Something to Die For

 I read a review of “wicked”, and one of the things is that it was revealed that Elphaba was actually a bit of an animal rights activist. She turned against society because of how animals were treated.

There was something that bugged me 10 years ago. Around that time, I was on a roll. My first few post-graduation years were not good, but gradually, I settled into my adult life, and it turned out to be not bad. I had a pretty good run of 7 years.

I learnt how to play basketball.

I became competent at work.

I learnt software development.

I earned a degree.

I picked up useful skills at work.

I made friends at work.

I enjoyed life in Singapore.

I became a good songwriter.

I moved to another country and was accepted there.

I earned a master's degree.

I found a well-paying job as a techie.

I ran a marathon.

Those years were and still are the highlight of my adult life. But later on, I sensed that things weren't going well. It was quite subtle at first. Life was still good, only I felt like I had lost my sense of direction. But a few years later, it became more obvious: I was in groundhog day, and I was living the same life over and over again. I lived alone with a housemate I didn't really know but was nice and civil all the time. I worked in a job that had nice perks, but didn't really interest me that much, and I stopped trying to stretch myself. I never managed to make time and space for my hobbies. I was wasting my time and energy on things that were unproductive.

And in hindsight, that was probably the prelude to what was to come: the midlife crisis.

When you're young, in some ways you are consumed by passion for something. Every time I did something out of the ordinary, it was because of where my passion led me. I would do a little extra to be good at mathematics. I would learn to be a great musician. I would write something special for the stage. I would go overseas and live and see what it was like.

But I never recaptured that drive that would make me want to uproot myself and move to another country. That drive, I think, was rooted in those years of failure, where I was lost and going around in circles, and things were so different from when I was in an elite school and it seemed really unlikely that I would ever fail in life. I think, the first few years after I started pulling my life back together, things felt really great. I was around 30, I was in my prime, it felt as though anything could happen.

But then things started to fall apart 10 years later. Because it stopped feeling great. Because good things happening to me felt like some kind of a routine, and maybe I started taking it for granted. There was no longer a drive, and no longer something I wanted to die for. I just wanted more of it, and not to have to sacrifice for it anymore. Or maybe things stopped being fun and rewarding.

So what was lost? What was lost was a cause to get excited over. I guess that would happen to anybody. What was lost was this sense of sportsmanship, this association of putting in effort with the possibility that something good was about to happen. What happened was that it was no longer about a yearning for adventure that was yet to happen, and instead looking back on the time that you tried this or that, and it turned out to be less satisfactory than what you had hoped.

Future of Western Democracy

 There's been a lot of handwringing about liberal democracy in the West.

My thoughts are these:

1. The West has gone through worse. They've gone through the nightmare of the middle of the 20th century. WW1, Depression, WW2. There aren't many heroic episodes in world history but the postwar institutions were heroic, the defeat of fascism was heroic. Ultimately, though WW2 was about the defeat of colonialism and that was basically self-inflicted. But they will have to go through some hard times, muddle their way through, find it deep within themselves to develop problem solving capacities, and triumph over adversity.

2. USA is basically Western Civilisation plan B. Plan A was Europe and it failed during WW1 and WW2 and after that it became subordinate to the USA. The institutions that make up the West are under attack on all sides and they dug themselves into a hole: for decades they had the mentality that emergent systems could take the place of government, that evolution could take the place of intelligent design. (When running a country, unlike in nature, intelligent design matters.)

3. Another heroic episode which has gone about unnoticed by the West is the rise of Asia. If they want to get out of their current mess, they will have to study how the rise of Asia was achieved. Because we did it without needing to rely on democracy and capitalism to function well. We had other qualities that helped us, and if the West doesn't figure out what those other qualities are, they will be going down further.

For example, I don't doubt the greatness of their intellectual tradition. But there are some things which are disconcerting. "Government" and "Political Science" are used interchangeably, as though they were the same thing. They are not. "Government" is about administering and running the show. "Political Science" is about monkey business. They need to start thinking more about administration and less about monkey business.

Europe needs to start thinking about how to function like a developing country, because some parts of their system are broken and they need to rebuild. There's been this habit of thinking, "let's just give people freedom and on their own accord, they will build a great society". That is lazy thinking, and they need to be more specific about how they will go about their business.

RI Petition

Something interesting caught my eye the other day. Somebody from RI, my alma mater put up a petition calling for the removal of the principal. I think it only made the news because of the sheer outrageousness of the whole thing.

Let me state that in the RI I went to, there was a high degree of tomfoolery. It was a place that was much like a looney tunes cartoon: violent but forgiving. People were up to all sorts of hi-jinks. People threw toilet paper against the ceiling to make paper mache. Somebody left his footprint on the ceiling. Teachers had limericks written about them. People got locked inside the toilet for laughs. Played squash against the blackboard.

But there were other incidents that took a darker hue. There are plenty of memories that give me a warm fuzzy feeling of nostalgia when I think about them. RI was a place where I was challenged for the first time, and I had to do things to prove that I had character, for example I had to go on a 20km route march. I had to write a school play, represent the school in competitions, master a musical instrument. Take pride in my own achievements.

But there were things about RI even back before it became a very competitive and unwelcoming place. People could be a little self-centred and only respected you if you did something that impressed them. They weren't very helpful to each other, and would look past you if you didn't have enough social status.

By and large, I was OK with the people who were there. Whether or not they were my good friends, I could always count on them to behave with honour and act according to the bro code. There were sufficient examples of people sticking up for me that I would have confidence in them as human beings.

There were a few things where I wasn't proud of RI. They didn't protect my mental health very well when things weren't going well for me. (Thank goodness I found a way to get back on my feet and in a way earned back my mental health). I didn't feel that somebody reached out to me to help, although to be fair, in retrospect people were concerned about me and I would have received more help if I were more receptive to help. There were bullies and I did get my things thrown around on the school bus, although it stopped once he got the message that he would be physically deprived of oxygen if he were to do that again.

There were certain things that disappointed me, although many of those things took place when I left. I was in one of the batches which moved from Grange Road to Bishan. RI had been in Grange Road since before I was born, so I barely understood that it was very much a temporary premises, RI was there for less than 20 years, which is basically a blink of an eye. But it felt that Bras Basah and Grange Road's RI was a very “old school” RI, which still retained a very working class and conservative mentality of the world. It was an RI which was still good at football. The RI of Bishan was the first place where we had computer labs, where people bought cassettes and CDs. It was a more internationalist, tech-savvy, cosmopolitan and worldly RI that took its place. Football was no longer an ECA in RI, quite possibly because the kids of my generation would get thrashed at it.

Perhaps when bad things happened to the old RI, things were kept under wraps. The RI of Bishan seemed to be a version which became more like what it is today – a bastion of the privileged elite. In fact, I was quite oblivious to the fact that a few of my classmates were children of civil servant royalty – maybe a minister of parliament or a permanent secretary or a superscale grade.

I was very disappointed when I heard about some of the scandals that made the news. I used to be embarrassed at some of the hi-jinks that I detailed earlier, but I don't think any of it was outrageously bad enough to go viral. The first one that really disappointed me was the “Elite Girl” scandal, where one of the RJC kids (who was the daughter of an MP) basically rubbished the idea about the growing divide between the haves and have nots. I think it got bad enough that she would be persona non grata if she comes back to this country.

Perhaps I wanted to believe that RI was some kind of a classless society. It was easy to believe, especially in RI's Grange Road era, where the economic advances were very broad-based, that we had finally transcended there being an economic divide in society. RI was that wonderful paradox: it was a symbol of Singapore. On one hand, it was an academically elite school and yet, it was supposed to be have students from all backgrounds. At least, that was the fantasy, that we were unlike the other traditional colonial elite schools who were the exclusive scion of the moneyed class.

Then there were a few other blackface incidents. One of my schoolmates was a playwright who – I respected his talent, but I thought he may have been a little thin-skinned about being a minority in RI. And make no mistake, RI is not a great place for a minority, and minority races are underrepresented in the school.

This petition felt different. For the first time, it felt that this institution was under attack itself. Perhaps I attended the school in a different era. I thought of the school first, and then secondly I thought about the school as a stepping stone to bigger and better things. I'm wondering about the guy who wrote the petition.

There is this thing about foreign students. I was a foreign student in Snowy Hill, and while I will always be proud of Snowy Hill, I also know that it's not my home. I could have attended many other universities, and there's nothing special about that university. Well, it's special, but it's not like a country that I would die for.

I'm starting to wonder if the guy who wrote it is either a foreign national or the son of a new immigrant, given that he did make a few English mistakes in his writing. Of course, every one of us at school has slagged off our teachers behind their bags for laughs. But we were careful not to do it in front of them, and while we weren't always very concerned about the reputation of the school (I can't imagine the number of crazy things I did while in school uniform) it's another thing entirely to want to decapitate the school's leadership.

So I actually went and signed the peittion and slagged off the kid for good measure. It's one thing to be disciplined by the school authorities for something as outrageous as this, but quite another thing to have to face up to a playground taunt, having to deal with a rebel within the ranks of the rebels.

As a former alumnus of RI, attended during the 90s when most of you were nothing more than a by product of your father's horny imaginations. I am here to tell you young punks that your conduct is nothing short of a disgrace.

During my time, we had to wear slacks every day and sweat as much as a horny female. The teachers made the rules and we had to live with them, whether we liked it or not. We had to sit in sullen silence as somebody threatened to slap our faces every 5 minutes.

While it is alright to want to aspire to independent thinking, what most appalls me is that such a flimsy and shoddy case is being built. You are asking him to be fired because he's turning off your air con and asking you to get a proper haircut? Many people have gone through RI and found it a character building experience. Are these pussies going to be our heirs and successors?

Teaching is not a popularity contest. You have to do the right thing whether the kids like it or not. It is OK to bargain against some restrictions that may be overly excessive. Reasonable to petition against the scrapping of an ECA (after having actually discussed this with a real person instead of hiding on the internet like a craven coward) But calling for the head of your principal is beyond the pale, especially on grounds that are as flimsy as the ones that are stated in the writeup.

People rebel against authority because of injustice. Like Lim Bo Seng against the Japanese, Lee Kuan Yew against the British, maybe even a few opposition party members. None of you are fit to be in that category. The frivolity with which you conduct your business, and the flimsiness of your stand make this whole affair a complete sham.

I was in sec 1 more than 30 years ago. I've seen a few things I didn't like – the shameless wayanging, the “elite girl” incident, people throwing away other peoples' lecture notes, a few blackface incidents, but never have I seen anything exposing the rot in the soul of RI more than a bunch of whinging brats offering to throw their leader under the bus over a few petty grievances.

I personally feel saddened that in this day and age, people who think that it's "personal correlation to judo" instead of "personal connection to judo" are allowed to wander the hallowed walls of our august institution. I am also disappointed in the people of my generation who have raised brats like the ones I see over here. Raffles Institution has fallen so far in standards as to be as bereft of character, like the graveyard that used to occupy the Bishan plot.

I am petitioning the board of directors for authorisation to allow the people who run the school to find the person responsible for this petition, and have him banished from Raffles Institution forever I am calling for people who sign this trash to have this on their permanent record If believe your generation calls this "cancellation")

If you think that calling for the head of your school principal is A-OK, I assume that this would also not be rough justice.

PS: Just because I'm an anonymous coward and a hypocrite, it doesn't mean that you guys aren't thin skinned cowards who can't face somebody calling you out for being unworthy Rafflesians and thin skinned narcissistic pricks who do not have the balls to face criticism.

One of the things is that the guy instigated quite a few people in RI to rise up against the principal. This is something more serious than blackface people embarrassing themselves. You actually got at least 100 people to join in the mutiny with you. You've made the principal's job more difficult. And if the school board feels that they have to fire the principal, then it sets a very unpleasant precedent that students in the school can remove the principal just by staging an uprising.

The principal, on the other hand (who may even be a younger person than me) has also done himself no favours. There was a blackface incident last year, where somebody turned up as a minority blackfaced Foodpanda delivery man. It was something very insensitive, possibly in breach of the religious harmony act, and he should have been punished. But the principal stopped short of doing something courageous and punished him. The principal, I felt, owed him at least a mock execution.

Quite possibly there were a few cutbacks to school programs. I'm starting to wonder if they were pushed down from the board, or from the Ministry of Education. Some of the CCAs, some of which had a pedigree in RI, had their plugs pulled. But the petition seemed so cheerfully nihilistic that I somehow doubt that it was truly about these weighty concerns. The guy just seemed more pissed off that the principal was withdrawing a few privileges.

There are quite a few question marks about the principal. He may have been unlucky enough to have had to implement quite a few unpopular changes to the school. Maybe RI was supposed to no longer have a monopoly on many of the special enrichment programs, and they were more broad based. This would be in line with making the Singapore school system less elitist. And there were criticisms of his style.

Somehow, though, this seemed to wind me up. The guy seemed to be doing something malicious as an insider. He was a traitor to the Rafflesian community. Maybe he was a spoilt brat who thought he could get away with anything. It's unfortunate that there are a few other people who have genuine reasons to feel upset at the principal and are being instigated to turn on him in a public forum. But this has made RI into some kind of a laughing stock, and highlighted the internal division between people in the school.

Last Week before Kamala Harris vs Donald Trump

 There are a few troubling signs ahead for the elections. In 2016, I could feel that the movement against Trump was very vociferous. People literally thought that he was going to destroy the US system. He didn't destroy it, but he did a lot of damage to it.

It is reassuring on the surface that some people have called the race for Harris. But they tend to be the old folks, and if there's anything I've learnt recently, old folks are not shy about losing their credibility because when you're old, there are fewer consequences when you lose your credibility.

The polls are starting to turn against Kamala Harris. This looks bad for her. The complaints are that she hasn't articulated a coherent point of view. A respected pollster has repeated that complaint recently. She had a lot of fundraising recently, and she rode a wave of enthusiasm, but that wave is about her not being Donald Trump or Joe Biden.

Kamala has quite a few things working against her: the current government is unpopular, and a lot of elections this year have favoured the "change" candidate. I've just realised that US presidential elections do not favour women, because the US self-image is quite masculine (as opposed to many European countries who have traditionally had female heads of state). She's black, and that was a bigger problem back in the day when US was basically a white country, but it's still some kind of disadvantage, especially in a race where small margins matter.

In a democracy, when you have 2 candidates for president, and people vote for them based on ideological differences, things are already going to be heated, and they'll be bad enough. But when both of them are of different races and the voters are split on racial and gender and geographical lines, then you don't really have a functioning democracy. What you have is tribal war.

What she has going for her is that many former Republicans are really tired of Trump and are turning out for her. But I don't know if that would actually help her. As Michael Sandel pointed out in the epilogue to "Democracy's Discontent", what's going on is not that people necessarily agree with Trump, but they agree that he's against the system, and they hate the system so much that they would destroy it. So for the professional eggheads to turn up for Harris would actually be a reason for them to vote for Trump.

If she loses, then at least she will be a less tragic figure than Hillary Clinton, who wanted her whole life to be president, but lost the election at the last moment. Also, the 2 anti-Trump sentiments are that he's too weak to govern, and that he will be extremely disruptive. It's been pointed out that these two objections contradict each other.

It was a little curious to me at first that both the Democrats and Republicans act like they're supremely confident they're going to win. And after thinking about it, it then occurred to me that this election is very likely to be disputed, and if it is disputed, you didn't want to be the guy who expressed doubt that your side was going to win. You wanted to create the narrative beforehand that you're the winning side, so that if it were become as close as Florida in 2000, you'd be in with a fight.

How to talk about Israel on the internet.

  One issue that I've avoided a lot is Israeli politics. And yet the pendulum has swung so far against the Israelis that there seems to be a way to start knocking some sense into the Israelis who for some reason are still defending their country. 

I've realised quite a while ago that it's pretty futile to be debating them on the specific facts of their situation: they will always have some piece of information that you don't have and you will lose points on that. 

Also, it's not entirely wrong to say that they are fighting against terrorists. What they are saying is that the Palestinians are denying their right to exist. On the face of it, this is true. But if you were living under Japanese occupation during the Second World War in East Asia, you would wish that the Japanese were wiped off the face of the earth. That's a pretty natural reaction and not because you are an evil person. I don't feel that sad when they dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 

What I can do instead is to appeal to their self-interest. I can remind the Israeli that I'm from East Asia, which is a place that's not directly involved in the Israeli Palestinian conflict. I can remind them that I'm a bystander, and that Israel is seriously losing their soft power and their moral high ground. 

I can highlight the progress that countries that are not at war are making, and tell them with this stupid war going on, they are being left behind and will go back to being rubble. 

And I can move away as far as I can from giving them any reason to feel smug and satisfied. Some people get an ego trip from being told that they're hated. Under no circumstances should you make them feel like they are martyrs or heroes. You have to emphasise that war is stupid, Israelis like to make war, and therefore Israelis are stupid. And I probably want to press home the point that absolutely none of them will live long enough to see the end of Israel being in conflict. 

They can't carry on feeling that they're winners. They're losers. I don't think I'm harming them like that. For them to think that the conflict can carry on just like that, for them to carry on getting the drug hit that Netanyahu and his right wing crazy people shoot up their vein, that would be the true disservice to them. So it's important to highlight the advances that people from other civilisations - the East Asians in particular - have made. Israel likes to think of itself as a bastion of civilisation in the midst of barbarians, but you can show them that the Gulf States and East Asia have leapfrogged them in terms of human development. 

Most importantly, they have to understand that by prolonging this conflict, it is they who are the losers of this conflict. It is a lose-lose situation, and Israel will eventually go down the tubes. Somebody made the point that traditional war is a bit outmoded: today's conflicts are about soft power and Israel is losing. And at the same time it's hard to see if they're going to wake up and see the light: they don't seem to ever learn from anything. 

American Beauty Redux

 Watching “American Beauty” all those years ago had enough of an impact on me that I’m still thinking about what it all meant, all these years later. Because it informed my thinking about what it meant to live a good life. 

“American Beauty” cannot be understood outside of the context, “what is the good life?” Everything in the movie is related to this question. Kevin Spacey is the middle aged geezer who feels the walls closing in on him, and feeling that his life is increasingly dull and meaningless. 

Annette Benning is the careerist wife, who is a great careerist and a go-getter, and is disappointed at her husband for allowing his career to stall. 

The younger generation – Thora Birch as the daughter, Mena Suvari as the Lolita character, Wes Bentley as the boy who develops a relationship with Thora Birch – have less developed character arcs, but they are actively negotiating and discovering their place in this world. 

One of my favourite aspects of this film – I watched it during late adolescence. Which means that I was almost 23 years old and not yet fully grown up. Some of my favourite literature has to do with people who are growing and changing. The plays I wrote for school all involved people who were facing growing pains. 

There is also the image of the rose, where there are layers and layers of petals. This is also a puzzle of a movie, whereby everything is not what it initially is, or what it initially seems to be. People either undergo change, or they are revealed to be somewhat different from your initial impression of them. 

But it was pretty crazy, looking back, that that movie was one of the most acclaimed movies of the year. I remember conversing with a college classmate about that movie, and she was a more mature person, with a more grown-up mindset. She wasn’t that impressed by it. There are a few things about that movie: first, it’s sensational, in that it delivers the element of surprise. This makes a great impact on first viewing. But in retrospect, when the element of surprise is lost, then it gets knocked down a few pegs. 

1999 was a great year for movies. It was a vintage year, one of the last vintage years. 2 years later, 9/11 would change the mood of the US, and it would be a more militaristic country. 1999 was one of the last years for Gen X to be dominating the popular culture. After that, movies would be more like marines training (how Jason Bourne movies influenced the James Bond reboot, for example). The Marvel Cinematic Universe would start to dominate. Christopher Nolan would make movies super serious and super earnest, without the sense of fun of the 90s movies. Being super preachy and super didactic would no longer be considered a vice in movie making. 

“American Beauty” asked “what is the good life”. And one of the reasons why “American Beauty” has undergone an evaluation downwards is the way they answered this question. There is the adult version of the answer: a good life is based on traditional values, being an upstanding member of your community, being successful in your career, being a pillar that other people can lean on. There is the juvenile / adolescent version of the answer, which is that the path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. That somehow, in spite of the wanton irresponsibility that is exhibited by Lester Burnham throughout this movie, he finds some kind of spiritual redemption. He quits his job, and god knows how he’s going to continue making a living. He spends the paycheck on buying the car of his dreams. He pumps iron and makes his mind and body young again. Perving over a girl who’s the same age as his daughter becomes a rejuvenation process. Masturbating over her at night somehow isn’t considered as committing adultery or rape in his own mind. Throwing tantrums at his family to express his dissatisfaction with his own life is a necessary stage to help others confront the fact that he’s in a rut. But it is hardly the model of responsibility. 

Quite obviously, “American Beauty” comes to the conclusion that the juvenile version of the good life rules OK, even though it is somewhat leavened by one aspect of the adult good life: Lester Burnham somehow gains some kind of spiritual enlightenment, and manages to lead the youngsters a little closer to what he has discovered. It is a questionable premise, in a certain way. However it can be argued that this process is a form of self-care, and you have to dig deep within yourself to find that spiritual side, to remind yourself about the beauty of everything. Still, this movie stopped short of showing how Lester Burnham was going to balance the juvenile side of the good life (which is amply represented in the movie) with the adult side of the good life (which the movie portrayed as so abhorrent – at least it was a jail that he had to break out of.) 

Next few paragraphs is a comment that I left on somebody's blog post: 

This is a film that's very rich in ideas, but with a lot of such films, it's quite easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. When it first came out, it was striking in its originality. Over the years, its originality and bravery has faded somewhat, which is why there is a downward appraisal.

So you can say this is a film about a midlife crisis, and the lolita narrative is definitely one of the striking parts of the plot. But it misses the bigger picture: Angela is on the posters because sex sells. But she's not the main character. In fact, she's by far the least developed character, which serves the real purpose. The only character development you see in her is when she and Lester are about to make out, and she suddenly admits that she's a virgin. It's meant to be jarring - oh my god, that's what she really is! No, a big clue in who she is is in her name: she's an angel, and she's the catalyst for the spiritual journey that Lester Burnham undergoes over the course of the movie. The fact that he was on the verge of consensual sex and didn't even think about seeing it through - I think it speaks volumes about what Angela was really all about.

The main narrative arc of this movie is the spiritual journey. Lester starts off being a walking dead man, but slowly, and bit by bit, he comes back to life, through being defiant towards the dead end life that held him in, through putting himself first some of the time, through channeling his lust towards Angela into rediscovering the more awesome aspects of his own youth.

And the secondary part of the film is that it poses the question, "what is the good life". This is typical of the pre-millennial films, which is why 1999 was so good: the new millennium was coming, and it was pushing quite a few filmmakers to get existential: there was “The Matrix,” “Being John Malkovich,” and "The Fight Club".

"American Beauty" answers the question in the most hippie manner possible. It's not very judgemental about Lester, but very judgemental about what it did not consider to be the good life. Having a steady job. Living in a nice suburban house. Tending to its beautiful garden. Having a great career as a real estate agent. Fine dining while listening to classical music. Listening to your wife. Being a dutiful soldier who is at the same time a repressed homosexual.

These were considered to be the good life: working out. Having a young person's mindset, and through working out, having a young person's body. Fapping away to chicks who are too young for you. Buying fancy cars. Working in jobs with low responsibility (like manning a fast food counter). Throwing asparagus at a fancy dinner. Introducing your daughter's boyfriend to pot.

Looking at the ledger, it's easy to classify what it considers to be the good life as "juvenile / adolescent", and what it does not consider to be the good life as "adulting". The movie is not entirely wrong, but it is too simplistic to do this. A lot of people who watched this movie in their youth and loved the juvenile message, would have grown into adults and have embraced the more adult aspects of their lives and start to recoil from the message of this film.

Of course, you have to end this film, and ending it with Lester Burnham dead is not necessarily a bad way to go. But it begs the question, what if he had to carry on living, how was he going to deal with the consequences of this long bout of irresponsible behaviour?

And it goes back to my own life. I’m not going to reject totally the message of “American Beauty”. But I know that I have to balance the juvenile idea of the good life with the more adult side of things. I had basically turned away from being an adult. I thought it would be temporary. But I’ve come to realise that you have to live both versions of the good life. 

I’ve come full circle. I’ve returned to the place I used to work for. I still don’t know why I left for a few years – probably 10 years – to live in “Mexico”. I don’t regret it because for me to have spent those 10 years working for the factory, that would have worn me down. Going somewhere else is refreshing, coming back is refreshing. But then I would have grown and would have to be more grownup. 

Seeing all those people after so many years will trigger some thoughts about what it means to be growing old. I’ve thought about what it means to be living a good life as an older adult. Do people get less happy? Do people indulge themselves less? Sometimes I look at one or two of the best years of my life, and those were years when I was thrust into something new, where a bright new future beckoned, where I found abilities that I never knew that I had before. But I have to make peace with the fact that past a certain age, I am no longer a growing person. And a non-growing person is either going to be consolidating what he already has, or he’s going downhill. 

People my age are no longer juveniles delighting in making new discoveries about the world. Or maybe they are, because they are negotiating new challenges and realities that are somewhat different from when they were young. But in many ways, I have not changed my circumstances by much since I was younger. The themes are the same. I will be working in tech. I will be a music lover. I will be managing my ADHD. 

I have a mind that loves change, and loves novelty. In a way, that’s good because learning new things is good for growing and becoming a more knowledgeable and intelligent person. It will be good for innovation, because I can sometimes see things that others cannot. But it is not good because older people tend to rely on old and accumulated wisdom, and a novelty seeking mind does not excel at retaining this wisdom. 

People my age are managers. We will be focusing on solving real life problems. I remember making a breakthrough, to become the person who could see things from a higher level and a higher perspective. That was nice and exciting. But after this, it means that you will be saddled with responsibilities. Going to school was fun because learning was fun. But you’re no longer learning because learning is fun: you have responsibilities and duties to solve real world problems. After a while, the joy of no longer being stupid will fade away, and what will replace it? 

When I first watched "America Beauty", what struck me was that it was very forgiving towards the "juvenile" mentality. But when I grew older, I realised that it was not sustainable. Now I'm more thinking: "it's alright, feed your inner child, and don't starve it. But don't forget that you have to be more like an adult."

So middle aged life becomes a little more complex: how do I balance the juvenile version of the good life with the adult version of it? 

End of the GEP

When the GEP ended, there was a lot of mourning for what it was, what it meant. I was at first quite critical of the fact that GEP people were shut off from the rest of the school and given our own special facilities. 

What is the meaning of the GEP? This is one of the biggest crucial questions, and a question that people avoid because answering it honestly might involve slaying a few sacred cows. There are two views of the GEP. First view is that it's to produce people of great talent and ability, and great geniuses. They are people who change the world, and the GEP is to leverage their strengths and not hold them back. The second view of the issue is that some of these guys are like Einstein - who is obviously a very capable human being, but in some other respects in his life, a complete mess who needs some help for his day to day life. 

And it was very strange that people who were gifted in one aspect of our lives were also considered handicapped in others. To add to the confusion, people in the GEP were as different from each other as they were from the people in the express, so you had to deal with 4 groups of people: people who are gifted, or people who got lucky in the entrance exam. (There won't be retarded people in there, but maybe one or two who may only have average IQ). There will be neurotypical people and neurodiverse people. 

The gifted program during my time worked because these 4 groups of people do not really have anything that will intrinsically put them in conflict with each other. You can put the smart and crazy people in the same room, and they will help each other, this is one kind of diversity that produces benefits for all kinds of people. 

So there was maybe a lack of honest discussion about which of these two things the GEP was really about. And that's because while people who are running the program are perfectly willing to do the things that are necessary to help the people who are maybe struggling and a bit behind, they aren't willing to make this facet of the GEP well known to everybody. And nobody really wants to discuss this angle, because when you are facing the public, you want to play up the angle that these guys are potential heroes, not potential losers. It's good for your ego, and it helps when you are trying to angle for more resources to be diverted into your program. Nobody wants to say, "this is for people who are already intelligent to navigate the more screwed up facets of their psyche", even though that is truly the case. 

The problem starts when the gifted program ends and people have to step into the wider society. Those first few post-gifted years were hard for me, in ways that I didn't anticipate, and my parents were ill-equipped to prepare me for. I think I'm only able to understand the true meaning of the gifted program many many years later when I make the adjustments I've had to make, and rue the opportunities that I didn't take. 

As you know, anybody who shut themselves away from a better social life when they're younger will regret it when they're older. This is one of the things which is almost always true. 

You will only know the answer to the question when you are put in a position to answer that question. There's a lot that we didn't know about life when we were schoolkids. And in many ways, some of us didn't grow up quickly enough. 

There are people who would argue that you should make the gifted program more exclusive because you should concentrate your resources more on producing the people who are truly elite. I think that is wrong. If you examine the theory of evolution closely, there's one aspect that people fail to understand. “Time and chance happen to them all”. People do not truly know how to select people for the gifted program, and you should not rely on people to have that ability. So in order to prepare for the eventuality that the wrong people are admitted into the gifted program, you should take in as many people as possible, and let them sort it out when they're in the gifted program. 

But one of the benefits was that you did put some of the smart people in the same room as each other, and that has its benefits, although it isn't an unalloyed benefit. You know what it means to grow up and live in a tight knit community. But then that community doesn't grow in a way that syncs up with what the larger Singaporean community is going to be like. So it actually handicaps students in one or two ways. I'm not going to lie. There is a temptation for the inmates to want to take over the asylum. I was one of the inmates who wanted to take over the asylum. And even for people who are less weird than myself, they talked about people outside as “the normies”. It's good to celebrate your quirks every once in a while. But when you can't tell the difference between what is normal and what is quirky, and when you start thinking that you can change the values of society just like that, then we have got a serious problem on our hands. 

It was very “Lord of the Flies”. We built a little mini-society that had rules that were slightly different from other people. But it was relatively good natured, there wasn't a lot of bullying, and it was definitely a safe space. We deserved a pat on the back for that. That said, every batch of gifted people are different, and I cannot speak for all the batches that came after us. 

My ability to integrate into the wider world was not terrible, but it's not fantastic either. After a few years, I was pretty OK. 

So the integration with the larger society is a big issue with the gifted program. The other issue is that you have a dual personality with the gifted people. There is a fundamental incoherence that you think that these guys are smart and tough on one hand, and are special people who need special help on the other hand. So does that mean you push them hard to succeed, or you coddle them? This is a very hard problem to deal with, and it may have led to one or two people remarking to me ruefully, “do you think that maybe we should have been working a bit harder?” 

But I do see the logic behind the gifted program, and it is a very similar logic to raising children in general: protect them when they're young, and hope that they'll grow stronger, so that when they become adults, they'll be ready to fend for themselves. I could moan and groan all I want about “why didn't I come our of this or that comfort zone a bit sooner” but is the gifted program really to be blame for this? You can give people opportunities, but you can't force people to grab them. 

And the big elephant in the room is the issue about privileges. And that's become something that ... it was already a big issue in the 80s and 90s, but today, I can imagine that it's even worse. A whole tuition industry has risen around getting students to game the system. Back then, we knew that we were the beneficiaries of an uneven playing field, but this was not something that was front and centre, not something that our entire existence revolved around. I can't imagine how crazy things are today, when you have Singaporean kids attending school side by side with new immigrants from other countries, or children of new immigrants. I can't imagine the level of bitchiness and resentment that could result from something like that. My own experience of the GEP is that we worked hard and played hard. But I can imagine that an elite student today will have to work hard without playing hard. And that's pretty sad.

So while I'm sufficiently distant from the GEP to have some good perspective of the general outline of what the GEP was about, I'm also too distant to know the finer details of what it's evolved into. I'm glad that more people can participate in elite education and get a leg up here or there. I certainly had a good time during my 7 years, and in some way, this is closing of a chapter. Years from now, when nobody even remembers that a GEP existed, nobody will really care about those 7 years of my life, other than the other people who went through some version of it. But at the same time, it's also quite remarkable that something like that has lasted as long as it has. So I guess there's the old cliche: don't be sad that it's over, just be glad that it happened to you.