioneers way back then and although there were no more new records or new songs, they still remain true to their love of simply playing together as a band and that is good enough for a die-hard fan like me. They played twice that day - one an accoustic set at the Observation Deck at 3pm in a meet-the-band session and another set at the new Nokia Arena outdoor stage at 9pm. I was hoping against hope that they will play the Substation-version of "Over Again" but it did not happen, a slight disappointment after all these years. That Substation-version in my own opinion was their best piece of work. Still it was such nostalgia to hear those familiar own tunes again, some of which brought back much memories of years gone by. I wonder if they will ever record as a band again but such one-off get-together is as soon as it gets I suppose.Also at the Observation Deck sessions was a band called The Lucksmiths from Melbourne, Australia and what a pleasant discovery that was! I had never heard of them but the crowd turnout surprised me. Even more surprising was after the set a lady took out a 7-inch record single (YES! good old vinyl record!) for the band to sign! I thought to myself, how long have these guys been around? I guessed most of the people who turned up must have studied or lived in Melbourne at some point in time to be fans of The Lucksmiths.They were simply amazing, reminds me of The Housemartins from UK. I was mesmerised by two songs which they played that day - "A Downside to the Upstairs" & "Great Lengths":

A Downside to the Upstairs - The Lucksmiths @ Baybeats2008

Great Lengths - The Lucksmiths @ Baybeats2008

The Lucksmiths played an outdoor set later that evening at the Nokia Arena and the place was packed to the brim! I had went over to catch Electrico at the Nokia Powerstage and by the time I made it back to the Nokia Arena, it was already impossible to get a decent place to watch them and they had already started their set. Managed to catch a glimpse from the side of the stage and it was the first time I had seen a stand-up drummer that was also the lead singer (Way to go Tali!). If not for Baybeats I might never heard of the Lucksmiths at all and what a great brand they are! Now I'm a fan.