To some, Tay Lai Hock is a “hippie” who’s misleading the youth; to others, he is just one Singaporean who is promoting the philosophy of living in harmony with nature.
Tay is founder of the Ground-Up Initiative (GUI), a non-profit group that aims to reconnect city dwellers with the earth. The group’s 26,000sqm Kampung Kampus site in Khatib is designed as a low carbon footprint area featuring tropical sustainable architecture. Their idea is not only to enable people to be with nature, but also actively look after the space, get their hands dirty and in the process, learn how to take risks and be leaders – all while working as a team with a 21st century kampong spirit.
Previously a highly-paid IT executive, the SilkAir crash in 1997 prompted Tay to have a rethink of what he was doing with his life. He later quit his job, backpacked around the world, and then started GUI.
Debates over land use in Singapore and the loss of rustic spaces are issues which resonate with him. He went “On the Record” with Bharati Jagdish about this, values in an ideal society, and what it means to put your money where your mouth is. But first, he took on what it meant to be called a “hippie”.
Tay Lai Hock: Well, I always say that if I’m a hippie, then I’m a hippie who promotes free love, free play, free spirit, but I don’t talk about free drugs or free sex, things like these. What I’m trying to do is help Singaporeans free their minds.
So often, we hear people say that they are very stifled. They’re very caught up with all the day-to-day running around and making a living that they have forgotten how to live. What’s wrong with what I’m trying to do? I’m not against anything. I’m just not doing what the mainstream thinks everybody should be doing.
So I’m just providing an alternative platform for Singaporeans. So naturally, the government officials when they started to try and understand what I’m trying to do, they asked me about it. Of course, the more progressive ones, the more open-minded ones will think that I’m doing good. But there are people who said I’m misleading youth. That one really hurts me.
Bharati Jagdish: Are you at liberty to say who said this about you?
Tay: No, I don’t think I should.
Bharati: But it was a government official?
Tay: Of course. I had more than one government official telling me this.
Bharati: Why do you think they think this of you?
Tay: I don’t know. I was shocked, I was like “Why are you saying this? What have I done? What did I do wrong?” Fortunately, that was about three years ago. I was really upset that day. Why do they think I’m poisoning the minds of the young? What have I done wrong?
CREATING A CULTURE OF RISK-TAKING AND CREATIVITY
Bharati: To what extent do you think this is because in Singapore, we have a culture of focusing on certain things – academic success, material success, but what you’re trying to do is quite different?
Tay: We all know that we’re chasing the five Cs right? You’ve probably heard that I backpacked around the world for four years. And in the last year, the last few months of my travels, I was sitting in the Sahara Desert, and I was looking back at Singapore and I said, “Okay Lai Hock, you haven’t died yet, you did well in the last few years, so what are you going to do now?”
So I said, “I’m going back to Singapore.”
At that time, our Government released the Remaking Singapore blueprint. Two things caught my attention. The first thing was, we want to teach Singaporeans how to take risks. I thought, “Wow, how do you create that, how to do that when the whole environment doesn’t even promote risk-taking?” Of course compared to back then in the early 2000s, I think Singapore is doing better now.
If you read the press, if you interview our local institutions, they are promoting a lot of entrepreneurship. The Government is putting in a lot of money to promote all kinds of things. But in my opinion, a lot of people are only taking risks because there’s a lot of money being put into them.
The second thing they said was, “We want to teach Singaporeans how to be more creative.” But our definition of creativity is narrow. For people like me, I will never be classified as a creative person.
Bharati: Why not?
Tay: You must be an artist, you must be this, you must be that.
Bharati: Yeah, that’s the conventional definition of “creative”.
Tay: But my four years of travelling around the world living as a backpacker in so many countries made me have this confidence. I said, “I am a creative person. I’m living creatively.” Now creativity need not be confined to just an art skill, but if you’re able to live creatively, and that’s where you need to be that free spirit. You need to be able to freely conceive things and adapt along the way, and change if you need to change. And –
Bharati: Solve problems.
Tay: Solve problems and not be just “uhh.” So when I came back, I really wanted to do all these kinds of things. And of course it was five years later that I decided that I will start my own organisation.
Bharati: In your opinion, why do we lack a culture of risk-taking and creativity?
Tay: It’s recognised that we have a good government. And the people do look up to them. It’s either we’re too comfortable or everything has been too convenient. The other thing is the lesser emphasis on character building; everything is always about results. Also, the majority of our population is Chinese. Chinese traditionally have Confucian ethics. So maybe it’s in the Chinese blood to always to be a little bit more driven to study, right?
Bharati: Nothing wrong with studying.
Tay: Nothing wrong with studies, but traditionally studying means rote learning.
Bharati: It’s about how you study isn’t it?
Tay: Yeah, but I think our Education Ministry is one of the most progressive ministries. Almost every year, they will come up with new policies. But I think if you talk to any teachers enough, everybody is jaded. There’s a disconnect somewhere, and that’s the truth. I’m sure we all know that.
Bharati: What do you think needs to happen to bridge this disconnect?
Tay: I remember one Minister for Education who said that we must treat our students as clients. With this American philosophy of customer is king, suddenly a lot of parents started to behave like kings and started going to schools and making demands, and so I did tell the last Minister, who’s now the Minister for Finance –
Bharati: Mr Heng Swee Keat.
Tay: Yeah, I did tell him that; I’m glad that one day in the press it was reported that he said no to this. And I feel that we need to have a fine balance. So I’m not entirely sure that these are the reasons, but I think that our teachers are already under stress. And then they have added stress to deal with ugly parents. I’ve met some outstanding teachers, and they’re trying their best to do this, implement teaching to encourage creativity, for example.
But I think it has come to the point where a lot of them just do it for the sake of doing it. There are many things affecting our system here. The whole world is facing this – prevalent technology and the internet, but the things that anchor us as human beings are eroding.
I know our country is trying to bring back Character and Citizenship Education, but this is after 20 years of cutting that away. That’s why I’m trying to do what I’m doing, to first focus on you as a person, as a character, and asking you to understand your place on earth and in this world, and as a living person.
Source: www.channelnewsasia.com
