Tag: Singapore

Remembering The First National Day Parade In 1966

Hours before the Ministers and VIPs arrived at 9am, the marching contingents stood in neat rows under the morning sun at the Padang.

Some 23,000 took part in the National Day Parade in 1966, just a year after Singapore’s independence.

For Mr Chia Hearn Meng of the People’s Defence Force, whose memories were mentioned by Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen on his Facebook page, the day started at 2am, when he collected and cleaned his rifle from the armoury.

The students had to assemble at 5am, and they were still practising on the Padang before the parade started.

For many, marching was something new, and they had spent months making sure their steps were synchronised. Some participants, tired and hungry, collapsed on the Padang as they waited in the sun.

Here are snippets from the 1966 Parade from four people who were there:

“Marching practices were chaotic, because many only spoke dialects.”

Mr Chia Hearn Meng, then a 29-year-old construction supervisor, heeded the call to join the People’s Defence Force (PDF) after he saw how racial riots rent the nation.

He was assigned to the 3rd PDF, which was stationed at Pearl’s Hill.

“There were many labourers and cleaners; we were all grouped together,” he told The Straits Times. “Marching practices were chaotic, because many of the workers only spoke dialects.

“When the NCO gave commands in Malay and sometimes English, they would shout for the instructions to be given in Cantonese or Hokkien.”

Just learning how to march took them many months, due to the difficulties of communication.

“Some cannot differentiate kiri (left in Malay) and kanan (right in Malay),” he said. “When they turn they will face each other.”

Each weekend, they would rehearse in the hot sun wearing thick uniforms, steel helmets and heavy leather boots.

“In the old days, the uniform was very thick and we had to swing our arms upright. My armpits had bruises!” he recalled.

Mr Chia, now 78, took part in five parades, and he remembers the routine clearly:

At 2am, they collected their Mark 4 rifles and blank bullets from Pearl’s Hill, then cleaned and checked them, he said.

After that they fell in and waited for the army clerk to lead them to Beach Road where the contingents assembled. At 6am, they marched to the Padang.

“It took us about an hour, and we would wait from 7am till the VIPs arrived,” he said.

After the march past at the City Hall, they continued to High Street, South Bridge Road, Chinatown, Tanjong Pagar, Neil Road, Outram Park and Queenstown, he said.

Along the way, people jammed the streets and cheered.

“It would be pretty awesome if I can march alongside my son and my grandson in this year’s parade. That will make three generations of soldiers serving Singapore,” said Mr Chia.

“We slept in school classrooms the night before”

The night of August 8, 1966, the boys from the St Gabriel’s Secondary School brass band slept in their classrooms to make sure they would not be late for the Parade.

They had to assemble at the Merdeka Bridge at 5am.

“We disturbed each other, and didn’t get much sleep,” said Mr Bernard Chiang, who played the baritone.

Then 15 years old, Mr Chiang and his friends were excited to be performing for the inaugural National Day.

They had trained hard – with sessions of three to four hours at least twice a week- to perfect their marching and their music.

“We sacrificed many hours practising foot drills and our formations to sharpen our precision and synchrony in marching and playing the instruments,” he wrote in an email to The Straits Times.

It was tough because they had just set up the school band a year before, and there was a lot to learn.

After assembling at Merdeka Bridge, they marched down to the Padang.

“While we were positioned at the Padang,we still had to go through few rounds of practices to ensure that the parade was ready and perfect,” he wrote.

That was when some participants started to collapse and they were carried away on stretchers, he said.

“It was probably due to long hours of standing under the hot sun, lack of sleep, dehydration and no proper breakfast,” he said, adding that this was the first NDP and they were better prepared for later parades.

Still, this was nothing compared to the torrential downpour in 1968, he recalled.

“The instrument was frozen and waterlogged, we couldn’t blow it,” he said. The dyes on their uniforms ran in the rain.

They marched a longer route that year too, all the way to Queenstown.

“Our uniforms got wet, and we marched till they dried in the sun, then they got wet again from our sweat,” he laughed.

He was quick to add that they were proud to be pioneers in the NDP, and the camaraderie forged then has stayed with them for a lifetime. He still meets up with his band mates, the 64-year-old florist said.

“We had no cameras, no phones back then to take videos!”

Mr Ramadas Palanisamy, now 85, was nominated to represent the former Woodbridge Hospital in the nurses’ contingent.

The nursing officer, then 36, joined dozens of others from local hospitals including Singapore General Hospital, Tan Tock Seng Hospital, and the now-defunct Toa Payoh Hospital.

“I was very happy and excited to be nominated,” he said, being one of only two representatives from Woodbridge.

The training took about three months, and an army officer taught them how to march at first, he said. Later, one of the nursing staff took over.

On the day of the Parade, they had to “go early in the morning and stand there”, he said. All the nurses were neatly turned out in their freshly-ironed uniforms and white shoes.

“Everybody was in a joyous mood, and it went fantastically,” he recalled fondly. “The only thing was, I couldn’t watch the parades. We had no cameras, no phones back then to take videos!”

He took part in the Parade from 1966 to 1968, but when he was nominated again in 1969, he decided to let others have a chance, he said.

“I saw Lee Kuan Yew and the cabinet ministers sitting on the City Hall steps”

Mr S. Sivakolunthu, 78, was with the first People’s Defence Force, but he was “on loan” to the Tamil Teachers’ Union for the 1966 National Day Parade.

The teacher, who taught Tamil and English, was a volunteer soldier for three years. He marched in the PDF contingents in the 1967 and 1968 parades.

For the 1966 parade, the lance corporal helped to train about 70 Tamil teachers at Monk’s Hill Secondary School every Saturday, he said.

“I had six months of training with the PDF,and it was tough, but I could do the marching,” he said. “There were teachers in uniformed groups, and they helped too.”

He recalls leading the contingent of teachers in their march past the City Hall.

“I saw Lee Kuan Yew and the cabinet ministers sitting on the City Hall steps,” he said.

The retiree, who is still active in community work, said he has watched the National Day Parade on television every year since.

Source: www.straitstimes.com

April 10, 2015
Are You A True Blue Anak Melayu?

‘You Malay or Indian?’

‘Mmm… .’ I hesitated. ‘Malay. Yeah, I’m a Malay.’
‘Oh! You know what… We actually offer financial aid for needy students to go for this overseas internship programme and …’

The rest of what was supposed to be the essential information that I needed dissolved into slurred words and irrelevancy. I smiled sheepishly at the international coordinator and walked away as if the aid was the only thing I cared about, simultaneously giving him the satisfaction of realising his own benevolence.

Perhaps to him, I was just another Malay student who had decided to give up on an opportunity simply because I could not afford it. So typical.

Not to say that I did not need that financial aid. After all, a nine thousand USD fee is an exorbitant amount for a three-month internship in the Big Apple. But why should the subject of financial aid be associated with me so purposefully, and almost explicitly? That was a rhetorical question.

I am a Malay. That is why.*

I was born into an average middle-class Singaporean Malay family, which means to say we have enough on the table to fill everyone in the household but flinch at the thought of going on a vacation to Europe.

We are Malay because the government says so. Who cares if my mum is a Malayali, or if my dad is half-Chinese? My paternal grandfather is a true-blue, pure-blooded son of the Nusantara. Hence by the power vested in the government, his descendants and all who marry into the family shall be identified as a Malay for the sake of the country’s administration. My grandfather is, therefore my father is. My father is, therefore I am. This patriarchal system and the hangover of colonial policies have dictated my racial identification, and the rich ethnic heritage that runs through my veins, virtually erased. The only way for my siblings and I to know about who we truly are has been through our mother’s soliloquies and occasional tirades.

As if losing three quarters of my identity was not enough, I have to identify myself as a Malay. Where do I begin with the Malays? God forbid that if they are not locked up for a litany of crimes, they will be lepak-ing at the void decks at night with their second-hand guitars and driving dwellers in the neighbourhood up the walls – and that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Indolent and imprudent.
Gullible and envious.
Non-tenacious and submissive.
School dropouts.
Druggies.
Runts of the state.
The blacks of Singapore.

The Malays are quick to cry foul at the brutal stereotypes and labels imposed onto them but there is no smoke without fire, no? Ironically, I came to learn about my own cultural deficiencies through my own family, my Malay family.*

‘Dik, dengar kata Mak. Pergi sekolah jangan campur dengan budak Melayu sangat, faham? Nanti jadi pemalas dan bodoh’, my mum would occasionally remind me before I headed to school. Of course, I did not want to end up as a lazy and stupid student in such a meritorious society. I was a very ambitious child and I held on to my mother’s words of pseudo-wisdom like a shining beacon.

So when I entered primary school, I did my best to avoid the Malay kids. My parents were right. All they ever cared about were fun and games. They did not excel in their studies, and neither were they the slightest bit penitent about their Cs and Ds grades. Bless their hearts, their parents only expected them to pass their exams. While they floundered academically, my mingling with the Chinese and Indian kids bore fruit as I rose above the noxious fumes of Malay incompetency and seamlessly made my way into the Express stream of a reputable secondary school, and later to a good junior college.

But at what cost?

My refusal to associate myself with the Malay race had turned myself into a snob and a faux-elite. Despite being fluent in the Malay language, I pretended to be atrocious at it by faking a ghastly foreign accent when speaking in my mother tongue. I called myself half-Indian all the time and begrudgingly revealed my Malay side only after being questioned about this other half.

‘Oh… Melayu la…’, they would chime afterwards while I heaved a concurring sigh.
After years of playing charades, I was finally confronted by my own hypocrisy when I entered junior college (the Singaporean equivalent of a high school). I had thought all along that I was one of the very few outstanding and worthy Malays. But as an apparent blow to my hubris, there were in fact many more like me. They were ambitious, driven, and intelligent. In fact, they were also good in mathematics, contrary to the popular belief that Malays are beyond hope when it comes to the art of numbers — something that I regrettably reinforce. Their merit was hard for me to fathom, let alone to accept. Never mind their academic excellence, they also possessed something I had never had: the potent ethnic essence and identity.

The evading games that I played with my racial identity throughout my formative years had stripped me of the very essence of my cultural background. The absence of Malay friends in my life left me without any knowledge of the glitter and gold of Malay culture, history, and traditions. I knew nothing about adat or tata tertib. I did not know about the glorious kampung spirit, keikhlasan, and kehormatan, the noble and rich attributes that the Malays take very seriously. I used to scoff at the Malay kids in school for wasting their time — as if they cared — dancing for the Malay traditional dance club and joining the Dikir Barat, without realising the splendour behind such exquisite Asian art forms. Yet the Malays I met at junior college displayed and carried these very attributes with such gusto and pride, despite their apparent modern outlook and zest. I was baffled by this, but it was not so much about how they managed to live with the best of both worlds – rather, it was about my inadequacies. Surrounding myself with the Chinese and Indians taught me a thing or two about their respective cultures, but it was never exhaustive enough to turn me into either one of them. Engulfing myself with Western literature and pop culture did not do me any good either. I can never be like the Chinese or the Indians or the Caucasians. I cannot be them. I am not them.

Now, whether I can even be considered a Malay is also debatable.

*

‘Are you Malay? Why do you speak like that?’, my Malay language classmate asked.
‘Kind of… I am half-Indian. I’m just not very good with the language.’ I lied, again.
‘Oh. So you are one of those Westernised lupa daratan la. What? Is it really that lowly to be a Malay?’. The annoyance in her voice grew.

Lupa daratan is a Malay expression for someone who has lost his or her roots. I was an epitome of that.

She was an intelligent one, and very ethnic at that. How was that even possible? Had my entire life hitherto been a lie? Why weren’t the Malay kids here the same as those shoddy ones who I had met during my primary school days?

I started hanging out with them. It wasn’t long before I realised that the Malay kids were not any different from the Chinese and Indian kids who I had hanged out with during my childhood and early teenage days. Lo and behold, the only difference among them was the race categorisation stamped in black and white on their identity cards. My hanging out with the Malay kids in junior college did not transform me into a ‘folk devil’. My school work did not deteriorate and my academic results did not falter. Nothing was compromised or lost. Instead, I regained what I had taken for granted and intentionally disassociated myself from all this while — my Malay essence.

It was also through my social interactions with my fellow Malays that I came to realise the caustic effects of oblivion, nonchalance, and blind acceptance. Stereotypes are essentially categorisations born out of ignorance. There is no truth in stereotypes and there is no truth in the cultural deficiency theory. Cultural deficiency is not relative but it is absolute. The Malay race may or may not be culturally deficient, depending on what the Malay community makes out of its own existence. I used to be culturally deficient not because of the fact that I am a Malay, but because I refused to identify myself as a Malay. As a consequence, I had ended up in a no man’s land. I am half-Indian but I am not Indian enough. I have Chinese blood in me but I am not Chinese enough. I am a Malay but I shunned it to avoid being inferior.

Jack of all identities, master of none. Who am I?

Today, my racial identity is no longer an issue to me in spite of my physical ambiguity. I draw strength from my perceived weakness as a Malay to debunk the many myths about my race. Being Malay empowers me to prove to society that a Malay son is more than capable to achieve or even surpass the deeds of the sons of the other races, and that no stereotype or label has a hold on me or on my race. What was a source of shame for me has become my pride and a perennial, underlying strength. Realising and accepting myself as an Anak Melayu has simply made me a sturdier and resilient person in undergoing life’s endless road-bumps, providing me with the valour to take up terrifying challenges. It has also become my driving force in propelling myself with conviction to strive and thrive in a meritorious and racially-attentive society. It is also with that realisation that I will always place my racial identity on the highest of pedestals and that it will always be my fortitude. My racial identity is my pride, and I hope that one day I can in return be its pride.*

‘So, it says here you are biracial? What makes up ‘Zaidani’ then?’, the interviewer looked at me inquisitively.
‘Essentially, a Malay.’ I answered.
Takkan Melayu hilang di dunia. Never will the Malays vanish from earth.

Zai Dani is an undergraduate at the National University of Singapore and he is currently doing his honours year. His tagline has always been, ‘Spread legs, not war’ but people always ask for more. He wonders why.

Source: http://entitledmag.com

April 10, 2015
Ho Kwon Ping: CMIO Categorisation A Hindrance To Cohesion

The traditional Chinese-Malay-Indian-Others (CMIO) categorisation should be dropped, so as to maintain cohesiveness in diversity, which is a challenge the Republic has to overcome in order to achieve its dreams in the next 50 years, said prominent businessman Ho Kwon Ping.

Such rigid categorisation hampers Singapore’s ability to deal with an increasingly vocal and diverse society, where there are multiple identities and more complex sub-ethnicities, he said, citing same-sex couples and intra-ethnic differences between immigrants and locals as examples.

“Race and class and a consensus on social issues are becoming increasingly complex and intertwined in Singapore,” said Mr Ho, who is executive chairman of Banyan Tree Holdings. He was addressing about 560 people including students, young working professionals and civil servants at his fifth and last lecture as S R Nathan Fellow, organised by the Institute of Policy Studies.

“The CMIO model … has helped to create common ground among those of different tongues and dialects, but it also has had the effect of oversimplifying the diversity that is our social mix,” he said. “How we define people often shapes how they behave, so the less we pigeonhole people, the more chances we have for a cohesive diversity.”

Mr Ho cited the example of New York City, where there is no fixed preconception of people. Despite their diversity, all New Yorkers love the city, he noted.

Similarly, Singaporeans must learn to embrace one another as individuals and not as categories, he said. “Without stereotypical expectations, we can accept and appreciate each person as different, but from whom we can learn new things.”

Mr Ho identified improving social mobility as another challenge.

Though a meritocratic system based on academic grades has served Singapore well in the past 50 years, the Republic is “in danger of being a static meritocracy that sieves people based only on a narrow measure of capability within single snapshots of time and, from there-on, creates a self-perpetuating elite class”.

Citing statistics on the backgrounds of those in prestigious schools and Public Service Commission scholarship recipients, and showing that the majority came from privileged families, Mr Ho said: “Ironically, the original social leveller and purest form of Singapore-style meritocracy — our educational system — may perpetuate intergenerational class stratification, rather than level the playing field.”

Affirmative action for disadvantaged groups is not a solution, because that would bring about “the start of an unending process of affirmative actions that will only demean and discredit our meritocracy in the long run”, he added.

While non-graduates can now take on jobs previously open only to graduates, Mr Ho said the Civil Service could do more to take the lead on social levelling.

For instance, the Administrative Service — the elite among public servants — should change its recruitment criteria, replacing academic pedigree with psychometric and other aptitude tests.

The third challenge for Singapore to overcome is in building a collaborative, and not paternalistic, governance style, said Mr Ho.

“However, such a government culture of participatory democracy can work only if the institutions of civil society can be actively engaged in decision-making,” he said, in calling for better access to information for civil society activists.

During the dialogue after his speech, questions on race and diversity dominated the proceedings. Members of the audience asked whether Singapore would go the way of New York City in becoming a cultural melting pot and whether the Republic was ready for a non-Chinese Prime Minister.

Mr Ho expressed confidence that a more cohesive diversity would solidify in the coming years.

Citing the United States as an example, he said questions had also been raised on whether the country was ready for a black president, yet Mr Barack Obama was elected in 2008.

Meanwhile, Mr Bilahari Kausikan, Ambassador-at Large in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has been appointed as Mr Ho’s successor as S R Nathan Fellow for the Study of Singapore.

Source: www.todayonline.com

April 10, 2015
Zulfikar Shariff: What is a Malay?

Seperkara yang selalu dibahaskan ialah concept Melayu/ Islam.

Ada yang menyatukan keduany (Melayu itu Islam), ada yang beranggapan keduanya tidak sama (Melayu itu bangsa dan Islam agama), ada yang merasakan menyatukan kedua perkara tidak wajar dan wajib dipisahkan.

Insha Allah post ini akan memberi sedikit pencerahan tentang bangsa Melayu. Ada yang lebih ariff dan insha Allah I hope they can expand on the issue further.

Bangsa Melayu tidak boleh difahamkan seperti suku. Suku ialah identiti melalui genetic. It is based on ancestry.

Bangsa Melayu is not simply genetic but characteristic. Orang Melayu ialah seseorang yang diterima masyarakat Melayu sebagai Melayu.

Penerimaan ini berdasarkan penggunaan bahasa Melayu, mengikut adat resam Melayu dan beragama Islam.

That is how the Malays have identified themselves the last several hundred years.

Not by ancestry, but through Islam, culture and language.

The problem arose when the British arrived in the region. They could not understand how a race is based on characteristics that are seen to be dynamic. It also went against their understanding of race and ethnicity to accept the possibility that someone can “Masuk Melayu”. Since their understanding of themselves is based on ancestry, the British could not accept the nature of the Malay bangsa.

For example, Abdullah Munsyi was ethnically an Indian. But he spoke for the Malays and was accepted by the Malays as a Malay.

Such identification was normal for the Malays. But the British rejected it. It was only late in the 19th century that Malayness began to be taken as ethnicity with Islam being held as distinct.

As Diana Carroll argued, “while it may be correct to say that Abdullah would not have appeared to be Malay by mid-twentieth century standards, this cannot be assumed to be the case when Abdullah was growing up.”

Rather than accept simply how the British and the west defined Malayness, we should return to our own definition.

Not every Muslim is a Malay. But every Malay is a Muslim.

Diana Carroll. Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society
Vol. 72, No. 2 (277), JOHN M. GULLICK FESTSCHRIFT (1999), pp. 91-129

Source: Zulfikar Shariff

April 10, 2015
Ho Kwon Ping: Singapore Should Embrace Diversity

Singapore’s sense of nationhood and unity has never been stronger than in the past weeks when hundreds of thousands of people came together to mourn the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew, said businessman Ho Kwon Ping on Thursday night.

In the next 50 years after Mr Lee, however, the country will be increasingly diverse, he added.

Singapore’s challenge is to embrace this diversity as a strength and an integral part of itself, said Mr Ho in his fifth and final lecture as the Institute of Policy Studies’ S R Nathan Fellow.

The lecture was held at the National University of Singapore’s University Cultural Centre and attended by 560 people including students and civil servants.

In his 50-minute speech, Mr Ho examined how this openness and acceptance of Singaporeans who may be different from the mainstream can be a defining characteristic of Singapore’s identity.

He noted that Singapore is ethno-culturally more similar to New York City, where culturally distinct neighbourhoods coexist cheek by jowl, than to the homogeneous cities of Tokyo or Shanghai.

“New Yorkers, for all their amazing diversity, all love their city. Like New Yorkers, Singaporeans must also embrace each other as individuals and not as categories,” said Mr Ho.

At the end of the lecture, IPS director Janadas Devan announced the next SR Nathan Fellow will be ambassador-at-large Bilahari Kausikan, 60.

Details of Mr Kausikan’s lectures will be given in August. The veteran diplomat will research public policy and governance issues.

Mr Ho’s lectures will be compiled into a book and published by IPS later this year.

Source: www.straitstimes.com

April 10, 2015