Category Archives: Life

When I was 15, I wanted to go on an exchange to China – I think it was in Ningbo or somewhere East China. It was an experience of a lifetime, or so I thought during that time. I had 3 other schoolmates selected for the programme and they were going ahead. I needed my parents’ approval to go ahead. It’d be only 3 weeks, and I’ll learn so much, make new friends and differentiate myself from my classmates who were all really elite students.

I brought up various benefits of going on the programme, but my parents countered citing safety issues. I talked about assurances from the school, and staying within the campus where the Chinese students stayed too. I mentioned how another of my schoolmate (who was my classmates when we were 12) would be going. They somehow found out and then told me he was okay because he had an uncle who lived in China. At that point I didn’t know but my parents already made the decision to exercise their power not to allow me to go for the exchange. To them, there was no point discussing further because they just wanted to close the case and move on.

Honestly, it wasn’t a nice feeling and I did feel rather bitter about it. I think it was because I felt I wasn’t engaged as an adult. They weren’t honest with me in sharing all that they had concerns with, which they were unable to mitigate and hence needed me to give up the opportunity. It was a lost opportunity for them to reinforce certain values they wanted to see in me before they were willing to let me have more autonomy or support my choices.

When I was reading up the recent coverage on the budget debates, especially the ones on the budget responsibility office (or whatever it is called, because I don’t get confused just because of different names) suggestion from the WP, it reminded me of the time my parents were shutting down the debate. There was no genuine response but just condescension and sarcasm from the cabinet. Perhaps the cabinet ministers felt like parents who knew what’s best and it was so obvious there was no need to waste time explaining further. But I think the opposition MPs this time did come across as the genuine schoolboy I was. He sincerely had a point that he believes in which he wants to make, and is giving the parent an opportunity to engage maturely.

It was a lost opportunity for the government of the day to demonstrate they continue to care and value fiscal prudence rather than just paying lip service to the fact our forefathers sacrificed to build the reserves we have. I think the cabinet ought to remember that the opposition MPs also represents the people (and in the case of the last election, I would say the Leader of the Opposition in Parliament is leading MPs representing a non-trivial 38.8% of the voters or whoever did not vote for the government of the day). And when answering to concerns of the people, the government can be more respectful and engage in more meaningful discussions.

My parents never faulted me for doing badly in school; whether I was top in class or last in class, they always said – as long as you’re doing your best. The problem was, I don’t usually know what my best really is. There isn’t really a proper benchmark. Competing with yourself, doing better and better in each of the next test is also not easy to achieve because the topics tested keeps on changing. Or if you’re gunning to be better in class ranking for each upcoming test, then it is also just a relative exercise.

Doing your best is really more of an attitude, that you have not spared any effort, you’ve not done things you regretted looking back. And looking back means not necessarily knowing the end result but then taking the same course of actions anyways. It’s another thing to say, having known the results, you regret doing such and such (that kind of regret is merely constructing an alternate universe and then attempting to live in it).

So what does it mean to have not done your best? Honestly, only you know. It could be pockets of skiving that you could have been bettering yourself. It could be actions you kept thinking you’d take and then you didn’t despite being fully capable of doing so and with no other obstacles in the way. But above all, it could be anything. The point is, what are you going to do from now? So what if you didn’t do your best just now? It no longer matters; what you do henceforth matters more.

In allowing me to put pressure on myself, and selecting my own success metrics, my parents liberated me but also gave me ownership of my own goals and targets. That is perhaps them doing their best at parenting.

Recently, I had a nice CNY dinner at Whole Earth that was specialised in ‘plant-based cooking’ which of course is there to appeal to those with ‘plant-based diets’. Really pretty good food and I’m really glad we got to go to the place – and it really did happen only because there were a couple of vegetarians within that group I was having dinner with. And this sort of diversity is great, it brings about new ideas, and causes us to think about things we take for granted. Being challenged even in terms of one’s identity is a useful way to grow.

Yet it can be difficult; when asked why we are on one diet rather than another; we might give a response that evangelises the diet, or one that tries to provide excuses for your personal idiosyncrasies. And when people test the boundaries of those diets (‘isn’t alcohol vegetarian?’ or ‘why do some vegetarians eat garlic and onions while you don’t?’), you might get uncomfortable about it. And you might not even have a ready defence or clear idea because you didn’t really think about it when you signed up to the diet. I think these are times when we can be more genuine, to say we’re still figuring these out, but that there are good reasons that you committed to the diet, and hence you’ll figure out why.

What would be an inappropriate response is to ask ‘why are you on that diet of yours then?’ as a response to the uneasiness or the discomfort of being challenged. Or to offer a more personal counter-challenge veiled in intellectualism: “what is the role of your diet in your life then?” Often we don’t even think much about our diets – the masses of us who just are brought up to eat certain things and in certain way! But with the changes that our global economy needs, we had better start questioning and thinking.

The dog I wrote about before whom we’ve adopted, he lived as a stray dog in Jurong industrial estate for most of his life. He was well liked by some factory workers and frequently fed. A while back, they moved him from Jurong to Tuas because the factory enjoyed having him; but soon at the age of 12 he got one of his ear bitten off and it got infected.

It was so bad that his wounds rotted and started to smell. No one cleaned his wounds or tended to him. Even when one of the non-profit stray feeding organisation offered to pay for his vet fees, no one took him to the vet. Instead, they left him to die near a canteen.

The canteen staff called in SPCA to take him in. By then, his wound was full of maggots. He was probably close to death but he fought on and survived. We fostered him after he was nursed back to health by the non-profit stray-feeding organisation. Then about 5 months ago, we officially adopted him. He was with us for slightly over a year.

But being 14, having led a thug life had its toil on him and after multiple bout of illness since December, his condition has deteriorated. We did a lot and spent a lot to keep him alive but it seems like he has reached a stage where he hardly has any quality of life left.

In the year he was with us, he impacted so many lives. People came with their dogs to visit him from all over Singapore. Friends who followed his instagram account told me he was such an inspiration to them. The instagram was the most detailed documentation of his life, his final year. While he lived 13 years in relative obscurity, he’d probably never realise how famous he became in his final year of life.

I plan to write a short children book with my wife (this amazing digital illustration artist) on his life and publish it to raise some funds for animal shelters. Let’s hope I’ll find the capacity for such a project so that in death, he shall continue to inspire. You’ve been a friend, a fellow old man, teacher and often-annoying pet. Thanks for bringing so much colour into our lives. Goodbye Dada.

In a recent dinner meet with some new friends who have just arrived from overseas and settling in Singapore for a stint, I discovered that we actually have a National Integration Council and they have this little guidebook about Settling in Singapore. The foreigners who received their EPs or other immigration documents allowing them to settle in Singapore would receive a hardcopy of this guide.

Besides the attractive graphics and the nice type-setting, I thought it was really nice how they put together some of the norms and conveyed recommendations on how people can adapt to the culture in Singapore. I liked how carefully worded various different practices were in Singapore (including ‘chope-ing’ seats in the hawker centres) in ways that would be neutral. In some sense, the ‘codification’ of all these cultural norms here in such a document from the government already reflected a positive sense of pride.

I’m certainly proud that we have such an organised system to help non-Singaporeans integrate better. For me, I always realise that ultimately, there’s no single Singaporean identity and it would always be full of paradoxes, tension between the Asian values with some of the westernised thinking, struggle between putting self or society first and so on. Over the years, our government have most certainly stepped away from that nannying role and try to take on a more nurturing role towards the culture and the economy. As citizens and Singaporeans, we too will have to step up and mature into a new future that we are going to create and not just passively receive.

We are stingy with our ideas for many reasons; I can think of a few:

• We are afraid a poorly thought-out idea will get criticised
• We are afraid the idea will put us in bad light
• We don’t actually want to take the trouble of executing so we want to spare ourselves the embarrassment
• We think compliance is more important than creativity
• We leave ‘creative thinking’ to others while we practice “critical thinking”

But the chance to share an idea is not a chore; it is not necessarily a right, and often it is a privilege. The ability to execute aside, at the end of each day when we all walk out into the world, out of our offices, video conferences, as fellow man, we want the best ideas to win, we want the world to be a better place because there were great ideas that mankind acted upon. It was a good idea to burn fuel to get energy and turn that energy into useful work. It was also a good idea to generate those motive power from things like flowing water or shinning sun that will not be exhausted, nor throw up more pollutants into the air.

For Singapore to be greener, better, we need to give our ideas – even the simplest ones you may not think too highly of. And honestly, I think for so long, our government have been very open to ideas-sharing as long as you come in as a concerned citizen who wants to make things better. So, please, I’d encourage you to look through the Singapore Green Plan, and then post your ideas and thoughts there.

In my final blog post questioning the pillars of the Green Plan, I’m covering the final pillar “Resilient Future”. If our vision of a resilient future is just about defending our coastlines against rising sea levels (no doubt important), local food production and having more greenery, I question what resilience really mean. Our future, intertwined with the focus on sustainability and resilience needs to encompass the physical, mental, policy and system aspects of resilience. By reducing resilience simply into something physical, we are giving ourselves too easy a problem to ‘solve’.

Resilience is not an easy concept – there’s a lot of dynamism embedded in it. You can be resilient but not seen as a winner; because it is more about suffering blows than claiming credit. And at the same time, we can build resilience at one level (eg. having strong base of reserves to use when they are required) but when crisis strikes, behave in a way that reduces our resilience (eg. creating moral hazards about using further draws to delay structural changes that is needed in the economy).

And even as we think about the resilience of a nation – what about our people, who are increasingly having difficulties with mental health, who feel increasingly disconnected between the prescribed path to success during their upbringing and their personal experiences in life? Has our education, upbringing and the manner by which we consider policy-making been building up or tearing down our mental, emotional resilience as a nation?

I appreciate that the Singapore Green Plan is not so much a plan than just an effort to piece together ideas as well as existing initiatives so as to cement our agenda against climate change and for more sustainable development. We need all the best ideas we can have regardless of where they may come from. Because when the ideas get out there, whether it works or not depends not on who came up with it – but more on the quality of it and on our ability to execute them. Having healthy conversations, trying to work things out through unanswerable questions are more important than trying to answer them. As a society, it is the willingness to do this, to work together that is going to bring about that resilient future ahead.

On this part 2 of my post about the green plan, I want to interrogate the next 2 pillars about Sustainable Living, and the Green Economy.

Sustainable living; our lifestyles are a product of systemic incentives and disincentives. We already see that in the case of marriage in Singapore and HDB flats availability. And often, availability is actually more powerful than price signals in changing behaviours. Take IKEA for example, you can’t choose to buy a plastic bag, you simply have to make do with carrying with your hands if you didn’t bring your own bag. Of course you can buy the proper reusable bag but that unavailability of the cheap plastic bag option matters.

So when it comes to waste, the lack of waste bins around can help; and maybe more importantly, the availability of proper recycling bins that are locked up, keeps the stuff in them dry and used only by those who have sorted and wash their recyclables should be available. You can even have a daily passcode reset so only those who bother to login to their accounts, check the code can use the bin. This kind of accountability, sense that your upholding of sustainability living makes an impact, will be infectious. Sustainable living only works when everyone plays their part but ideas spread in a different way, the leaders of action is a minority, most people “adapt” to social conventions when they take hold. How we start things off will have to appeal to exclusivity, to those who are leaders of action. We don’t need to convert non-believers but we do need to make things easier and impactful for believers.

Trying to “mass manufacture” sustainable living in the way we drive GDP KPIs is simply not going to work. We need smart and innovative marketing – to spread the good and infectious ideas that convinces us we actually can move mountains – then things gets interesting.

The Green Economy; what exactly is that? The Green Plan blurb for this section starts off with “Tackling climate change cannot be at the expense of livelihoods and jobs”. The negative thinking and presupposition is disappointing here. There is so much assumption around loss of livelihoods and jobs because of tackling climate change which is opposite of truth. Dealing with climate change needs work; and if we think more fundamentally about the work of creating transparency about environmental impacts, around assessment, deployment of solutions, campaigning for behavioural changes (such as those points made above), there are plenty of jobs that will be created. The idea of taxing carbon then subsidising investments in decarbonisation is a great principle but safeguards as to how the investments are made is important; otherwise it gets reduced to tokenism.

All the technological solutions (such as carbon capture, use and storage, hydrogen based energy carriers) trotted out are already available though not necessarily commercial. It’s not so much a question of availability this time around but how the government can help make the economics work by helping to create scale. Singapore has done well in this historically with infrastructure and the latest example is the district cooling system applied at the upcoming Tengeh HDB estate. There are other opportunities similar to creating multi-utilities synergies in Jurong Island a generation ago. When you have stronger regulation on waste management and then provide the waste treatment services efficiently at scale, it will be taken up. And new jobs will be created.

The difficulty in the current existing narrative is the traditional marginal thinking prevailing. We behave as if the green economy is an add on, either to parts of the economy or a layer upon the whole economy. The truth is, whether we see it that way or not, it’ll pervade the entire economy, and it’s going to transform things. That does not mean marginal thinking is not useful – we still need to think about the incrementals but target the systemic differences across all sectors first, then work out the incrementals.

I’m honestly really glad that our government rhetoric has gone on the green bandwagon. And knowing Singapore, we want to be able to deliver on our goals and make a reportable difference. However, I think it is vital to really interrogate those plans and consider if on a overall scheme of things, the plan is actually really green.

Looking just at the key areas; beginning with parks and trees – City in Nature pillar. The setting aside of land for more parks and planting more trees is definitely welcomed – but I’m not too sure if the destruction of trees/grassland to make way for further developments is progressing at a faster rate than the increase in parkland and trees. Is there some overall measure instead that the government can hold itself accountable to? Or if actually it just serves to slow down the destruction, can we also be transparent about it and confess when will we actually be increasing rather than decreasing green land and green cover?

On the Energy Reset pillar, Singapore is rightly described as an energy-disadvantaged country especially when it comes to renewables so I think we can be forgiven for still having to resort to fossil fuel for most of our baseload power. However, I think the opportunity is really not in putting solar panels on HDB, or doing small things to optimise efficiency of our plants. The real opportunity is in improving the energy efficiency of our buildings and ideally banning completely individual air-conditioning units. There’s a real waste in having individual units stacked one on top of another in a single row as in HDB flats because the hot air from one compressor is just feeding the one on top of it and once you reach high floors like for my unit, I’m wasting a tonne of energy keeping my compressor working. And besides that, our vehicles is another huge opportunity – using the same principle of freezing our vehicle growth, can we simply not ban the internal combustion engine on passenger vehicles by 2030? Our COE system can just dole out the last COEs to ICE cars and from now on, only allow EVs for passenger cars to get COEs? Then by 2030, most of our roads will be EVs – never mind the charging infrastructure; once people who wants to drive buy the cars, the market incentives to bring about charging and all will come.

And there are industries whose energy efficiency can be improved further, not just buildings – which by the way is more or less pretty well managed by BCA’s green mark certification system. The government can and should take the lead by making sure all of their facilities are green. 30% of schools being carbon neutral by 2030 is a little slow in my opinion given that more schools can simply fit itself with solar panels (even for education purposes) and do a host of other things like composting food waste, doing grey water recycling. Yes, Singapore managed to close the water loop for most part but encouraging grey water reuse would be able to improve water efficiency further.

Talking about water – how about having potable water supply pipes vis-a-vis non-potable water? So that we can reduce the energy intensity of our water treatment? Well, maybe the cost doesn’t add up as well – but all of these decision making process and sustainability considerations can be made more transparent as well so that citizens can be more involved. Accountability is key when it comes to environmental governance and sustainability – not just voicing out of plans.

Singapore had too many budgets last year I kind of lost track. There was a lot of support from the government here and there; it was good the new leaders are demonstrating that they are able to draw from the reserves during times of need and try and direct it towards those who need them. This is very different from our government’s approach in the earlier years of managing the economy. Of course, there will be some people who think of these as dangerously populist.

This year we have 1 budget so far (to be fair the year has really kind of just started), and things looks pretty boring in my view. It is a very safe, ‘same-old’ kind of budget, which in my opinion, reflects once again a lack of imagination. There’s a lot of just recycling old materials, old scripts, and to a large extent, wishful thinking. Job supports/subsidy assumes that the economy will recover or that firms are not just taking advantage of them to keep zombie operations alive. They are also generally contingent on those sectors eventually getting an uptick by the time subsidies end. Government tried to signal that if needed, they’ll step in again (as DPM Heng mentioned during the CNA programme), which reeks of moral hazard.

There had been talks about the desire to make manufacturing a significant part of our economy; but somehow the budget doesn’t seem to be devoting much to that area. Little doubt we are still stuck with thinking we would just be using tax incentives to attract MNCs to position themselves in Singapore. How about developing the domestic sector? We do have excellent firms which are local firms part of the international semiconductor value chain – can we cultivate more of that? Are we doing any R&D necessary to help these firms? Are our polytechnics and university working with these firms? Are we developing a workforce that can enter jobs created by these firms? How is the government spending its budget to make these things happen?

There is more ‘enforced spending’ kind of stimulus in the form of vouchers again. This time it’s called CDC vouchers for heartland kind of spending – hawker centres and shops. Maybe that will help to ramp up digitalisation more; and you are also handing out small sums to many people so the marginal propensity to spend is high, and that can generate some multiplier effect. But what is the longer-term supply-side impacts of such measures? Likely nil. Why not use those funds to pay for all the digitalisation stuff in schools to facilitate more remote learning? Why rely on means-tested subsidies rather than blanket subsidies? In any case the rich people already get iPads and they can be given the chance to opt out of the free one if they already have one. That saves the hassle of the poor people making applications, going through means-testing, etc.

Then there’s the question of funding our budget – which of course is not exactly clear since we drew from reserves and there’s no mention of returning the funds to the reserves. How about enforcing our claims on intellectual property generated through our research grants and all the money that NRF has put to work? How about putting those IP to use in terms of commercialising something that we can manufacture domestically? Or if they are not yet ready, how about selling it to some private sector in Singapore at a concessionary price and then part of the upside income from the commercialisation of the IP goes to our national coffers?

I’m just throwing out new ideas and they could all be bad ideas. But to me, the problem I’m observing with our budget is that there’s insufficient bad ideas because there isn’t much new ideas. And that playing safe, that ‘it’s always been done this way’ kind of calculations in the background, is getting more dangerous in this brave new world.