Last night a couple of friends and I met - kinda like our annual meeting - at Clarke Quay. We talked about politics and caught up and as usual the chat generally revolved around how there was generally no sense of the government being able to engage with any sense whatsoever with reasonable discourse. It is ok for the extreme bloggers to exist because they serve the government's purpose, but by and large moderates are just given a hard time because they are the real threat.
So it kinda went along this vein. I have known many of my friends for at least 20 years and more or less they have been having this same problem for twenty years. Essentially the ability to ask for anything more meaningful in life from the PAP beyond this obsession with GDP and non-outcomes related results is impossible. The alignment of self interest with the interests of the country/state is however not just characteristic of Singapore, or indeed, this part of the world. IT is currently a malaise affecting most people who hold positions of power. This is why the Occupy movement exists.
Earlier in the day i went to a rather odd meeting in a carpark which was given by a landscape architect who had been tasked to turn the carpark into what he called an urban Ubin, complete with coffee plantation and TCM herbs. It was very surreal and he seemed a bit detached from reality. It really makes me wonder what in the world is going on when people become so divorced from the human scale of things.
I guess i'm of an age now where i am perfectly happy in my own skin - well, give or take of course - so i see all this extreme striving as quite unnecessary. More than that it is also completely pointless. And a waste of resources. Why do people need that kind of excess? What drives them? Which is also a question i asked last night. If people are motivated solely by money, then qualities like honesty, integrity and courage will almost certainly go out of the window. Of course you can be rich and have all these qualities, but i think that if you had these qualities, your material wealth will either be limited OR you wuld share and redistribute quite easily without anyone asking or forcing you to do so.
Anyhow, these are the things i do when i spend my days in Singapore. I generally don't take photos of friends or if i do i don't put them on FB. So you will just have to believe that i did meet friends, and am not making any of this up.
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Outside a pub in Clarke Quay
Reading Steiner's Colour lectures with a bottle of Tiger |
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| Sacred geometry outside the Sultan mosque |
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| Sign outside Sultan mosque |
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| The golden dome |
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| Railings |
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Those are soyasauce bottles the dome is resting on!
Recycling in the 19th century |
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| The shady avenues of Arab Street |
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| Traditional toys |
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| Shophouses |
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| I buy Rose Abs for like next to nothing |
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| IJ |
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| The Sec School block |
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| The view from the front of IJ |
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| Our school motto |
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| Jesus and the Pope |
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| The chapel |
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