A little whisper in the dark

Wee are Singapore

Oddly enough, for all the time that I spend on the internet, it seems I don't spend enough time trawling the current affairs forums. Perhaps there's too much chaff to sift through to find the wheat.

Good thing I still read the Straits Times then (never mind the press controls).

Otherwise I would not have read about a certain RJC girl's off-the-cuff response to a man in his mid-30s, vocalizing his thoughts and opinions about his life and future in Singapore, and what he hopes the government would do for him.

And so it is a clash in the Wee Family, for it is Wee Shu Min, gifted student extraordinare, versus Derek Wee, your everyman on the street, polytechnic student, part-time university graduate, with a decent steady job, but with doubts on his future (don't we all?).

At a more basic level, are we looking at how the powers-that-be view us worker ants? To be sure, her command of English was much better than Derek's slightly strained composition, but you can see that he made the effort to word it concisely and clearly. In an intellectual debate, is it fair to use that as a means of denigrating the points made by the other party?

You can't make it if you can't even spell......

And then what made the front pages of the same newspaper that I read today has the Public Transport Commission looking into how they can increase the proportion of people using public transport, rather than private transport during peak hours. And its been steadily declining, aided in part by the cheaper cars on the road.

While packing my room today, I uncovered an old 1998 magazine, which listed a Subaru WRX at $163,800. Today, it costs $79,000. Its little wonder, then.

Just call it a feeling, but I don't think the people who are pushing for increased use of public transport systems themselves use it (very much, if at all).

Them and the likes of Wee Shu Min, are probably nutured through the same system, to be the leaders of tomorrow, while the rest of us, nurtured to be worker ants.

And the irony is, we all hold pink I/Cs, and we are all Singaporeans.

posted by Chung Leong @ 5:35 PM 0 comments

Singapore : A fast-paced and multicultural society

So I went out to Orchard Road today with the intention on doing some street photography - one end to another. As I stopped at a traffic light, I saw the pedestrians lined up across the road opposite Orchard Emerald, and the multicultural makeup struck me.

My wide-angle lens was on the camera, its zoom just a bit too short to frame it exactly right, but I decided I would crop it later, so it remained to just nail the shot. I initially wanted cars blurring the image, veiling the pedestrians somewhat, tried 5 or 6 shots (which didn't work well) till I got a motorcyclist come by that didn't blur the pedestrians as much as the car did.

What do you think?

posted by Chung Leong @ 4:47 AM 1 comments