Thought-provoking quotes from others: Life is colourful and it is almost impossible to find a black & white answer

Finally found time amidst the inertia to post these notes here:

“I think we are losing touch with our own culture here. People are becoming robotic and overworked and neglecting their children. And there are so many foreigners here now.

Now, as a Singaporean, I feel like a foreigner in my own country. I go to Old Chang Kee and have to try to communicate with a China girl, just so I can buy a curry puff. And there are also too many ang mohs. Local girls marrying ang moh men, I don’t understand why they want to do that. They always think the grass is greener on the other side.”

– Kumar, in the Straits Times Life! Mar 16, 2009

Manufacturing and service sectors are the twin engines of growth. Manufacturing is not old economy (eg: Germany). An economy cannot survive with just R&D because R&D spends the money while manufacturing earns the money.

– EDB Presentation in GP Seminar, Mar 25, 2009

Singapore follows the developmental model where everyone has a role in society–pragmatic approach (sounds like utilitarianism). And human rights can’t really exist if everyone feels threatened by riots and fights: the right to restrict has to come in to protect other rights.

– Dr Gillian Koh at GP Seminar, Mar 25, 2009

Screws

This is yet another ranting session.

CAVEAT: This post can be real offensive. If anyone feels offended, feel free to contact me before suing me. I’ve only just finished marking the Paper that’s about freedom of expression.

I totally hate it when some folks screw around with my expensive purchase. Nokia repair centre did it with my 8850, but that’s because their staff at that time were pretty much corrupted I guess: they were hauled up to court a couple of years later. Today LTA-STA literally screwed the Off-Peak Car seal too tightly that it popped my bumper. And what can I say or complain? They are “the” Authority. So there’s money wasted on the repairs.

Then, NUH screwed up my dad’s appointment. Seems like there is no real difference in quality between B1 and B2 patients. You give us the appointments and yet they were not appointments with any doctors. Could you be more specific so that we could plan our lives around your idiosyncracies? We are paying you to make you feel happy, isn’t it? But I thought we should be paying you so that we feel pleased? Don’t mess around with my life and expect me to trust you with it. Or maybe it’s just the hospital? I don’t know. They made a transfer to SGH almost impossible although it would be more convenient to all of us.

Okay that’s all for today. Back to marking.

Mercy+Rehab. No, no, no. Gossip Guy.

This post isn’t about OneRepublic’s take on the mesh-up song(s), by the way. But it is certainly about something more sombre and thought-provoking that is tugging at my eye lids and I’d feel uneasy if I don’t post this tonight.

Just heard about this and then I read (to be precise, I attempted to) about it in the Chinese evening papers (the pictures were mainly helpful).

The news was about this family (father and son, only) who is countersuing the family of the Vietnamese bride of the son, who is now in a vegetable state. Basically her family wanted to get her home to Vietnam but the two men didn’t want to. And they got their own lawyers.

I guess the newspaper presented it rather objectively, but the impression of a situation involving a foreign wife and a Singaporean husband is generally biased against the former, which is perhaps what made me want to post this to attempt to balance off the potential, implicit bias.

Of course, this family lives a block away from me.

I see the father and the mother at the Boon Lay MRT station selling newspapers every morning when I am not driving.

And the father and the son happened to run into me and my family at NUH on the second day of the Chinese New Year this year. Their eyes said a lot, and I could tell they were hiding their souls.

The father and the son, as far as my source and I know, have had a past that I don’t think should be left behind, especially when I think the punishments they served were light. But then, who am I to judge? For the record, I would seriously like to see South Korea’s use of chemical castration widely used here in Singapore (the assumption here is the judges here will never be kangaroos, which they are not). I also heard that the father had tried to kill his wheelchair-bound wife once. And I thought they were a loving elderly couple. Now I am just going to be extra cautious when I drive close to the pavement as he usually wheels her on the road; it used to be close to the kerb but I did notice he’s taking up quite a bit of space on the road and cars had to switch lanes to avoid hitting them.

I didn’t know how did the Vietnamese wife come to such a state as I did not really finish ‘reading’ the article, and surely I’m not going to jump to conclusions.