"But I Didn't Tell A Lie ... I Just Didn't Tell The Whole Truth" - The SAF

In March, an SAF training accident occurred. A few days ago, the Straits Times reported it:

ST May 25, 2010
SAF commando shot by Thai villager
By Jermyn Chow & Lester Kok

A COMMANDO on a night training exercise in Thailand was accidentally shot by a local villager out hunting.

First-Sergeant Woo Teng Hai, a regular from the 1st Commando Battalion, suffered head injuries in the incident on March 13.

The 25-year-old serviceman was hit by pellets from a shotgun, the Defence Ministry told The Straits Times yesterday. He is now on medical leave.

Mindef spokesman Darius Lim said 1st Sgt Woo was taking part in a 'routine training exercise' in a 'designated training area' in Kanchanaburi province, west of Bangkok.

But the story was not complete. It was missing a very material piece of information.

Another SAF servicement had been shot. He is a 19-year-old NSF. More than two months after the accident, the shotgun pellets are still lodged in his cheekbones and shoulder.

How did these facts now come to light? Did Mindef tell the public about it? Nope. Mindef kept very quiet about it. Instead it was an unnamed relative of the NSF who called the Straits Times, to report it.

ST May 26, 2010
Another SAF soldier shot by Thai farmer too
By Jermyn Chow & Lester Kok

NOT one but two Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) soldiers were hurt while out on a night military exercise in Thailand in March.

A local farmer out hunting accidentally shot Private J. Pritheery Raj, a full-time national serviceman (NSF). Two shotgun pellets are still lodged in his cheekbones and his right shoulder.

The 19-year-old is now on medical leave.

News of this second shooting surfaced after a relative of Pte Raj called The Straits Times on reading its report that a villager had fired his shotgun at First Sergeant Woo Teng Hai. The regular commando is said to have been blinded in his right eye.

The Defence Ministry, which had confirmed the accidental shooting of 1st Sgt Woo on Monday, admitted yesterday that another soldier had also been hurt in the same incident.

It was a cover-up. Exposed by the NSF's relative.

This is a simple example of why Singaporeans do not trust the SAF. All too often, the SAF just does not behave with integrity.

My only hope is that the SAF will treat both servicemen - the regular and the NSF - fairly, and give them proper compensation.

And not treat them in the the way they had treated ex-NSF serviceman Lawrence Leow.

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Life Without A Blog

A few readers have asked why I have been blogging less and less frequently. One colleague expressed his "disappointment". Another reader asked if everything was okay in my life.

Well, everything is okay. Except that I've been too busy with various things (mostly work and family), to be blogging a lot. That's one answer, and it is true. However, another answer (equally true) is that I just don't feel that interested in blogging anymore. In fact I have been feeling distinterested for some time.

It seems a waste to just abandon the blog, especially when I've kept it going for quite a few years. On the other hand, to keep it going just for the sake of keeping it going also seems to be an illogical decision.

Well, everything is impermanent. Blogs are no exception. Most of the Singapore bloggers whom I once considered as my "contemporaries" have largely vanished from the scene as well. That includes Xeno Boy; Molly Meek; Singapore Angle and Singabloodypore. I wonder how many people even remember those blogs/bloggers now.

I've noticed that the less I blog, the less I bother to keep up with the news. Once upon a time, reading the online Straits Times was pretty much a daily habit for me. Now, many days might pass, before I bother to read it once. I still read Today quite frequently, but mostly because I often get handed a free copy while on the way to work.

Due to my regular inattention to the news, I feel somewhat out of touch with this country now. Nevertheless my life goes on smoothly. Sounds a little strange, but it seems eminently possible to get by just fine in one's own life, without knowing too much about the broader national developments. I mean developments in areas like politics, government, education, healthcare, the economy etc.

Maybe the nature of the world now is that people can just easily zero in on the specific information they need, when they need it. For example, you don't need to be reading the newspapers regularly, to know what's happening in the property market. Instead, right at the time when you want to know, you can just google to find out what you want to know. And you could get much more relevant, detailed information from a few dedicated property websites, than from the mainstream media.

I've considered blogging about topics other than current affairs. To some extent, I've already done it. In many of my posts this year, I have often mixed news articles with personal anecdotes drawn from my own everyday experiences. Then again, perhaps the most important question is whether I'm wasting my time blogging here. And whether I should be doing something else.

It's been almost a year since my book Two Baby Hands was published. Part of me feels that it's high time I got started on a second book (I'm considering short stories - I have plenty of ideas floating around in my head). But writing a book takes a lot of time, and I'm not a full-time writer. To succeed, I need to decide exactly what I want to do or not, and after that, I just have to avoid spending any time on things that I don't want to do.

So the question for myself is - do I want to blog, or not? Hmmm.

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Marina Bay Sands - An Embarrassing Show

Well, this is one hotel that I will be avoiding, at least for the next one or two years. Hope they get their act together, by then.

ST May 6, 2010
Uproar over Marina Bay Sands conference woes
By Ng Kai Ling & Lim Wei Chean

ORGANISERS of the first conference held at Marina Bay Sands (MBS) are looking into taking action against the integrated resort (IR) for the problems which plagued the event from the word go.

They say MBS failed to deliver the 'unmatched guest experience' it promised when it first signed the deal early last year.

Mr Yap Wai Ming, chairman of this year's organising committee for the Inter-Pacific Bar Association (IPBA) conference, said they will take stock of all the things that went wrong before meeting MBS to discuss the issue. He did not give a date for the meeting.

The IPBA conference, a prestigious meeting of lawyers now into its 20th year, was the first event hosted at the IR, which threw open its doors on April 27 after months of delay. More than 1,000 lawyers and judges from all over the world, including the United States, Japan and Chile, attended the meet, which started on Sunday and ended yesterday.

By the time it was over, delegates had compiled a long list of complaints about MBS, ranging from minor irritations to major flaws:

- At the five-star Marina Bay Sands Hotel, some delegates spent the first night without air conditioning.

- Some guests had to make calls using their mobile phones because the room phones were not working.

- Some rooms had no hot water or working toilet flushes.

- Facilities like the gymnasium, spa and swimming pool were not ready for use.

But the problems did not end at the hotel rooms.

At the Sands Expo and Convention Centre, sound quality in the conference rooms was poor, and meetings were interrupted by construction noise or worse.

Mr Yap said an IPBA committee meeting had to be reconvened along a corridor because of loud piped music playing in the meeting room. He said MBS told them it was unable to turn the music off as the sound engineer was not around.

To add insult to injury, the power went out for more than half an hour in the conference room on Tuesday during the address by the Chief Justice of the Australian state of New South Wales.

The inadequacies so irked the delegates that one of them, lawyer Axel Reeg from Germany, raised a motion during the annual general meeting (AGM) yesterday that the association take a 'fair and tough stance' against MBS for not delivering what it promised.

'The conference has been world class. The venue was presented to us as going to be world class. Sadly, it is not yet world class...I think we should rename Marina Bay Sands to Construction Bay,' the 51-year-old told the assembled lawyers at the AGM.

Mr Yap said MBS should have been more honest about the progress of the IR right from the start, when it knew that its planned opening last December would have to be pushed back because of unforeseen construction setbacks and labour shortages.

One of my lawyer friends, who was staying over at the hotel for the conference, told me that the hotel even messed up the check-in/check-out times for their guests.

Five hours before my friend was due to check out, the hotel staff thought that she and her husband had already checked out. The hotel staff assigned the room to a new guest and insisted on sending his luggage to my friend's room.

My friend had to tell them exasperatedly, "Wait, WAIT. You are making a mistake. This is MY room. You can't give a stranger a key to enter into MY room. This is a security breach!!"

She also telephoned several times to ask for mineral water, but it never came. Oh, and she had to use her own handphone to call. The telephone in her hotel room was not working.

There were other horror stories - about hotel guests getting stuck in lifts etc. In one case, the lift worked, but only partially - the door opened only halfway, so the hotel guests had to squeeze their way out.

* * * * * * * * * * *
A terrible start, for the highly-billed IR. What happened to the quality control?

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Singlish, English and the Way We Speak and Write

It started with my eight-year-old son using a couple of cuss words. He was having an argument with my daughter, and he used a few cuss words on her. My eyes opened wide and I asked him if he even knew what those words meant. He didn't. He had used the words, just because he had heard some other boys in school use them.

I sternly told him not to use that kind of language again. Still I wasn't too surprised that this had happened. He does attend an all-boys' school, after all. As a parent, I just have to learn to deal with it. Anyway, one day my son will be in the army and then he will inevitably acquire an even more colourful vocabulary.

But until then, I do not want him to develop any habit of using cuss words.

So I started to pay more attention generally to the way my son talks. When he realised that I was doing that, he stopped using his cuss words. However I couldn't help but notice that he now also speaks a lot of Singlish. This isn't exclusively the schools' fault - Mrs Wang and I also speak a lot of Singlish at home.

And then I also noticed that my daughter also speaks quite a lot of Singlish.

The difference between Mrs Wang and I, on one hand, and our two children, on the other hand, is that when Mrs Wang and I need to, we can easily switch out of the Singlish mode, and speak proper English. It's not so easy for the children to do it. So now, I'm putting some effort into training them to speak proper English again.

I've made it into a sort of a game at home. If anyone of us catches another family member speaking Singlish, we can go beeeeeep and the person has to correct himself or herself, and rephrase what he or she was saying, in proper English. So far, so good. The kids are seeing this as a fun thing.

I think that Singlish has a certain charm. It's part of our culture. It helps Singaporeans to relate to each other. Singlish has a number of highly expressive phrases, capable of conveying a wider range of emotions (in contrast, notice how flat and dull many Brits sound, when they speak proper English in the typically understated manner of the Brits). I wouldn't mind my children speaking Singlish, if they are also able to switch to proper English when they need to. But I think that first, they had better master proper English.

The odd thing is that both children write very well (for their respective ages). The boy is able to write a long essay, not only without any Singlish, but with almost no grammatical errors at all. In fact he writes with a remarkable resemblance to Enid Blyton.

This seems to indicate that different parts of the human brain process language in its written form, and language in its spoken form. The children have learned to write, based on what they read. But they have learned to speak, based on what they hear. That's why they write excellent proper English, but speak Singlish.

It's interesting, the way children learn language.

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The Fine Quality of our Dear Deputy Prime Minister

I wonder whether Teo Chee Hean got up in the morning, read the newspaper article below and then felt a little stupid about himself. Or perhaps his skin has become too thick for that.

ST Apr 6, 2010
Have more faith in the Singapore system

SINGAPOREANS should be more confident in their country and not be swayed by outsiders who have no stake in how society here works, Deputy Prime Minister Teo Chee Hean said.

Responding to a student who asked if Singapore would adopt a new political attitude or stick to its Asian values stance, he said: 'We need to be more self-confident.'

He related how when he became education minister in 1997, he was surprised to find that teachers lacked confidence in themselves, even though they were doing a great job.

'Everybody was telling them that they were doing the wrong things,' he said. 'I said: How can this be? People are coming to learn from us, see how we teach, why we are successful. Yet our teachers don't have self-confidence.'

It led to Mr Teo resolving to set up a unit at the National Institute of Education for teachers to study why Singapore's education system works and how it can be improved further.

Notice that the student wasn't asking about self-confidence. He wasn't asking about "outsiders". He wasn't asking about what Singaporean teachers were doing wrong or right. He wasn't asking Teo to talk about his past projects in 1997 at NIE.

The student was asking Teo whether Singapore would adopt a new political attitude or stick to its Asian values.

Teo's response was, of course, totally irrelevant. Teo might as well have said: "Oh, the sun is shining and the sky is blue. Birds have wings and dogs can pee. I hereby refuse to answer your question."

That response would, at least, have been honest. And confident. Although still stupid.

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The Strange History of Productivity in Singapore

So the latest buzzword in Singapore is productivity. The ministers are touting it as the next great new idea that will ensure Singapore's survival and success in the future.

This is funny. Because productivity is not a new idea in Singapore. In fact, it is rather old. Back in the 1970s and 80s, productivity was one of our favourite national campaigns (along with the "Speak Mandarin" campaign and the infamous "Stop At Two" family-planning campaign).

Productivity even had its own mascot (known as Teamy the Bee). And it also had its official song that would be aired on radio and TV. The lyrics went something like this:

"Good, better, best,
never let it rest,
If it's good, make it better
If it's better, make it best!"

I still remember it, because I was in primary school then, and it was a simple, catchy tune (the kind that would appeal to young children). By today's standards, the words are very corny. But then the world was a simpler, more innocent sort of place back then.

Anyway, productivity was such a big thing in the 1970s and 80s that it even had its own statutory board. Yes, along with key public institutions such as the HDB, URA, PUB and CPF, we also had .... the NPB! The National Productivity Board.

The purpose of the NPB was to promote practices in Singapore that would lead to increased productivity. A big part of the strategy involved studying the Japanese workforce, who were known for their high standards and productivity.

When did the productivity drive start to dwindle and fade away?

I can't pinpoint an exact date. We know however, that the NPB died in 1996. Parliament repealed the National Productivity Board Act in April that year. From then onwards, the NPB officially ceased to exist.

Around the same time, whether by coincidence or not, Singapore launched its new key strategy for the nation. It was all about getting skilled manpower from overseas to relocate to Singapore. In that same year, the phrase "foreign talent" entered the national vocabulary for the first time.

Well, you know the story from there. As the years passed, "foreign talent" became a looser and looser term.

"Foreign talent" used to mean highly-skilled professionals from overseas, who possessed expertise and knowledge that was scarce in Singapore - people such as cardiac surgeons and university professors.

Then over time, the term "foreign talent" ballooned and expanded. It began to include nurses; engineers; IT system analysts; chefs; soccer players; bus drivers; bankers; construction foremen; salesgirls; junior executives; middle managers; receptionists; photographers, school teachers. Basically every kind of Tom, Dick and Harry. The floodgates were thrown wide open.

In 2006, PM Lee, when making his National Day rally speech, tacitly abandoned the word "talent". He didn't say "foreign talent" anymore; he merely said "foreigners", when referring to the foreigners working and living in Singapore.

It was both honest, and dishonest, of him. Honest, because he was admitting, in his own way, that not all our foreigners were "talented". Many were decidedly mediocre. This was the inevitable result of our strategy of importing as many foreign Toms, Dicks and Harries as we possibly could.

It was dishonest of PM Lee, because he abandoned the word "talent", without expressly pointing out that he was doing so, and without saying why. It was a verbal sleight of hand. Most people didn't spot it. The policy had morphed, from a small-scale initiative to recruit highly-skilled foreigners, to a huge initiative to recruit any foreigner who would put his hand up. PM Lee wanted to admit, and yet not admit, that the policy had changed.

Anyway, the problem with taking too many low-skilled foreigners is that the national productivity goes plummeting straight down. That has happened in Singapore, it has been discussed a lot recently, so I won't go further into it.

Here's to Teamy, our dear old friend. When all else fails, going back to the basics may just work.

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Another Odd Fish in the Small Pond of Mr Wang's Life

In the near future, I'll be flying off to Europe to attend a course. It is a global course, with participants coming from many countries all around the world.

The course is residential, one week long, and intensive. Every day, it starts early in the morning (like 8:00 am sharp) and ends quite late at night (like 9:30 pm). There are no breaks except for lunch and dinner. When I get back to my hotel room each night, I'll also have to prepare for the next day's sessions. Which means that I probably won't get much sleep.

The course will be extensively graded and scored. If I pass, then I qualify for Part 2 of the course. This will be another intensive one-week event, to be held later in the year, in another part of the world. If I fail (either Part 1 or Part 2), then I am automatically disqualified from being considered for promotion in 2011. That's a strict rule.

You might be thinking that since I am a lawyer, the course probably has to do with the law, and that I will be attending lectures and sitting for exams.

However, it's not that kind of course at all. The course is mostly about personal effectiveness, and soft skills. And it is extremely hands-on. Based on what I know about it so far, a big part of the course will be run like a .... reality TV show.

What do I mean? Well, the course will constantly place me in a variety of simulated scenarios. For example, I might be required to act as the leader of a group of people facing an emergency. Or I might have to act as a CEO chairing a meeting on business strategy. I would then be closely observed, to see how I handle the situation.

And I will be assessed on attributes such as my leadership qualities; my presentation skills; my ability to convince and influence other people; and how I make decisions. Throughout the week, there will be judges to give me criticism and feedback on my performance.

It's going to be a little bit like Survivor (but less rigorous), or The Apprentice (but less bitchy) or the American Idol (but less glamorous).

(I understand that in one particular year, the participants even had to plan a rescue mission. There was a real cliff, with rappelling equipment, and a real little girl waiting at the bottom of the cliff. The idea was that you and/or your team members had to rappell down the cliff, to rescue the girl).

I've heard accounts about a few previous participants who felt so stressed that they voluntarily dropped out of the course, after Day One or Day Two. They chose to drop out, even though they knew that their promotion prospects would be dashed. So evidently the course can be challenging.

I do look forward to it. It will be an unusual and memorable experience, at the very least. Wish me luck!

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