There seems to be some conventional or prevailing wisdom about people having to keep to their lanes in different ways. So there are so-called norms for being a worker, being a father, a brother, a son and so on. Overlay that with the dimension of culture, including heritage and religion, you get a different set of different norms that as an individual, you are expected to display.
And so all my life I’ve somehow been defying classifications. One of the big divisions in school I had was between a ‘science’ student and an ‘art’ student. In high school, I defied that classification by doing arts (not just humanities but even fine arts, digital arts, and film) alongside all of the sciences (biology, physics, chemistry). When I entered junior college, I took two science subjects and two arts subjects as my main subjects.
And when it came to college, I just had to go to a school that offered a Bachelor of Science (BSc) in Economics when in most places, Economics was considered a Bachelor of Arts (BA). And then in my masters of economics, despite joining the advanced mathematics course, I also did a module in Economic & Business history.
I often recognise the value and importance of arts despite being an economist and finding it difficult to quantify the value that arts generate. Life in Singapore has become so draining and taxing on the human spirit often because we don’t know how arts play a role in helping us recover and restoring dimensions of our lives that we fail to see or identify. In recent times, as I caught plays from Checkpoint theatre and various films or shorts produced by Singaporeans about life in Singapore, even poetry that is written about life (eg. Government Haikus), I begin to see more and more that we all need arts more than we know. It could well be what will keep us alive.
