Singapore School Anthems Part 1

There has recently been a great deal of hype and angst about schools in Singapore and the government is scrambling to assure us all that every school is a good school.  I have written a lot about schools in Singapore and I'm sure I have ruffled a few feathers especially of those who may have misplaced pride in some schools but the time is right for us to forget the academic records of schools and focus on something quite inconsequential, trivial and lighthearted - the school anthem.  The school anthem doesn't really mean much. If a school is unfortunate enough to have a rotten anthem, it may be saddled with this disgraceful yoke on its neck for a long time to come because schools don't normally alter their anthems.  But a bad anthem is no indication that the school is bad, as we shall see soon enough if you follow my blog on to Part 2.

Let me begin with the worst school anthem.  How bad can an anthem be?  It can't be that difficult to write a school anthem and I'm sure I can sit down for no more than a couple of hours and come up with something quite respectable. The fact that some of these schools have rotten anthems does make one wonder what the school administration was up to when some teacher or, as is usually the case, the school principal came up with his or her own composition.  But these are usually former teachers or former principals who are long dead, so please understand that I'm casting no aspersion on the current crop of teachers and principals who are all wonderful people and are perfectly able, at the drop of a hat, to write the most glorious anthems.

But really, how bad can an anthem be?  What makes a school anthem truly bad?  Naturally, because it's to be sung, the musicality of the anthem is important.  But I will attach less importance to music since I have to admit that this is one area that can be rather subjective and besides, whatever I used to study for my ABRSM Music Theory exam is all forgotten.  But any one of us can judge the language or grammar in a school anthem and we don't need to have a training in music theory for that.  We can also judge an anthem by looking at its choice of words.  This is different from its grammar.  For example, if the lines are largely in iambic pentameter  and we see a stray line "We in our youth try to acquire knowledge" which will immediately strike anyone as jarringly ugly and inelegant and that's because the metre is broken even though it's grammatical.  Perhaps "Despite our youth we'll scale the heights of arts" would be a great improvement.

But for the bottom-of-the-heap school anthem that wins our "Most Rotten School Anthem" award, we don't even have to examine the metrical structure of the lines.  Such a close scrutiny of the metre may only be necessary when we want to decide which of two great school anthems should win our coveted top prize for Singapore School anthems.

I will begin with the worst school anthem and work my way to the best, so please look out for future parts in this series.  I will be guided purely by aesthetics, poetry, grammar and less so, music.  I will be purely objective and I will give my reasons and you are free to disagree with me if you think I am wrong.  Just post your comments on this page below.

Which school takes the MOST ROTTEN SCHOOL ANTHEM award?  Such an anthem must not just be grammatically wrong.  It's got to be worse than that. And there is one school anthem that has just about everything you can think of when you want to look for a really rotten school anthem.  This anthem doesn't just get its grammar wrong, it does something truly shocking - it steals its song from elsewhere.  You probably think I'm being a bit harsh and the school merely "borrows" the tune of another song but no.  This is outright plagiarism in that not just the tune is stolen but the lyrics as well.

Now, you're probably wagging your finger at me in disagreement.  How can anyone plagiarize the entire lyrics of another song?  Yes this school anthem does precisely that with the exception that it sneaks its name in where someone else's name appears.  I will present the facts and leave you to be the judge.

It's with a heavy heart that I denounce the anthem of a school that I should feel something for but since I have decided to be purely objective so here it is -

The MOST ROTTEN SCHOOL ANTHEM award goes to:-

ANGLO-CHINESE SCHOOL

(or ACS, as they would rather be called)

This school anthem is shamelessly a shocking plagiarism of the Canadian anthem "The Maple Leaf Forever".  It is shocking in that not just the tune was stolen by ACS but the lyrics as well. I'll just say a few words about the Canadian anthem.  "The Maple Leaf Forever" was written by Alexander Muir in 1867, some 19 years before ACS was founded.  In the song, we hear of "Wolfe, the dauntless hero", a reference to James Wolfe who captured Quebec from the French. It's not surprising that the song was not picked to be the official national anthem of Canada because its strongly pro-British stance would be objectionable to French-speaking Canadians but it was one of the songs considered for the national anthem and it is still widely sung today and is generally known as the unofficial national anthem of Canada.

Click here for the lyrics of this beautiful national anthem The Maple Leaf Forever and do a mental comparison with the ACS anthem (note: the music is identical):

You would have thought that a school that filches a national anthem would of course get its grammar right so on my score board, the school should at least pass the grammar category.  But not so for ACS.  With the ACS anthem, we don't have to go very far.  Just look at the second line of the anthem: "Oldham dauntless hero came".

The very first time I heard the ACS anthem, I felt strangely uneasy and I got a copy of the lyrics to see for myself if it really was printed as it was sung.  I'm sure all of you had that same feeling.  It's because we get this sense that there is something grossly wrong about the anthem.  It's the problem we have when we are drafting an email hurriedly and we copy and paste from wikipedia onto our own text and we fail to read through the email and click "SEND".  When we finally read through the email, we wish we could edit it but it's already sent. But folks, this is a school anthem we are talking about and not a personal email written in a hurry!!!

Leaving out an article in a sentence is common in Singlish but I have to remind myself that this school anthem was written in 1926 by a teacher called Henry Hoisington.  This was before Singlish even came into being.  Why then was the article left out in "Oldham dauntless hero came"?  Bishop Oldham, a great man for whom I have the highest respect, is of course the founder of Methodism in Singapore and the founder of ACS.  It is only when you look at the Canadian national anthem from which this line was copied that you will understand the reason for the error.  In the Canadian anthem, the line is "Wolfe, the dauntless hero, came".  Presumably, Hoisington, thinking to himself that since "Oldham" has two syllables while "Wolfe" is monosyllabic, felt he had to remove a syllable from that line and he must have decided that the article "the" was dispensable.

Whatever Hoisington taught in ACS in 1926, one hopes that he didn't teach the poor students English or English literature.  Anyone who reads poetry knows that you can always abbreviate the article the to th' so that you don't count it as a syllable.  It's a little like a grace note in music.

But Hoisington goes on to remove the article in other lines in the ACS anthem.  I just have to glance through the lyrics and I see a few examples: "emblem" stands by itself without any article but the most hideous error must be "the Land of Rising Sun".  I know a young boy who sang it as "the land of Rising Suns".  The poor lad is at least grammatically correct even if he badly needs a lesson in geography and possibly astronomy.

The other line that brings deep furrows to the brow is this:

No discord e'er will sever

You immediately look at the preceding line to see what it is that discord won't sever.

Our hearts our hopes our aims are one

No discord e'er will sever

This is inelegant even though it's not ungrammatical.  You sever chords, ties, bonds and knots but you don't sever hearts, hopes and aims.  Again, all you have to do is to look at the Canadian anthem and you will see why plagiarism can bring disgrace to your school for a very long time to come.  If you must plagiarize, at least put in the effort to tidy up the parts that differ from the source from which you stole the lyrics.

In the Canadian anthem, the lines are

And may those ties of love be ours

Which discord cannot sever

There you have it.  The original song talks about not severing the ties of love which is a perfectly correct usage.  Shame on Hoisington not only for plagiarizing the music and lyrics but also for making no necessary changes to the lyrics to ensure that the school anthem doesn't sound like the theme song for Jack Neo's future movie, "When an Ah Beng Copies a Song".

It's only fortuitous that Hoisington picked the Canadian anthem for the ACS anthem. He might very well have chosen a more famous national anthem and today, we'll all be laughing away every time ACS students sing with pride and gusto (which they will no doubt do in blissful ignorance of how rotten their anthem is):

God save our ACS

Long live our ACS

God save our school

Send her victorious

Happy and glorious

Long live to be our school

God save our school.

EDITOR:  In case you think I'm just doing a spot of ACS-bashing which I assure you I'm not, in Singapore School Anthems Part 2, I will be presenting the Runner Up Award for the Most Rotten School Anthem to a school that is famous for its high academic achievement.  It is a school loved and respected by all Singaporeans and parents will give an arm and a leg to see their child in the school.  I have only recently heard the anthem of that school (obviously the school would do well to take pains to conceal its anthem) and it's astoundingly ROTTEN!!!  Stay tuned for Singapore School Anthems Part 2.

NOTE: Singapore School Anthems Part 2 is now posted on this blog.

How bad is bad?

I've just read a very interesting Facebook posting by a friend who was complaining about the growing use of the term "my bad" to mean "my fault".  I don't know if you have come across this usage but I'm inclined to think that anyone who hangs around on Facebook, google+, online forums and chat sites is sure to have seen this.  When I first read it online in either a chat site or a forum, I didn't know what the writer meant.  But with time and the frequency of its use, I soon understood it perfectly and I'm quite adept now at the proper usage of this phrase.  It's only used when you want to admit to a mistake.  For example, if you describe someone as fat and others remonstrate that you're rude and insensitive, you simply say, "Sorry, my bad".  Succinct and to the point and the entire internet community forgives you for your earlier indiscretion.

In her posting, she frowns on the use of this phrase, "my bad".  I won't do justice to her witticism and humour (her article is very witty and humorous) if I do not quote verbatim what she wrote:

We had formidable English teachers at Marymount Convent whose mission in life was to ensure that if nothing else, we would speak English properly. One of my enduring Primary 4 memories is of sitting at my blue wooden desk in my green graph-paper uniform watching our teacher write out in white chalk on the blackboard the difference between nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs.  

I can still hear her voice: “Girls, a verb is an action word. An adverb describes a verb. A noun is an object or a person. An adjective describes a noun.” 

By those rules “bad” was definitely an adjective, as in, “a bad day”. Having had those rules drummed into me since the tender age of ten, encountering “bad” as a noun left me feeling a little linguistically dislocated.

"Bad" is quite a bad deal for those of us who want to make some sense of the language. As a slang, originally US Black English, "bad" undergoes a reversal of sense so that in some circumstances, it can mean "marvellous" or "very good". Before Michael Jackson became white, he sang his greatest hit "Bad" which carries that meaning.  When used in that sense, the degrees of comparison for "bad" are not the standard "worse" and "worst" but "badder" and "baddest". For example one may say as a compliment, "Hey man, that new kid in town is bad, man.  Badder than anyone we know.  He's the baddest."

While I totally share the writer's view on the ugliness of "my bad" and I can never get myself to use "bad" in this way even when I want to sound young and cool, I'm not so sure I agree with the rigidity with which she (or more accurately, her English teacher) pigeonholes each English word strictly into one of the many parts of speech, as such categorization is called in grammar.  As everyone knows, many words can come under different parts of speech and some, like the word "fast" can be a noun, a verb, an adjective and an adverb.

But the writer is not talking about that.  She is saying, and quite rightly too, that "bad" cannot be a noun.

Now, how bad can "bad" be?  When I gave the matter some thought, I realised that "bad" can be pretty bad.  "Bad" has not only encroached into the realm of nouns, but also clawed its way into the arena of adverbs.  How many times have we heard someone say that he wants something "real bad"?  Or "my school didn't play too bad in that football game"?  You may say "bad" in these examples can only be used informally or colloquially but you have to admit that "bad" assumes a surer footing in the following sentence: "I felt bad after running up that hill" which is permissible even in formal English.  Notice however how peculiar the rules of grammar are in that once you use a different verb or when it is used with the auxiliary verb, "bad" becomes ungrammatical and unacceptable even in informal English.  Try forming a sentence in your mind if you don't believe me.

The writer goes on to decry the use of other adjectives as nouns and in an amazing display of her knowledge of modern songs, she quotes liberally from lyrics which I'm ashamed to say were totally alien to me and I had to look them up on youtube just so I didn't feel as if the world of music had passed me by.

After quoting from the lyrics of a song, "Would you let me see beneath your beautiful?", she wrote, "In the world of perfect grammar it should of course be beauty (a noun), not beautiful (an adjective)..."

Of course she is absolutely right but I cannot help feeling that a little more should be said about how bad the other adjectives really are in the world of grammar and they must have taken a leaf out of bad's book by showing the world how bad they too can be.  In fact, the OED tells us that adjectives have been making forays into the world of nouns for centuries.  For example, the OED records "intellectual" as an adjective that was first used in 1398.  By 1599, it made its first recorded incursion into the domain of nouns and up to this moment, it's not uncommon for us to refer to an intellectual as a person who is intellectual.  There are other examples that I can think of such as "explosive" a perfectly good adjective that somehow decided one fine day to metamorphose into a noun while retaining its adjectival properties.

Even the example given by the writer, the adjective "beautiful", refused to remain a mere adjective all its life.  The OED tells us that by 1756, "beautiful" took upon itself the right to be a noun.  More than a century and a half later, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a novel called The Beautiful and Damned.  

Now I daresay not even the English teachers of Marymount Convent with their forbidding exterior that the writer writes about with such reverence will dare expose their frown beneath their wimple.

The Still Small Voice

An insect got into my cup of milk and I took it as a sign that I shouldn't drink so much milk. After all, milk is high in cholesterol and I could do with less of it.  I threw the content away and didn't pour myself more milk.  

What do I mean when I say I took it as a sign?  Taking things that happen as a "sign" or as "the still small voice of God" is common among religious people.   You may not be aware of this but "still small voice" can only be used for God's voice.  When I was a lad, I wrote in an essay about how I heard my mum's still small voice from the kitchen and my teacher circled "still small voice" in red and wrote in the margin of the page, "I hope you are not claiming divinity for your mother."

Why, you may legitimately ask, should God's voice be still and small?  Do people really hear the voice of God?  I have asked many of the parishioners in my church and in other churches and nobody really hears the voice of God.  It's always an impression that we have and that impression is of course strongest if we are in a religious mood.  "Still small voice" is by far a more respectable description of a voice that is absolutely inaudible to those of us who are sane.  

I knew someone a long time ago who told me he had schizophrenia.  He told me it was difficult for him to decide what was God's voice and what were hallucinations which he had regularly. I told him it was very simple.  Anything he heard or saw which was out of the ordinary had to be a hallucination.  If he heard a voice and it wasn't the voice of another person within earshot, it's got to be a hallucination.  He asked, "What about the voice of God?"  I told him the voice of God was inaudible.  He said something that was quite wise for someone who was grappling with hallucinations all through his waking hours.  He said, "Wouldn't that make God rather pathetic that he can't even have an audible voice?"

Who needs an audible voice when he's got that still small voice that others can't have and if you so much as attribute it to your mum in an essay, you will see it circled in red.

Microblog: Turning Singapore into a Christian Nation?

I've been reading a lot about Lawrence Khong and his mentor, Peter C Wagner on this website:

Click here.

I don't think Singapore will ever be a Christian nation and I hope it won't.  Singapore is best kept as a secular nation and that's the way it should stay.

On hawkers and hawker centres

I read with amusement a letter to the Straits Times yesterday written by a reader who complained about the use of "hawker" and "hawker centre" in Singapore.  He maintains that since hawkers have from the 1960s been prohibited by the government to move from place to place to sell their wares, the centres which the government built with the purpose of making these hawkers stay put in one place should not be called hawker centres.

Any country that uses the English language extensively is sure to have some form of variant that distinguishes it from the standard language of England.  Sometimes, the history and collective national experiences of a country make it necessary for the people to use terms which aren't heard of in the West.

The hawker centre is a term that Singaporeans should be proud of.  In the 1960s, street food vendors sold unhygienic food and there was widespread food poisoning.  It was very difficult for health inspectors to ensure cleanliness because these hawkers could be here today and somewhere else tomorrow.  The Singapore government is not known to let the grass grow under its feet especially when the welfare of its citizenry was involved.  Laws were passed and hawkers were systematically required to place their carts permanently in designated spots in a large building that came to be known as a hawker centre.  In those days, one could see individual carts in hawker centres and some even had their wheels intact.

Many hawker centres are now called "food centres" but this is a trend that should be stopped.  The term "food centre" is merely an anaemic description of a place where food is sold and it is quite unlike the term "hawker centre" which encapsulates the story of our past.

But in every former colony you are sure to find those who would grovel before their former masters and for these people, what's not said in England should not be said here.  There are varying degrees of such grovelling.  The more extreme cases are those who insist on calling the current academic term in Singapore "Michaelmas" but thankfully for the rest of us, there are very few such people around.

I'm not one who encourages the flouting of grammar rules but neither do I bend my knee to anyone.  We should take pride in our history and our past especially when what seemed draconian to the hawkers of old proves to be a huge success today.  It is a fact that Singapore has the fewest cases of food poisoning in Asia.  The hawker centre stands for the great qualities that Singapore is famous for - efficiency and cleanliness.  I have this to say to the grovellers.  Grovel all you want but don't erase our history in the process.

You can go crazy but you can't go toilet!

There's nothing that irritates me more than this strange fashion in Singapore of dropping the preposition in speech.  I first heard it a long time ago and it seems to be catching on today.  The first time I heard it was in a play school where I was seated with my son who was then a toddler next to a woman who also had her son with her.  The woman asked her son in a loud and offensively supercilious voice, "Would you like to go toilet?"  My son innocently asked me in a voice that was quite audible, "Is that right?" and without pausing for even a second to think, I immediately responded, "You can go crazy and you can go mad but you can't go toilet.  Never drop the preposition 'to'!  Remember that!"  From the corner of my eye, I could see the woman looking at me with rage but I felt she deserved it.  I would not have responded in that way if she had spoken less haughtily.

But I would never have expected that I should one day see this same thing in print.  In today's New Paper, there's an article which purports to be humorous and this sentence caught my eye:

I'll simplify the sentence for clarity - you may ignore the bit about wearing Crocs.  It's totally unrelated to the article and it was presumably inserted by the writer as his feeble attempt at humour.  The sense of the sentence is preserved if I reduce it to this: "The prison was where I was sent".  It is obvious that like the woman with her toddler in the play school, the writer of this article left out the preposition "to".  The natural question is why did he leave it out?

Sir Winston Churchill on the English language

At first blush, I thought the writer was averse to ending a clause with a preposition.  But that's something that countless grammarians from Fowler onwards have denounced as ridiculous.  The story is told that Winston Churchill was so infuriated with a subordinate who tried hard not to end his sentences with a preposition in a report that Churchill wrote in the margin of the report, "This is the kind of tedious nonsense up with which I will not put".

Of course there are instances when the preposition may be dropped.  Some direct objects may have a locative role.  A good example is "The policeman walked the streets".  The preposition "through" may in such an instance be dispensed with.  The same with "The horse jumped the fence".  "Over" is left out.  But notice that you can't do it in the passive voice.

Upon further reading, it will become clear to the reader that the writer of the article is just one of those who would drop their prepositions at the drop of a hat.  Here is another excerpt from his article:

The sentence now takes on a ludicrous meaning that the writer did not intend.  It tells me conclusively that the writer really has an allergy for prepositions and it has nothing to do with the all too common but misconceived fear of ending a sentence with a preposition.

Microblog: When do you change a motto?

I went running in Kent Ridge this evening when I saw something that made me stop and take my phone out to snap a pic.  It was the motto of KR Hall printed at the top of its main entrance.  KR Hall was my hostel when it was called King Edward Hall at Kent Ridge or KE Hall.

To Seek, Strive and Excel seems a little jarring and wrong but surely the Hall could not make a mistake about its own motto?

I ran the Hall anthem in my head just to confirm and yes, of course.  The motto used to be "To Seek, To Strive, To Serve".  Someone must have decided that service was something embarrassing and ignoble and they promptly replaced "To Serve" with "To Excel".  I'm glad I was no longer a part of the Hall when that happened.  There are some things in modern Singapore that I don't seem to see eye to eye with.  If I may borrow the words of St Paul and modify them slightly, excellence without service is dead.

Microblogging

Microblogging seems to be the rage these days possibly because modern folks don't like to read long articles.  Although I have various tumblr accounts and have used them, I don't see why I can't do some microblogging on blogger.  I will be posting microblog posts from time to time on this blog.

Escalating confusion

A few days ago, I took my MacBook power adaptor to Apple Service Centre to replace the wire which has become frayed.  I was told that the warranty did not cover such a damage, which was fine.  But the helpful man at the counter who spoke with a Filipino accent told me that he would try to "escalate to Apple but there is no guarantee".  I asked him to repeat what he said, which he did.  "We will escalate to Apple but there can be no guarantee that Apple will replace the adaptor".   I was tempted to ask him what one did to Apple when one escalated but I brushed it aside.  After leaving my adaptor at the Apple Service Centre, I was given a Service Report.  Here it is.

And there I have it in black and white.  "Will try to escalate to Apple..."

I racked my brains for a word that sounded like "escalate" but which carried the connotation of "appeal" but I could not think of anything close.

A few days later, I received an email informing me that the "escalation" was unsuccessful.  No, I'm only joking; the email made no mention of the word "escalate".  This afternoon I called at the Service Centre and this time, I was served by a Chinese-looking man who I thought was Singaporean.  But when he spoke, I could detect a strong Filipino accent.  He said they had escalated to Apple but Apple was unable to allow a replacement.  Again, I asked him to repeat himself because this was a different person.  He obliged me and again, he used the word "escalate".

I'm now convinced "escalate" used in that sense is a Filipino word which means to appeal to a higher authority.  Who could have started using the word in that sense in the first place?  I tried searching google but it led to nothing.  I then gave it a thought and I came up with a brilliant idea. I don't claim to be an expert on Filipino English etymology but if you are familiar with the ways of the Church and Filipinos are religious folks, you will understand how a word like "escalate" can take on such a meaning.

To appeal to a higher authority is in itself vaguely religious.  And we all know that religions thrive on multi-syllabic words which give an appearance of authority.  Few words in religion are under three syllables in length.  We genuflect, we venerate and we supplicate.  So, when a Filipino appeals to a higher authority within his company, he does not merely speak to his boss; he escalates to his superior.

White Lies and Holy Lies

Years ago, when I was on the verge of losing my faith, in a desperate bid to salvage my faith, I looked out for debates where Christians could defeat atheists but alas there was none.  In my search for some plausible argument for faith, I discovered a professional debater called William Lane Craig.  From the reviews I read, he seemed like the best bet to set right my flagging faith and so I studied every single debate transcript and watched every video this professional debater was engaged in and there were a lot of them.  Instead of being comforted, I was horrified.  I discovered that Craig was a deceiver and a liar.  Every point he makes is nothing more than sophistry and deceit which can be debunked.  All lies and falsehoods can be discredited but Craig's lies are so sophisticated and cunningly crafted that they require more time to counter and with the time limit imposed in any debate, Craig's opponents have no way of exposing the fallacy of his arguments.

I remember being so angry with Craig that I could not go to sleep.  As I tossed and turned in my bed, I kept rebuking God (let's assume he exists).  "Why is God so false and his religion so fake that he needs a defender who resorts to lies and deceit?" I mused.  Why am I saddled with a religion that is so laughably irrational and a God whose existence is no more plausible than that of fairies, pixies and elves?   But I realized I was wrong to blame a whole religion because of the lies and deceit of one man.  My religion is a total failure in logic but then so are all other religions.  Besides, I soon discovered that most Christians have not even heard of Craig and those who admire Craig are genuinely too feeble-minded to see his deception so they can't be tainted with Craig's dishonesty.  In other words, most of my fellow Christians are either uninterested in the faith and have not heard of Craig or if they do take an interest in the faith and are impressed by Craig's arguments, they are too stupid to see how fallacious his arguments are.  But it's not a crime to be stupid.  It took me a long time to return to the faith after discovering Craig's dishonesty.  Sometimes, I ask myself if the standard of honesty I adopt is too high for my religion.  For me all lies are bad and I can't live with lies but sadly, Christianity does not view untruth in the same way.

Yes, the Bible tells us that "God is truth" and in the Gospel of St John, we are told that Jesus declares that those who tell lies have Satan for their father.  But from a close reading of the passages, it's clear that the lies that the Bible disapproves of are lies that work against God and the faith.  If lies are used to defend God, they are looked upon as wholesome and to be encouraged.

One good example is Rahab, the prostitute of Jericho.  The Bible tells us that Rahab told a lie to conceal two Jewish spies and the lie she told enabled the people of God to kill every man, woman, child and infant in Jericho as ordered by our most merciful God.  It is very clear from the story told that if she hadn't told the lie, the people of God would not have had the opportunity of slaughtering the entire city of Jericho as desired and commanded by God.  Instead of being labelled a liar, a traitor to her own people and an ethnic cleanser, the Bible speaks of her as a great woman of faith.  The Holy Gospel lists Rahab in Christ's genealogy.  The Epistle to the Hebrews (in the New Testament) speaks glowingly of Rahab as the exemplary figure of a woman of faith.

 A painting by James Tissot of Rahab and the Two Spies.

If this is how the Bible treats those who lie and kill for the faith (or in Rahab's case, to facilitate a God-ordained ethnic cleansing), perhaps the deceitful lies Craig tells in a debate are not all that bad.  On the contrary, he may be richly rewarded as a good and faithful servant of our Lord.

NOTE:  I just did a search and I found a blog post that I wrote more than a year ago giving some examples of Craig's deceptive arguments.  Click here. 

The Church and Its Accountability

 Some churches, such as this in Italy, are a real work of art. Contrary to 
what most of my friends think, I'm not such a bad photographer, am I?

 
The City Harvest trial in Singapore reveals astounding sums of money that the church seems to get quite easily from its members.  The trial tells us at least one thing - parishioners are always willing to give liberally to the church.  It's not uncommon for us to hear stories of people who sell their houses to give the entire proceeds to the church.  Notice that it's always the lay person who does this. You'll never find the clergy giving away all they have.

From my personal experience, mad people do have a strange fascination for religion.  I know someone (from a church group of course) who is a schizophrenic and he hallucinates ever so often. He asked me once if I had seen angels or heard the voice of God. I told him NO, NEVER!!! He said he saw angels all the time and God spoke to him regularly. I told him to take his medication which he would refuse to do because it made him drowsy and in a daze. He asked me how he could distinguish God's voice from the hallucination. I told him any time he heard anything in his head, it's got to be a hallucination. There's no such thing as "God's voice". He didn't believe me and continued to think he heard God speak all the time. It's sad but he's just the sort of person who might give everything he has to the church if his hallucination leads him in that direction.  And there are many opportunities for him to have hallucinations of this sort.  If he listens to a sermon on the importance of giving tithe to the church (which is not such a rare sermon in church), he may very well be led by the power of suggestion to hallucinate God's voice telling him to give everything he has.

I can't be sure but I think many churches are compassionate enough not to accept a large sum of money from someone of dubious sanity if they know where the money is from in the first place.   Usually, the church does not know.  A madman may put a lot of money into the offering bag and nobody will know where the money comes from.  I know most people think the government should not get involved with the church but I see the church as being in a position of great authority over its parishioners.  There are many believers who have surrendered their minds and wills to the church even though they may not care to admit it.  It's easy to see the reason for this.

Churches have taught their members from a very early age onwards that giving to the church equals giving to God.  Some churches are fond of quoting Malachi in order to frighten believers into accepting that not giving to the church is synonymous with robbing God.  The City Harvest case is highly revealing of the mentality of many Christians.  Many of its members continue to support the church leaders even after the arrest and trial (which is still ongoing) and although I can't be sure of this, I am inclined to think that there has been no reduction in the church's monetary collections every Sunday.

I know the church does not like Government scrutiny (no organisation does) but the church is not your normal organisation that should be allowed some autonomy.  The church wields such immense power over the thoughts and actions of its members that it would not be wrong to say that it owes a huge fiduciary duty to parishioners and there must be an accountability that far exceeds that owed by other establishments and institutions. 

I am saying all this as a Christian and an active church member.  I'm sure if Jesus were here, he who overturned the tables of commerce in the Temple at Jerusalem would say precisely the same thing about church accountability.  Anyone who opposes my call for greater accountability by churches cannot have honourable motives.  What reason can there be?  

I'm hoping the Government would step in and check on all churches and make them doubly accountable.  The people must be protected from unscrupulous leaders of organisations.  I have no doubt that many churches have at their helm noble clergymen.  I pass no judgment on the leaders of City Harvest because the trial is still ongoing and who knows?  They might very well be acquitted.  But I'm speaking generally about the great fiduciary duty that the church owes to members of the public.

You may say the fiduciary duty is owed only to church members but I disagree.  The fact is church membership is fluid and from statistics, it's clear that church memberships are increasing rapidly in Singapore.  Churches are allowed to proselytize freely and they are allowed to approach members of the pubic to lead them to full membership in the church.  Churches do this all the time.  Spreading the Gospel, as it is called, is one of the most important activities in the church and every Christian is duty-bound to preach to others.  Because of the constant approach the church makes to the general public in order to convert non-believers to the faith, ie sell its membership to them, the duty owed by the church should not be confined to church members alone but to the entire public just as a seller of contaminated food cannot claim that he does not pose a hazard to the public but only to his regular customers.

Since the public in general is exposed if there is any wrongdoing by a church, it behoves the government to examine the affairs of all churches with a fine toothcomb.   Churches that are innocent of any wrongdoing should welcome this.

Racism: easy to accuse, hard to defend

The Zimmerman trial made me wonder if Zimmerman's crime was in fact not being black.  If Zimmerman were black, his acquittal would not have attracted any comment and most of us outside  the US would not even have heard of the news.  But are people really interested in the facts revealed at the trial?  No, they're not.  All people in general bothered about was the fact that he wasn't black and he shot a black man and so the jury can't be right to acquit him.  That was all they cared about.  The rule of law doesn't apply to most people.  Nobody I've spoken to cared to read and examine the evidence adduced at the trial.  And yet they felt they were competent to make a judgment that Zimmerman ought to have been found guilty.

Much of the Western world has a huge collective guilt for their wrongdoings against blacks in the past and the guilt is understandable.   However, we must be very careful about claims of racism today.  Sometimes minority races use the world's angst about racism to their advantage and this is particularly bad if the person who happens to belong to the minority race is as powerful as Oprah Winfrey and the person accused of racism is a shop attendant.  Everyone has heard what Oprah Winfrey claims about having been at the receiving end of a racist discrimination at a shop in Zurich.  But have people wondered what the poor sales girl in the shop has to say in reply?  Do they even bother with what she has to say in response or what a nightmare such an accusation must have been for her?

The shop attendant denied having refused to show an expensive bag to Oprah when the latter asked for it.  She accused Oprah of having told a lie.  So it's her word against Oprah's and who can one believe?

Click here to read what the salesgirl has to say.

We should bear in mind that Oprah Winfrey was at that time promoting Lee Daniel's film, "The Butler" which is about the black civil rights movement and racism against blacks.  Is it not a wonderful coincidence that even in liberal Switzerland, racism is not dead and gone, as Oprah herself experienced in a shop in Zurich?

If it's a made-up story, surely the decent thing to do is not to mention the shop at all.  It's fine if you want to promote a film on racism to tell some imaginary story of racism which might very well take place in the real world.  But to name the shop would be quite unconscionable and besides, you might get a strong denial from the salesgirl in the shop.  The fact is Oprah didn't name the shop.  It's journalists who traced her steps and they were the ones who identified the shop in Zurich.  Oprah has since said she was sorry she even named the country where this incident is alleged to have taken place.  See this BBC report.

It would be wise for all of us to treat any accusation of racism with a bit of care.  It's something that triggers a strong emotional response.  It's easy to make an accusation of racism.   Once made, the impact on the accused is huge and devastating and at the same time, it's very hard to defend against such an accusation and even if the accused is totally innocent, he probably won't be believed.

Beloved Mr Lee?

It does not take long for a blog writer to know what people online absolutely detest.  A simple praise of Singapore's government will usually attract a lot of negative comments, some of which are downright abusive.  The same goes with praising meritocracy and all the great values that Singapore is well known for.  Lee Kuan Yew is another target for some netizens and any post defending him or praising him or attacking his detractors is bound to unleash the indignation of online viewers.

But this is my blog and I will say what I like.  The truth is there are the irritating sycophants who praise everything connected to the ruling party.  I remember once a PAP MP posted on her Facebook page a link to a video that immediately garnered scores of "likes".  Subsequently, the MP re-posted the link to the video and apologised because the earlier link was an error.   Obviously, the "likes" came from her supporters who would blindly like anything she wrote.  But not everyone who praises the Singapore government or Lee Kuan Yew himself does so for such ignoble reasons.   If we are to be perfectly honest and objective, there is a lot to be praised in Singapore.  But all you have to do is to look around you on the internet and particularly in the various blogs and you are sure to see Lee Kuan Yew's detractors hard at work.

If you sit down and analyse carefully what each of them has to say, and you ask yourself what it is specifically that he is complaining about Mr Lee, you will find it hard to crystalize the vague negative comments into something concrete.

For an example, I will pick an article I just read.  The writer compares Mr Lee to Stevens, the butler in Ishiguro's novel, The Remains of the Day and suggests that Mr Lee, having "devoted his life to the concept of duty and responsibility", may have missed "the key to human warmth."  I take strong objection to the comparison of Mr Lee to Stevens the butler because Mr Lee is without doubt the opposite of Stevens in character and essence.  I recall the scene in which Lord Darlington dismisses two Jewish servants because they are Jews and Stevens, despite feeling the injustice of the action, complies with his employer's demand with unquestioning servility.  Anyone who has the slightest acquaintance with Mr Lee's strength of character (especially when we cast our mind to the way he went about in his dealings with the late Tunku Abdul Rahman) will know immediately that Mr Lee will never behave the way Stevens does.  In such a circumstance, Mr Lee would have demanded the reinstatement of the servants or he would have left the service of Lord Darlington.

I have tried very hard to see if there might be in Mr Lee even a modicum of resemblance to Stevens but I can't for the world of me find any.  Why then did the writer choose a character from this novel to draw an analogy to Mr Lee?  My guess is he has probably just re-read the novel and was moved by it, as anyone would be (for it is an excellent novel and one that won Ishiguro the Booker Prize) and he thought the term "the key to human warmth" was just right to illustrate what he felt Mr Lee lacked and so, he ignored the huge differences between Stevens the butler and Mr Lee and lumped the two of them together in a comparison which is both invidious and laughable.

What is this "key to human warmth" that the writer thinks Mr Lee lacks so much so that although he "would dearly love to love Mr Lee", he finds it "so difficult - almost impossible even - to connect 'beloved' with Mr Lee"?

I should say at the outset that the rest of the world does not seem to find it difficult to love Mr Lee and to honour him.  Even a careful biographer must have lost count of the many awards of distinction and honours that have been bestowed on Mr Lee from schools and universities to Heads of State. 

The writer then turns to Mr Lee's latest book, One Man's View of the World and he says this:

The writer says very clearly that he wants to see "some inkling of [Mr Lee's] sentiments and frailties".  In the segment quoted by the writer himself, is there not enough humanity in it?  Mr Lee craves to see his wife in the hereafter but he realistically declares it probably won't happen.  But observe his humility.  He doesn't dismiss the idea of life after death as nonsense and pathetic (as some vociferous atheist writers do) or as childish wishful thinking (as Einstein did).  He merely says "I don't think I will".  He qualifies his statement with a modest assertion that it is only his thought.  He is not stating it as a definite fact as we Christians tend to do with an overconfidence that is sometimes ludicrous especially since it doesn't have the support of any evidence.  All Mr Lee does in the passage is to express his thoughts.  Mr Lee then goes on, quite legitimately, to expand on why he thinks that way and it is obvious to any reader that here is a man whose thoughts are perfectly rational.

After quoting that passage from Mr Lee's book, the writer of the article concludes disapprovingly that "logic is all or nothing to Mr Lee, even in the twilight of his years." 

What does the writer expect?  That Mr Lee in the twilight of his years should lose some of that wonderful logic of his?  That logic of Mr Lee's is the logic that brought us to where we are today in Singapore.  Thank God Mr Lee still has his logic in heaps!  Logic may not be an important commodity to the writer of the article and his own writing discloses his scant respect for it but I'm sure glad the former leader of this nation and the maker of policies that affect all of us is perfectly logical even at 90.

Some people want to see frailty in a man of 90.  To these people, an old man is more human if he displays some clear weakness so they can weep with him and offer him their sympathy.  A bit of dithering, a bit of doubt, some regrets for his past and a frantic search for an afterlife would, to these people, be clearer signs that he is indeed in possession of the "key to human warmth".

But Mr Lee is not one whom we can love the way we love a squishy teddy bear and neither is he a child we can smother with kisses.  Mr Lee is a pragmatic doer and he makes things work.  You can only love and respect him for the things he has done.  And as it is, there's a lot to love and respect him for without bothering about some fuzzy notion such as human warmth.

City Harvest on the English Language

I can't call him "Rev" because he's not been properly ordained.  Kong Hee is a self-appointed leader of his own set-up which he calls the City Harvest Church.  It won't be appropriate to call him Mr Kong Hee either because obviously, he would expect something more glorious.  "King" is the best title for him.  After all, there are many African tribesmen who insist on being called King because of their elevated position within their tribes.  For this post, I'm not in the mood to argue whether King Kong is rightly prosecuted for criminal breach of trust and misappropriating church money.  I'm not interested in discussing if he siphoned money from the church to help his wife Ho Sun realise her dream  of becoming a Hollywood star.  If you are interested in these boring matters, you may want to watch some of his wife's music videos and you can always search on youtube under "China Wine" and see her cavorting in revealing clothes as a geisha in a black men's bar.

King Kong has a way of attracting public attention.  Recently, in a sermon in his church, he said to his extremely compliant flock that he heard God crying and telling him, "My son, Kong, thank you. Thank you for going through this. I need you to go through this alone so that you and City Harvest Church can be the man and the ministry I call it to be. I'm so sorry, but you need to go through this by yourself to bring a change to your generation."

The video of this portion of his sermon went viral and it drew a barrage of angry comments from viewers.  Most people were outraged because they perceived King Kong's words as a presumptuous claim that God apologised to him.

You would have thought the right thing to do was to lie low and let the storm of protests die a natural death as it usually does if you would but let the fury rage over your head while you remain totally silent.  But no, that's not how King Kong and his merry men work for they, like God, move in a mysterious way.  A spokesman from City Harvest Church's Corporate Communications Department immediately emailed the Christian Post and this is what he wrote:

"As anyone with a basic education in the English language ought to be able to tell that the use of 'I'm so sorry' here is not in the context of an apology, but a word of comfort, for example, 'I'm so sorry about your mother's suffering,' or 'I'm so sorry you need to go through chemotherapy.' "

Now, I'm not interested if King Kong's words were irreverent when applied to Almighty God or if they were sacrilegious or even blasphemous.  These are deep matters for trained theologians to discuss in their tight collars.  Neither am I going to comment on the appropriateness of the response by the spokesman for King Kong.  As can be expected, his response triggered a tornado of negative comments from netizens.  But as to whether such a comment is appropriate or offensively arrogant is something the reader can decide for himself.

What I'm going to talk about is the grammar.  I have made it abundantly clear on a previous posting that I'm the last person on the planet who would point out another man's infraction of the rules of grammar.  These things don't bother me in the least.  But when someone purports to put on his papal hat and pontificate on what proper grammar should be or if he arrogates to himself the authority and right to put down other people on a point of grammar, it's only fair that he does the pontification or putting down (as the case may be) in flawless English.

Anyone with a basic education in the English language should know that the sentence made by King Kong's representative can only stand if either "as" or "that" in that sentence is deleted.  Since the spokesman obviously hasn't the benefit of a basic education in English, I will make myself clearer.  The sentence should either read "As anyone with a basic education in the English language ought to be able to tell, [that] the use of..."  or  "[As] Anyone with a basic education in the English language ought to be able to tell that the use of..."

What is interesting to me is this is an obvious case of City Harvest being hoist with its own petard. If the spokesman hadn't been so bitchy and had merely said "As anyone would know, the use of...", it is unlikely that he would have inserted "that" in the sentence, rendering it incorrect.  But because he lacks the Christian virtues of gentleness and humility, he haughtily added that caustic remark without realising that he is not equipped to handle a sentence that is longer than what a five-year-old would normally be adept at constructing and hence the bloomer.

A self-appointed grammarian is very much like a self-appointed pastor.  He must watch his step carefully.

Efficiency - a word coined in Singapore

This morning, I drove to Brickworks Food Centre for breakfast and this was what I saw:

Notice the broken car park barrier.  The time stamp on my iPhone photo says 07:46:07.

After snapping the photograph, I went for breakfast and it didn't take long for the nasi padang and teh tarik to take my mind off this insignificant matter and I forgot all about the broken barrier until I went back to the car park and took another pic:

The time stamp on my photo says 08:35:49.

It took less than an hour for the Urban Redevelopment Authority (for this is a URA car park) to replace the broken barrier with a new car park barrier and it all happened in the heavy rain and way before 9am too.

It's very easy to slam the government for a myriad of problems.  I've heard and read complaints of all kinds and the government takes the rap even when there's flooding in Orchard Road.  But how valid are these complaints?  We have all experienced dissatisfied clients, customers, patients and whoever it is we deal with in the course of our work and we know how unjustified some of these complaints are.  But we are quick to be equally unreasonable when it's our turn to be the "customer".  We forget the many blessings we enjoy and while some of us are thinking of emigrating, there are countless other foreigners who can't wait to come and live here.  My advice is simply don't pass up a good deal.

This may be a small incident but it set me thinking.  I thought about life in Singapore and what kind of life it would be if things changed a lot.  Everyone is asking for change, as we see in the recent General Elections in Malaysia.  True, a change would have been good for Malaysia. But the Singapore government is not at all like its Malaysian counterpart, not by a long shot.  My policy is if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Our Language Watchdog's Bark

A watchdog will bark at anyone who enters the house it is guarding and all the long hours spent at the dog trainer's can't put a stop to this instinctive reaction of the dog, however annoying its bark may be to your guests.  While I can see the need for a watchdog and I do love dogs, I do not look so fondly at a bunch of people acting as the nation's language watchdog and telling the rest of us how we should speak and write particularly when they seem not to know what I would consider the rudiments of English grammar. 

I know very little about the Speak Good English Movement in Singapore but the occasional encounters I've had with them over the course of many years have not endeared them to me.

The first time I heard of the movement was when I was walking along Orchard Road when suddenly the face of the then Chairman of the movement appeared on a huge screen on the wall of a shopping centre. He spoke on the importance of proper pronunciation and recounted how he once went to England on business and he wanted to tell his English listeners something about "cement" and they heard it as "semen" because of his mispronunciation. The moral of his story was Singaporeans needed to learn to pronounce their words carefully so as not to confuse their foreign listeners.

Naturally everyone around me laughed on hearing his story including quite a few tourists. This was right in the middle of Orchard Road, Singapore's busiest shopping district. I remember standing at the junction of Orchard Road and Scott's Road thinking to myself how the Chairman of the movement had wronged Singaporeans because that was not how most Singaporeans spoke!

I need to explain further to those who are not familiar with Singaporean and Malaysian English users. Singaporeans and Malaysians can roughly be divided into two groups of English speakers: the natural and the pretentious. The majority of English speakers are natural. Of course within this category of natural speakers we have smaller groups which are banded according to the person's level of education, family background and so on but these minor differences do not concern us here. What I'm saying (and I firmly stand by what I say) is that all the natural speakers can pronounce "cement" perfectly well. If you don't believe me, go ahead and ask anyone around you. I just tried it on my renovation contractor whose hair is permed and dyed red  (the unmistakeable insignia of a genuine Ah Beng) and even though he speaks no English, he pronounced "cement" almost as well as the corgi-hugging queen. At least nobody will mistake it for "semen".

It's the pretentious English speakers who alter the stress placed on a word so as to accord with what they think should sound less Singaporean.  They get some words right but alas, English is not a language with fixed and inflexible rules and for some words such as "cement", they replace the usual Singaporean pronunciation which happens to be correct with their erroneous one and this mistake can be downright embarrassing. But it's wrong to term this a Singlish error. It's an error limited only to a small group of pretentious English speakers and it's not representative of the rest of us.

That was a long time ago and just when I thought this Speak Good English campaign had been rightly put to sleep and forgotten, I saw this article in yesterday's Straits Times.

MINDEF staff have been sent a list of common English errors. The article says "Some of these common errors include the use of redundant words in phrases like 'emphasise on' and 'still remain'".

Let's take a good look at "still remain" which the Speak Good English Movement says is an error.  Is it really an error due to the use of redundant words?  Is it an error at all?   No, says the Oxford English Dictionary.

To illustrate how the word "remain" may be used, the Oxford English Dictionary gives a quotation from R. Rendell's novel: "When he left Olson ten minutes on the meter still remained to run".

Even the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible which is used consistently by grammarians throughout the centuries as the ultimate bastion of correct English does not view "still remain" as tautologous.  See Jeremiah 27:11 in the KJV which reads, "But the nations that bring their neck under the yoke of the king of Babylon, and serve him, those will I let remain still in their own land, saith the Lord; and they shall till it, and dwell therein".

Just in case objections are raised that the KJV is outdated, the New International Version (NIV) of the Bible which uses current English does not view "still remains" as incorrect.  Hebrews 4:6 of the NIV reads, "Therefore since it still remains for some to enter that rest, and since those who formerly had the good news proclaimed to them did not go in because of their disobedience..."

Just to give a more balanced picture, I have included these two quotations from the Douay-Rheims Bible used by Roman Catholics:

2 Kings 13:6 -"But yet they departed not from the sins of Jeroboam, who made Israel to sin, but walked in them: and there still remained a grove also in Samaria".

John 11:6 - "When he had heard therefore that he was sick, he still remained in the same place two days".

I hope I have shown quite clearly that the Speak Good English Movement is wrong to denounce "still remain" as a language error.

Why, you may ask, is the Speak Good English Movement so disgracefully wrong? I really don't know. But I do know that what some grammarians have declared erroneous is not "still remain" but the phrase "continue to remain".  In 1926, Fowler calls it a "ridiculous tautology".   But nobody today uses the phrase "continue to remain".  There was a time when you signed off a letter with the ludicrously servile "I remain, Sir, your obedient servant" and in the early 1920s, a trend was emerging to end a letter with "I continue to remain, Sir, your obedient servant" probably because it was perceived as emphasizing the continuation of the writer's submission to his reader.  But this CANNOT be a common error in Singapore or for that matter any part of the world today! In any event, it's the phrase "still remain" that the Speak Good English Movement claims to be wrong when it isn't.

Let us look at the second example the newspaper article gave of what the Speak Good English Movement terms a common language error because of the use of redundant words - "emphasise on".  Everyone knows that "emphasise on" is incorrect simply because "emphasise" is a transitive verb.  This has nothing to do with tautology.  To say that it is an "error due to the use of redundant words" is incorrect. 

You may very well ask what it was that possessed the Speak Good English Movement to say categorically that "still remain" is an error and what made them categorise "emphasise on" as a tautologous error when it clearly is not.  One shudders to think what other errors they have made in their pamphlet purporting to correct Singaporeans' errors.  The Straits Times has only given two examples and they got both wrong.  Statistically, that's a 100% failure.

Those who insist on being the nation's language watchdog must first have sufficient knowledge of English grammar.  They must also keep abreast of the latest developments in the language because the English language is a vibrant language that undergoes many changes.  What was ungrammatical or incorrect usage or "unacceptable Americanism" when I was a boy might very well be perfectly acceptable today.   Almost 3 years ago, I wrote here about Singaporeans who love to make up their own grammatical rules.  But these were mere individuals who spoke in their personal capacity.  The Speak Good English Campaign has less excuse to blunder when they pontificate to the nation on what good English is.

What is the function of the Speak Good English Movement?   Why have them at all?  Presumably, public funds would be used for some of their activities.  David Crystal whom I once met at a literary conference told me that he didn't like the idea of prescriptive grammar.  Gone are the days of Fowler when grammarians would cudgel students with all kinds of grammar rules.  Some of us no doubt recall the days when we had to parse a sentence and today, I don't think I can pick out an adverbial clause from a sentence.  What need can there be for such a Movement in Singapore?  If indeed Singapore wants to have such a movement, we should at least make sure that the committee members are fully knowledgeable about the language and are perfectly suitable for the job and they should not make errors which I would have thought ought to have been made only by half-baked, ill-qualified grammarian wannabes.

The same newspaper article says that "The Speak Good English Movement started in 2000 amid concern that the colloquial use of the language was catching on, and may harm Singapore's efforts to be a First World economy."  Now, this is absolutely priceless - that sentence uses a colloquialism while deprecating the use of colloquialism in the same breath.  Either the Speak Good English Movement (or perhaps the Straits Times journalist) does not know what "colloquial" means or it does not know that "catching on" is a colloquialism.

But surely if the aim of the Speak Good English Campaign watchdog is to stop the "colloquial use of the language", it must be barking up the wrong tree?

For more posts on the many errors of the Speak Good English Movement, please click here.

Getting into that coveted school at Uni

I have just read this article in the Temasek Review Emeritus and I think it's necessary to set the record straight.

From time to time, I read the same furious response parents show in their blogs when the PSLE results are out and their children are unable to enter RI.  RI would of course be labelled as elitist and why?  Because the cut-off point is too high.  As I have suggested in an earlier blog post, what parents essentially want is for their sons to enter RI and take up the places of those who have done better than their sons.  That is something these parents must know to be blatantly unjust and yet they have the cheek to make their demands openly in their blogs.  And as if that is not enough, they go further and accuse the government of all kinds of things when this has NOTHING at all to do with the government.   

Now, let's examine this article in the Temasek Review Emeritus dated 9 April 2013.  I feel I can comment because I do have a child who also applied for the same course.  The writer's daughter must have done the A levels around the same year as my child.   The article says that his daughter had the following results: Biology - A, Chemistry - A, Humanities subject - A, Physics - B.  What the article does not tell us is what she got for GP and Project Work.

Assuming that the daughter did her A levels last year, she must have got no better than a B for GP and a B for Project Work.  In order to qualify for the NUS Medical School Multiple Mini Interviews this year, a candidate must have a minimum of 3 As in H2 subjects and 1 B in an H2 subject and an A and a B in GP and Project Work (it does not matter if it's an A for GP and a B for Project Work or the other way round). 

This is how it works in most medical schools in ANY respectable university.  Thousands of candidates are first sieved out according to their grades leaving behind a pool of candidates who will then be selected based on the Multiple Mini Interviews.  If you don't make the grades, you don't get in at the Interview stage.  To expect that you be given a chance for the interview is unjust because you will actually have to deprive another candidate who has better grades than you of a place.  It is that simple but I'm surprised parents don't seem able to comprehend this.  It's got nothing to do with the government, please!

I know it's very sad to fall within that category of students who miss the NUS Medical School interviews by just one point but there will always be many such students in any examination.  It's the same if you are applying to an overseas university.  They operate by the same criteria unless they are one of the rogue universities which will take in anyone who is able to pay a high fee.  And it's irrelevant if you are able to secure a place in a foreign university.  Everyone knows that it's far easier to get a place in a foreign university than in a local university for any course and far more so for a course like Medicine.  Again, it's market forces at work and again, it's got nothing to do with the government.  Everyone in Singapore who wants to do Medicine always has the local Medical School as top priority because we all know that the teaching is excellent here and there are many other benefits of which the writer of that article himself is well aware which is why he wanted so badly for his daughter to enter a local medical school. 

But there is another alternative in Singapore.  NTU Medical School which opens this year accepts students with lower A-level grades.  Candidates who scored the same results as the writer's daughter and a B for GP and a B for Project Work have been accepted for interviews at NTU even though they were not called up by NUS.

But there is a good reason why medical schools have to ensure that their students achieve an extremely high standard in their academic performance and lowering the standards is never the right answer.  We all love our children to bits and I respect the writer of the article for selling his flat to fund his daughter's education.  I fully sympathize with him and I think highly of him for this act of love.   But it's nobody's fault, least of all the government's!  Places must always be given to those who have done better.  That's basic justice. 

The Singapore government has been lambasted by many netizens for all kinds of perceived wrongs.  Many of them are unfounded and totally unjust.  But the truth is the Singapore government is probably the fairest government in the world when it comes to meritocracy.  For all the scurrilous things that netizens have written about the government, the facts speak for themselves.  No cabinet minister has his son in RI unless his son actually qualifies for it academically.  That is a fact and you can look it up if you don't believe me.  Not even the Prime Minister's sons.  Similarly, you will never find the child of a government man however high his rank may be in a local Medical School or any coveted school for that matter unless he truly deserves the place and qualifies for it academically.   That's how upright and aboveboard the Singapore government is.  How many countries in this world do you know that has a system that is so committed to the virtue of meritocracy?  Not even in the West can you find anything quite approaching our government's standard of unimpeachable integrity.

It may be devastating when our children do not qualify for their dream school but that is a fact of life we all have to accept.  Those of us who are willing to sacrifice for our children (such as the writer of the article) are indeed exemplary and laudable.  But we should not blame others, least of all the government.

Stark naked!!

I have just returned home after having attended a most unusual event and one which my Facebook friends seem to blush when mention is made of it and they would quickly talk about something else. You see, I spent my holiday with the Taiwan Naturist Association and throughout my stay with them, I wore precisely what Godiva wore when she rode her snow-white horse through the town one fine day or so the story goes. 

It is natural to have some reservation about going to a resort with a naturist association.  Most reasonable people agree that there is no shame in nudity but when it comes to actually going starkers in full view of other people, most of us baulk at the idea.  Why we hesitate to go naked publicly (I mean in a situation where it is not unlawful to do so, such as in a naturist resort) is something that is not rational but we hesitate anyway.

I would like very much to believe that I am rational and driven by pure logic alone.  Now, logically, there should be no shame in nudity.  What harm can there be if nude photos of me circulate online?  In the first place, no sane person would want to circulate MY nude photos.    But supposing the photos are circulated, what harm can there be?  Absolutely none.  The only disadvantage I can think of arising from the circulation of one's nude photos is if one is applying for the post of Chief Eunuch in the Imperial Palace in the Forbidden City in the 19th century.  Photographic evidence that the candidate was not castrated before puberty will dash any hope he may have of being shortlisted for that post.  Those of us who do not have such lofty aspirations need have no fear.

From the very beginning of my time spent with the Taiwanese naturists, I found myself perfectly at home with nudity.  I did not feel the smallest embarrassment and I really felt no different than if I had been fully clothed.  The President of the Naturist Association was told that I loved having my photos taken (the rude expression currently in vogue which I find coarse and distasteful for such a person is "camwhore") and he very kindly obliged me by taking hundreds of photos of me both with my camera and his more sophisticated DSLR camera.  You would have thought that even the most diehard camwhore would be uneasy if he were in a state of deshabille and far worse if he were stark naked but I took to nudity as if I had been brought up a naturist and I felt perfectly comfortable.  The experience left me wondering if all of us are in fact natural naturists.  Who was it that first told us to hide our bodies with clothes and what made us listen to him dutifully and for so long a time?

I now have hundreds of photos of me alone and with others and if you look at the photos, you can see that I posed for them the same way any clothed tourist would pose for a photograph.  At no point was I conscious of my nakedness.  That's how natural nudity is even for someone like me who experienced naturism for the first time.

We Asians are generally camwhores and if you don't believe me, just observe a group of Chinese or Japanese tourists.  They will snap a pic with every two steps they take.  Unlike Western nudist resorts which strictly forbid photography, the Taiwan Naturist Association is more balanced - it allows the use of the camera but of course you should use your camera to take only your own photos or if you have the consent of other people, you may take a group photograph.  It's not every day that you get to go to a nudist resort and naturally for us newbies, we would probably want to take many photos and while I find it impossible to openly post the photos on Facebook or Twitter, they come in handy when I want to convince my unbelieving friends that yes, I did go to a nudist event.  Years ago, I was in a hot spring in Taiwan with my son and I wanted to take a photograph of us in the bath but I didn't want to offend the other bathers.  This time, I have more photos than I will ever need of me not just in a hot spring bath but on virtually every square inch of the two resorts I stayed in.

Like I have said, it's not easy to post photos from a nudist event online.  If the photo contains the faces of other naturists, I would not want to post them without their consent.  Most websites do not allow nude photos and so a bit of censoring is necessary.  However, it's easy for me to post the photograph below.  It was posted on the Taiwan Naturist Association's blog and I have their written consent to use it in this blog.

Now, let me explain the circumstances behind this photo.  Our group wanted to watch the sun rise over the Pacific Ocean and we went early one morning to the Eastern tip of Taiwan.  Just as we were lazing about on the beach, a beach ranger or patrolman came by on his buggy.  I expected some trouble but not only was there no trouble, the ranger lent us his buggy for us to pose on for pics.  I have countless photos of me riding the buggy with and without others on it.  The patrolman even helped us take a group photograph which is what you see below.  Will we one day be as liberal and tolerant as the Taiwanese?

One huge mistake many people make when they think of naturism or nudism is they link nudity with sex.  It's the non-naturist's obsession with sex that makes him draw such a link where none exists.  Having now attended a naturist event, I can say quite categorically that naturism is purely non-sexual.  I'm not saying naturists don't have sex.  That would be ridiculous.  Quite a few of the naturists I met went there with their spouses and they have kids of their own.  But it would be outrageously wrong to associate a nudist camp with sex and orgy.  Anyone who thinks that way needs a sex psychologist to help him deal with his own sex addiction.

Naturists are healthy people who are perfectly comfortable in their own skin.  Literally.   Naturism is all about self-acceptance.  Naturists accept their bodies and are not filled with shame, quite unlike the rest of us who desperately make it a point to hide our bodies and blemishes with cleverly designed clothes.

Photo: courtesy of Ms Chew of the Taiwan Naturist Association