Engaging Global Sport

When Feng Tianwei won the bronze medal at the London Olympics, there wasn’t unanimous jubilation. Instead public reaction was mixed, the detractors criticising the fact she was not born and bred in Singapore. The focus was suddenly on the fact that the often panned Foreign Talent Scheme(FTS) “bought” athletes who could not cut it in their respective countries.

Contrast this with Malaysian Lee Chong Wei, the Olympic badminton silver medallist . The whole country rallied (no pun intended) behind Lee when he contested the badminton final. And what a final it turned out to be, with many believing he only just came short in his attempt to win the gold. In fact, many Singaporeans cheered on Lee as if he was one of our very own.

What was the difference between the two? Probably the fact only one of the two was born and bred in the country he was representing. Both would have trained just as hard and would have made numerous sacrifices just to have been able to compete in the pinnacle of sporting achievement.

So why the hullaballoo? So what if the likes of Feng and Li Jiawei are from other countries ? So what if they need translators to conduct interviews? These guys are sweating buckets to bring glory for the nation. One can only imagine how they would have been hung out to dry if they had failed. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
The problem that we face is not our abhorrence towards these athletes, but towards the policy that welcomes them. We’ve suddenly developed this persecution complex where we believe that these athletes are taking the places of local boys and girls who deserve these spots instead. This is an extension of the general xenophobic feeling that’s developed due to influx of immigrants entering the country over the last decade.

Let’s then ask this question differently then. Are they any local youths who would have emulated their achievements at the Olympics? No name comes to mind. In fact, our athletes’ dire performance at the London Olympics led the media to write off the hopes of several athletes at the next Olympics.

If our local athletes are not up to the mark internationally, why are we criticising the scheme that allows individuals who may not have made the grade in their birth countries, but are allowed to develop themselves to bring glory to their adopted country. Win-win to me.

The idea of athletes representing countries other than their birth isn’t a new concept. Wilson Kipketer was Kenyan born and represented Denmark at the Sydney and Athens Olympics, running in the 800 metre event Although he never won a gold medal, his world record for the event stood unbroken for almost 13 years till it was surpassed in 2010. Wilson’s accent meant that many of his Danish interviews needed subtitling. Sound familiar ?

The Foreign Talent Scheme is simply a policy which complements our general sporting strategy. With every Feng, there’s a Joseph Schooling, who at 16, could practically own the water in Asian swimming pools for years. And if he can keep his goggles and swim cap on, the world is his oyster. And my personal favourites are the Under 15 and Under 16 football teams. Put Hariss Harun, Safudin Baharudin and Shahdan Sulaiman together with the likes of Adam Swandi, Hanafi Akbar and R Aarvin, and you’ve got a football team who will have the whole country eating from their hands.

Globalisation has taken our world by storm. Mandarin has become the most favoured second language in Australia, Asians are now the rising ethnic group in the US and Toronto has become such a cultural melting point that demographers are unable to point out a dominant ethnic group.

A senior politician once commented during a televised event that Singaporeans who leave the country for greener pastures are “quitters.” That train of thought is no longer pursued. Singaporeans are actively encouraged to go abroad , broaden their horizons and expose themselves to global insights. What they are asked to do now is to return some point to their countries to use their experiences to contribute to Singapore. One can only look to opposition politician Chen Show Mao, who spent most of his life abroad before coming home to win a constituency. And to add some consistency to the tenor of this article, Pravin Gunasegaran, who spent a lot of his life in Australia was drafted into the Lions XII to compete in the Malaysia Super League.

Singaporeans have given as much to the world as foreign athletes have given to us. And more so, specifically to their adopted countries. The last thing they want is ,after all the effort they put in, to be criticised for it.

Mr Menon
The Social Swami

Save the day Singapore

Rational fear

When I was young, the biggest word I knew started with an X. That made it all the more exotic. I learnt it from my PETS textbook. Xenophobia. If I remember correctly, xenophobia referred to a fear of people from other countries. The New Oxford American Dictionary adds the conditions of intensity and irrationality to the mix, making the new definition, an “intense or irrational dislike or fear of people from other countries.” And rightly so too! It is afterall such a long word.

I bandied about this word like a child would his little wooden sword, battling the imaginary dragons that live in caves dark and deep. The problem was though, that like this child, I was fighting imaginary dragons. I was wrong – The hate speech and bigotry I’m reading online aren’t manifestations of xenophobia. Why? Well, there’s “dislike”, check, and it’s “intense”, check check, and maybe there’s even an element of “fear” surrounding the concept of the alien and what’ll happen to the idea of the ‘Singaporean’ in the coming generations. But the one thing that much of the existing online commentary isn’t, is irrational.

It is rational. There are reasons why the many vocal Singaporeans online zealously articulate their discontent with the way things are turning out. The odd immigrant who abuses an old lady on the bus, the inability for some graduates to get hired by the firms they’d like because the openings have been filled by immigrants who work for less, the inability to order what you want to have for lunch at the hawker centre downstairs because the person who’s taking your order can’t tell you if the dish contains something you might die of. It really hits home doesn’t it? You may not want an eldercare in your back yard, but there doesn’t seem to be anything you can do about it becoming a potential rape and theft zone that smells of coconut oil and curry. The intense dislike and fear are not baseless and invalid as hating someone who has a different melanin count. But that’s as much as I’ll concede and my empathy ends here.

Repeating history

If it’s not xenophobia, then what? A rational dislike of someone, because of broadstroked biases, abbaration incidents, subjective experience or the way they smell or talk makes one a racist.

I disagree with villifying these people because the hackneyed ‘reasons’ for parroting the venom are simply not good enough. Like my forefathers, (or any immigrant in history for that matter,) they left all they knew to be familiar behind in search of a future. Their intention is not to rob you of your wives nor children, freedoms of speech nor religion. They seek opportunity, just as your not too distant ancestors did. The great irony of it all, is that by spurning the Other so vociferously, they’re advocating a country of migrants that consumes itself. How positively cancerous.

There is nothing new under the sun. This scenario has played itself out time repeatedly when crisis hits, be it social, moral or economic. People look to asign blame, and often enough, they blame the Alien – unraveler of our moral fabric, bringer of crime, vice and destabilization to our well-balanced system, infiltrator of our economy and deprivor of our birthright. Eject or destroy them, that we should restore balance to the system and ourselves to our rightful place. Sounds familiar? (Think Aryan supremacy gone wrong.)

All we’re doing is repeating history by recasting the old ‘us against them’ dichotomy. From a people once racially divided, the current social policies have brought us to a unity where the immigrant is now the Other. One wonders if the price is right. Does our nationalism have to come at the expense of the victimized Other? Will we build our nation (strong and free) on the backs of the victims of our racism?

Assigning blame

Yes, there are real substantive issues with the current immigration policy and there could be devastating consequences for the Singaporean identity, but let’s carefully consider the assigning of blame for our current woes before we do so. To victimize the immigrant, guilty only of being opportunistic would be to lambast the sun for global warming. I asked the opinions of my friends regarding the re-emergence of an ostensible racist sentiment in Singapore. I received two main replies. The first suggested that Singaporeans felt under-appreciated and uncared for, standing in the dark shadow of a back-turned, north-facing, open-armed state. Because of what they feel constitutes an overstretch of domestic infrastructure, but more over, the feeling of being deprived of opportunities which are “rightfully theirs”

To those upset by “infrastructure overstretch”, I sympathise. I then suggest you promptly buy a ticket to Mumbai, Bangkok, New York, Ulaan Bator, or London. When you get there, buy a train ticket, see the sights, smell the smells and have more than just your shoulders rubbed. Yes, perhaps the state could have prepared better for the influx of people, but these are perennial global issues. Much is being already done to address the issue. They’re buying busses, and building more train lines to divert traffic. This is a case of the problem manifesting before the fruition of the solution arrives. Futurecasting at the Prime Minister’s office can only buy us so much time. Let’s be a little more gracious and patient.

To those who feel like they are being deprived of opportunities that were yours by birthright, I express my confusion. How in the world, did you grow up in a merit-based society founded on the creed “no-one owes Singapore a living,” expecting to have an opportunity handed to you because you were born on this plot of soil and not another? Nobody owes you a living. Not me, not Lee and not even your own government. Our geopolitical circumstances, don’t allow us the privileges of protectionism and an us-first social policy. Nobody is to blame – that’s just the way the cards have fallen.

Now, many of you don’t meed me to tell you why we need immigrants. But I’m going to assume the lowest common denominator here and explain it to my 14 year old self. We need immigrants to sustain the working, value adding, skilled demographic before we all degenerate into a society of cranky old wise guys. We need this because we haven’t been replacing our population over the past two decades (to the point where some population and demographic academics say the situation is nigh irreparable). Yes, it was almost prohibitively expensive to the point where having the replacement level of kids and fulfilling the Singaporean dream were mutually exclusive pursuits. So Singapore was caught in the binary. Why did things get so expensive so fast? Well I’m no economist, but I reckon that’s what happens in an economy dominated by a disproportionately large tertiary sector where value-adding leads to higher disposable incomes leads to inflationary pressures. We didn’t have a choice in the matter. The amount of natural resource available to us and the impulse of state survival necessitated the shift into high gear early in the game. That said, perhaps, to some extent we have been let down.

By who? I do not know. The government isn’t perfect, and I am critical of some of its policies, but in this instance, I don’t know what it could have done better. Perhaps it could have better forecasted and prepared the population for the problems that we’re facing now. Since the race riots, we’ve been told to treat each other with respect. Maybe it should have told the masses to treat Others with respect as well. Maybe we should have changed the dominant discource from “tolerating” our neighbours, to “accepting” them, a decade ago. Or maybe we have let ourselves down. Maybe we lost sight of the good life when we replaced it with the 5Cs. When we exchanged bits of our humanity for the want of that airspace on a 99-year lease. When we feigned narcolepsy to keep that seat on the train or refused to budge at the back of the bus to keep our “personal space.”

Save the day

But enough with the counterfactuals. What is, is. All we’re left with is how we react to today and I have a few suggestions. Instead of fearing the ‘alien’ who’s cheaper or better, don’t. Instead, you be better. You raise your game. You devise new ways and systems to make your employment more appealing. When Lee set out to get us on the path of a knowledge-based economy, he had foresight, seeing that we’d never be able to claim any form of material or physical resource advantage. Statecraft taught him that our comparative advantage would be a highly educated and skilled workforce. And it’s paid off – We’re a miracle. But I fear we’ve been deluded by our own success. We’ve rested on our laurels, bought into the story of Singapore’s success, internalized it, crafted the narrative of our lives around it and gotten lost in our lala-land.

What is happening now is basic capitalist economics. It’s realpolitik. It’s a numbers game and many of us are on the losing end because we’re just not good enough. Forget lemonade! Lee’s generation had the guts and brains enough to take the lemons that life handed them and build a city-state. They were innovators and pioneers. This generation on the other hand lacks the spirit of enterprise and creativity to best the circumstances that have sought to disadvantage it. We need to rise to the challenge and quit whining about how the government has failed us with its open door policy or about how we’re a structurally disadvantaged city state, doomed from the outset. Arise, innovate within capitalism, honour your leaders for getting you this far, best your fathers, best yourselves. Step into your destiny.

We need to build this country on the justice you grew up on, and bask in the righteousness of a Nation that walks its talk.

Timothy Anand Weerasekera
The Social Swami

For Courtesy’s Sake

The National Courtesy Campaign in Singapore was launched in 1979 by the Ministry of Culture to encourage more kindness and considerate behaviour amongst Singaporeans. The Singapore Kindness Campaign was launched in 1996, following Prime Minister Goh Chock Tong’s National Day Rally in which he highlighted the need for Singapore to be a more gracious society in the 21st century. In the year 2012, Courtesy, kindness and graciousness play a curious role in Singapore. Much like the need to get a degree, get a job, car and to be economically stable, we view courtesy and common graciousness as something we need to fulfil to meet requirements.

Anyone who has taken public transportation in Singapore will attest to the usage of the phrase “excuse me” in its most harried and venomous manifestation, almost in substitution for “get out of my way or else…” It is not my argument that graciousness and common courtesy is dead in our society or that it does not exist in our national psyche. I am merely arguing that for us to be a truly gracious society, we must shift our perspectives towards accepting courtesy as a innate part of our consciousness and not a prerequisite that must be met due to national campaigns and reserved seats.

I have often found the policy of having reserved seats in the MRT to be redundant, damning and indeed a public declaration that our society is immature and incapable of regulating itself. If 2 seats in a row are reserved for handicapped, old and pregnant people, what if there were more than the ‘allotted’ number of such people in a cabin? Then surely the other seats must immediately become available to them as well? Or perhaps we should realise that ALL seats are reserved for those who need it most and not just the seats at the extreme ends of a row. This policy has merely served to create a atmosphere of allotted courtesy in which courteous behaviour is regulated and enforced through a system of seat dispensation.

A week ago, I was travelling in a reasonably crowded train and when it reached a particular station, a large number of people entered the train, one of whom was a really pregnant woman who found herself bundled into the centre of the carriage. Needless to say, she was ignored for a short time before it became painfully obvious that someone needed to offer her a seat. Eyes darted from one seated person to another, before the man who was seated right in front of the lady, at the centre of the row finally decided to do the right and gracious thing. He quickly alerted the secondary school student at the end of the row and chided him for not giving up his seat to someone who needed it more than him. The abashed student quickly stood up and offered his seat while the pregnant lady squirmed her way through several bodies before planting herself onto her allotted seat. Everyone then continued on with their normal routine. Justice and more importantly courtesy had been served.

If you thought that this scenario was completely acceptable, then I think I have proven my point. We must as a populace shift away from thinking of courtesy and compassion as part of the system. We must learn to understand that the act of giving up someone’s seat, helping someone in need must come from within. It is not because we have to, because the seat is reserved or because it gives us CCA points. It is because we are all part of a shared humanity and we must celebrate that humanity. We help because we can and we want to.

A society is a continually evolving entity. This concept of graciousness should not be an excuse to launch into a debate about whether Singaporeans or foreigners are to blame. If our culture is strongly attuned towards being gracious and courteous, immigrants will be compelled to follow suit. Is is not possible that we are rubbing each other off the wrong way, creating an increasingly hostile and ungracious society?

The solution is a long and arduous one and it starts at home. Our children learn from watching us and let us make sure we teach them the right lessons. Graciousness should be a natural reaction, almost a reflex action and not dependent on the rules or the recipient. Let us build a society that is courteous because it is the only way to be and not one that is courteous for courtesy’s sake.

Pravin Prakash
The Social Swami