20 December 1954. Chicago, USA. A group of devotees gathered at the home of their prophet, Dorothy Martin. They sang fervently and they waited for the arrival of aliens in a spacecraft that would take them away before 21 December 1954 – when a great flood would drown out everything on earth. Earlier that year, […]

With elitism and inequality being hot topics these days, Trade and Industry Minister Chan Chun Sing cautioned that a distinction must be made between “elites who give back to society” and those with “elitist attitudes” who have closed themselves off from the rest of society. During a dialogue at a public policy conference on Oct […]

At the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS)’s 30th anniversary conference, Diversities: New and Old, Ambassador-at-large Prof Tommy Koh challenged the government’s idea that it has made strides in lifting the incomes of the lowest-earning Singaporean workers without the need for an absolute minimum wage policy. Prof Tommy Koh quoted Mr Lee Kuan Yew as saying: […]

A concerned mother (whose identity I won’t reveal as I don’t have her permission to quote this) wrote: 12-year-olds must sit for the PSLE which determines the track they are streamed to : N(A), N(T), Express, IP 16-year-olds on the IP track are deemed too clever to waste time sitting for the O level exams. […]

Retired author Ni Kuang was born in communist China, raised as a Shanghainese, recruited into the police force where his endless questioning of draconian, unreasonable procedures got him into trouble, forcing him to flee for his life. He settled down in Hongkong and became one of the most prolific Chinese writers in the world. He […]

Inequality is not something to be taken lightly. The following video shows a rather uncomfortable conversation going on between a diverse group of teenagers whose educational paths, streams or programmes if you will, are readily identified from the things they said and the way they said them. I wonder if Dr Janil was surprised to […]

So what’s new? The creator of popular travel video series Nas Daily, Mr Nuseir Yassin, has hit back at those who have decried his video series on Singapore, one of which was a five-minute video that lauded the island state as an “almost perfect” country. Not surprisingly, he quickly drew flak from the folks who […]

Just when we thought that no one can beat the absurd postulation that our elderly collect cardboard boxes to exercise (they can go to the gym for $1.50 now), Mr Sitoh (who was elected by the once courageous folks at Potong Pasir) hit us with a shocker. Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of the […]

Some 30 years ago, when my relatives from China visited us, they were glued to our TV sets. They loved our Chinese drama serials. They remarked that there was nothing so “realistic” in China. Thanks to the very down-to-earth plots and situations, our Chinese dramas attracted a huge following in China. When crossing the Khunjerab […]

It’s better late than never, but it’s still with regret that I only managed to visit Indonesia for the first time in 1993. I was already 29 with not that many years remaining to go on adventure trips – or so I thought. I remember that was an ambitious trip, spanning the length of Pulau […]