Water no more: same same but different

One of the things that tiny city-state Singapore will never escape is its intertwined relationship with its northern neighbour, Malaysia. I thought it interesting but unsurprising how the recent news of a water agreement between the two states coming to an end was differently portrayed in the national media. There's no subtlety at all, how the news was portrayed in each of the country, as with most other news relating to bilateral issues between the two neighbours.

The headlines in Channel News Asia on 26 April is:
"S'pore will not renew one water agreement with M'sia which expires next year"'

And the headlines in Straits Times on 27 April is:
No need to renew water deal

Now consider the headlines in the Malaysian National News agency, Bernama, on 27 April:
Johor To Stop Selling Water To Singapore From Skudai Plant Next Year

I think I need not explain further how the headlines would influence the respective domestic readers on the same issue. I thought the distinction just stood out so starkly when I came across the articles. Yet it's all nothing new.

Sunday, 6:44PM

Ingredients of a happy Sunday afternoon

1. Foamy Beer


2. Children art in multiple colours


3. Things hanging around for semblance of creativity


4. Downright unhealthy food


I like lazy weekend afternoons spent at cozy hideouts. (:

Seletar revisited

I said I would be back.

The decision to make good my promise was actually made on a moment of impulse. The good weather today fuelled my urge to be outdoor and enjoy the lovely breeze. My morning plan to cycle had failed, but I was stirred in the afternoon to take a second chance. I was in town when the urge to cycle to Seletar came upon me with a desperate urgency, so much so that I was willing to take a cab home before the evening gets swallowed by darkness.

In the end I managed to get to Seletar before dark, lingering there till the last light faded into darkness. Though it would have been nice if I had reached earlier, I was nevertheless able to enjoy a tranquil evening surrounded by big open spaces, water, voluminous clouds and plenty of silence. I felt contented.


The long inviting road packed with vehicles at the sides


Enjoying some me-time and the view in front


There were a few families around, amongst other people who have also come to enjoy the lovely space here.


The two brothers keeping each other company


It was nice seeing the kites. One of them went really high.


Such as this...


The clouds shifted to let in the crimson red burst through


I went into unchartered terrain, literally


The long road ahead was mostly empty. I would have gone on to Sengkang had the road not been sealed at one end by a fence not interrupted the road.


Scenes like this just stop me in my track. I can just admire it for a long, long time.


The old Seletar's gone, so very sad. I kept cycling into the small roads joining the remaining houses, but always came to a dead-end. The residential area has shrunk to a miserable puny area. The old England is lost.

For the Nostalgic

Just what stirs feelings of nostalgia? Is it a yearning for the yesterdays that were but now etched as mere memories? Or is it an unconscious lapse into the past that is ever drifting further away from our consciousness; an impulse, if you like.

I don't know, but I think nostalgia is a self-affirming need. Who we are and how we perceive ourselves must surely be related to the past. Feeling nostalgic is about making a connection to the present with the past, and making sense of our otherwise meaningless life.

I think nostalgia is also a natural defence mechanism, being at work when we want to block off alientation, loss, fear and even frustration. Familiarity, after all, lends a sense of reassurance.

During my early years, I actually grew up listening to Chinese music. That was until I'd had enough of crap music and endless advertisement and deejays' talking on the radio. Like every generation who believe that the music of their era is the 'real stuff', the more authentic, I also think (chinese) music from the long yesteryears were much better in terms of their sincerity and meaningfulness.

During my secondary school days, a classmate of mine, who inclines towards English and all things western, once conceded that English songs can never convey emotions and feelings to the same levels of depth and intensity as chinese songs. I believe this is mainly due to the fact that Chinese is a poetic and culturally rich language, and its words convey so much more meaning and depth than the English language.

I often hear chinese pop songs from the nineties whenever I walk to or passed by the back lane that has many shops selling things. The music is loud, but most of the times I didn't mind because the songs playing were familiar and pleasant pieces. Hearing them inevitably reminded me of earlier times, and I would be suffused with a warm fuzzy sense of elation. And these days while taking the overcrowded trains, I find myself tuning in to chinese music stations, hoping to catch a familiar nice song.

Perhaps I have been living an extended period of nostalgia, trying to relive the past through the songs I once heard and enjoyed fondly. For the nostalgic, it is through yesterday's sights, sounds, smell and feel that bring back memories of our younger days. Listening to old songs reminds me just how much it is that our life journey's accompanied by music, different songs playing to different era.

I am not alone

Over email with T today, I actually felt better after the short email exchange with her. I think that's what they called, Connection.

Prelude: T sent me a url.

Me: Every now and then i feel like im having a little life crisis. These days feel like another such period. Sigh.

T: YES I know what you mean. I think I’ve hit the “crisis” several times, but this time it’s a wall!

Me: You need to break down the wall then. Haha.

Me: Thanks, it was nice reading your email. ;) You make me feel like I am not alone out there, that there are others feeling the same and facing similar 'problems'.

T: You are definitely not alone.
Ahhaha, there’s plenty of us in the same bloody dilemma.
Where to from here.

The exceptional Vagrants

I finished reading The Vagrants by Li Yiyun about two weeks ago. It was one of those excellent storybooks that kept me turning the pages once I get started on it. I remembered staying up late one night just to finish the last few pages even though the end turned out to be more than a few pages.

The novel is written in the third-person and the language style is simple and straightforward. Yet it is this simplicity and third-person narrative that betrays an understated poignancy and suppressed tension that holds the plot tightly.

The story examines the impulses of and psychological effects on people living under communism in the 1970s. Through a singular event - the execution of a young woman who had lost faith in communism - the writer cast light on a host of particular characters and general townfolks: their attitudes under a communist regime; the way they live and perceive their lives and other people; and the forces that shape their private lives. As you read the novel, you feel almost furtively let in into a town hanging on suspense and permeated with unuttered fear.

In particular, I admire the writer's way of telling the story at times through the lenses of other characters or through narrating multiple events simultaneously. Her perceptiveness and adroit craft is demonstrated when she writes about separate but related events that are taking place at the same time, using this to great effect in heightening certain truths or episodes.

I've taken the liberty to extract the following paragraphs which I thought powerfully conveyed a significant episode. This was achieved mainly through the eyes and minds of the seemingly random and important people that appear in her novel.

"Disturbed too were other souls. A female prison guard, off duty for the next two days, claiming she had a minor cold, woke up from a fitful dream and gasped for air; her husband, half-asleep, asked her if she felt unwell. A ridiculous nightmare, she answered, knowing enough not to tell him that she had fainted at work earlier that morning, when the warden had ordered that Gu Shan's vocal cords be severed so that she could not shout counterrevolutionary slogans at the last minute. The woman had been among the four guards assigned to pin the prisoner down for the procedure, but it had not gone as smoothly as promised by the warden and the doctor; the prisoner had struggled with a vehemence that one would not have imagined could come from her skinny body, and the female guard, whose nerve was unusually up to her work, had fallen backward and bumped her head hard on the floor before the doctor finally finished the operation.

Unable to sleep, in another house, was an old orderly for the police station. I tell you, he said to his wife, who answered that she did not want to be reminded for another time about the bucket of blood he had washed off the police jeep that had transferred the prisoner. But it was unusual, he said; I tell you, it was a horrible thing, to clean up so much blood. What did they do to her? Why couldn't they wait until they got her onto the island to finish her off? He threw one question after another at his wife, who was no longer listening. He was getting old, after waiting for answers that his wife would not give him, the man thought sadly; he had fought in the war against the Japanese when he was a boy and he had seen plenty of bodies, but now he could not sleep because of a bucket of blood from a woman who was no longer alive. The story would make his old platoon friends laugh at the next reunion, the old man thought, and then he realised that he was the last one remaining who had not reported to the other side.

She had to die anyway, one of the two surgeons who had operated on Gu Shan told himself one more time - so it didn't matter, in the end, that they had changed the protocol because the patient did not believe in receiving something from a corpse and insisted that the prisoner be kept alive when the kidneys were removed. This was not the most challenging operation for him, but it would be the one to make him the chair of the surgery department, and put his wife into the position of the head nurse in internal medicine, though she was still unaware of her promotion and would be overjoyed when she found out about it. It would also help their twin daughters, fourteen and a half and blossoming into a pair of young beauties, to get a recommendation from the city government so that they could go to an elite hight school in the provincial capital. The man thought about his wife and his daughters - they were fast asleep in their innocent dreams, unplagued by death and blood; the burden was on his shoulders, the man of the household, and he found it hard not to ponder the day when he could no longer shelter them, the two daughters especially, from the ugliness of a world that they were in love with now, rosebudlike girls that they were. What then? he wondered, painfully aware of his limitations as a man trapped between practicality and conscience. In the end, he had to make himself believe that he had chosen the best for his family. The long-needed sleep rolled over him like a tide and washed him offshore.

In an army hospital a hundred miles away, medicine dripped into an old man's vein. He was surrounded by people congratulating themselves on the success of the transplant operation. And in Muddy River, in a hospital populated by many more patients and fewer doctors and nurses, sat Mrs Gu, who was dozing off at the drip-drip of the saline solution into her husband's arm. Now and then she woke up and watched her husband's face, shrunken and suddenly too old for her to recognize."

Unseen Moments #6: Passer-by

Urban Soul

The Urban Soul. Always restless and wandering. Desires creativity and inspiration; craves freedom and spaces. Seeks out remnants of delights in the everyday and finds solace and excitement in pockets of urban. Deplores banality and repetition. Love its antithesis.


The soul bares it all


The dark soul


Dreams are written down big


Like two paws. Aesthetic Repetition for the mundane.


It's the colours, stupid!


Finding hidden inspiration


Boxes


To transform, be transformed.


Quivering Shimmers


Grey Matter, but no matter


Slice through the bread


Be somebody.


Songs for the girls we never dated. You need a few HMV music stores, man.


Urban soul needs nourishment too


Open for heart-to-heart talk, but make appointment please

the CATCHER in the TRAIN

"Sorry...I can't help but notice you are reading Catcher in the Rye."

My concentration in reading was suddenly cut off by a youthful female voice from my side. I looked up and was greeted by the face of a young lady. She looks like she's around 20 years old. She spoke rather apologetically, as though conscious of and worried that her unexpected interruption would be met with rebuke and unfriendliness.

Having got my attention now, she continued in her timid but firm voice: "Did you get it from a local bookstore somewhere?"

I was a little thrown off the course but was able to grasp her question and give a reply.

"Oh, i got it from Kino."

And that was it. She promptly thanked me before turning to the other side. As quickly as she had stunned me with the question, she had disappeared back to her original position, probably embarrassed at having accosted a complete stranger in the train. I couldn't concentrate after that and was started to make some speculations.

Given the very English way that she spoke and her interest in a rather literary piece of work at her young age, I guessed she is probably a literature student. Yet I remained rather half convinced because I thought a literature student must surely be acquainted with local bookstores than to ask that question. She could even have asked her fellow lit friends or borrowed the book from the school library.

I reckoned she must have been looking for the book for a long time but to no avail. If not, what could have made her summon the courage to interrupt a stranger standing in the train? Her body was completely slanted to the side after she thanked me, such that there's no way we could have made any further eye contact. Two stations later, she alighted the train, and I quickly forgot about the incident and returned to my book.

She was clearly interested in the book only, not the reader.



I bought The Catcher in the Rye only a week ago. It's a classic and very entertaining read. Embarrassingly, it was the writer's recent death that provided the catalyst for me to start reading it. Like a few other books, Catcher in the Rye has always been around and featured in the bookstores as one of those literary classics. I tend to avoid these mass-publicised books, preferring to start on them later.

Then came news of the writer's passing on. I read the papers and for the first time got acquainted with the writer and the novel that brought him fame. I knew I had to read the book and would enjoy it. I was proven right. Reading the novel, I found myself smiling, if not laughing, often, as though I am reading part of myself in some of the situations described. It's quite a gem really. I only regret that I didn't get started on it earlier.

Excerpt:

"Anyway, it took me about half hour to find out where they all worked and all in Seattle. They all worked in the same insurance office. I asked them if they liked it, but do you think you could get an intelligent answer out of those three dopes? I thought the two ugly ones, Marty and Laverne, were sisters, but they got very insulted when I asked them. You could tell neither one of them wanted to look like the other one, and you couldn't blame them, but it was very amusing anyway.

"I danced with them all - the whole three of them - one at a time. The one ugly one, Laverne, wasn't too bad a dancer, but the other one, old Marty, was murder. Old Marty was like dragging the Statue of Liberty around the floor. The only way I could even half enjoy myself dragging her around was if I amused myself a little. So I told her I just saw Gary Cooper, the movie star, on the other side of the floor.

"Where?" she asked me - excited as hell. "Where?"

"Aw, you just missed him. He just went out. Why didn't you look when I told you?"

Yesterday once more #1: 传 统

看到杂货店的玩具让我冋想起许多回忆。这些简单玲珑的玩具并非是什么贵品,但它们可是许多儿童所梦想的好伙伴。

曾几何时,你我不也是这些儿童,追求着同样的梦想吗?


怀旧的经典唱片


Where parents and in-laws buy the necessary items for newly-weds


天长地久,百年好合. [It helps that the colourful shirt caught my attention.]


婚姻物品


饱经沧桑


八下的景观

seletar, seletar

While the guys are either overseas for holidays or preoccupied with family obligations this weekend, I thought I could do with a little secret training to boost my fitness. But alas, I woke up to an ominously grey sky in the morning, and knew better than to take any chances. So I promptly went back to sleep.

Not long after - I was in the morning semi-sleeping state - it started pouring outside, and when I say pouring, I really mean pouring: it's like water poured continuously out of a bucket, except that the number of buckets is what you need to cover the entire horizon. So my sleeping in was perfectly justified.

But I am disappointed, to say the least. The whole week, I had been looking forward to Sunday. I had planned to take a slow ride to Lower Seletar Reservoir, which is the vicinity of the Seletar Airbase. It's a lovely place, and if i get there early enough, it would have been a very nice ride with a view of the reservoir. And Jalan Kayu is nearby, beckoning with roti prata. Instead of all this, the space here would have been filled with pictures of the long road to seletar, the quiet surrounds of the reservoir. Unfortunately, things didn't turn out that way.

Till the next time!

it's sunday tomorrow

For once I just feel so glad and relieved that tomorrow is Sunday and not a working day. Yesterday was a public holiday, so it kind of felt like with the passing of today, it would be back to work tomorrow. Thank goodness it's not.

I feel so tired from today's trip. As evening came and I was on my way home, the thought that the weekend hasn't ended, that tomorrow's Sunday, struck me quite randomly, and I just heaved a sigh of relief. For the working man, a free day is just so, so precious.

Here's cheers to Sunday tomorrow!