Cooling-Off Day

Spoiler alert? Maybe? But who cares, I’m going to ask you to watch it anyway.

In the end the words of the heartlanders, the voices of the individuals that make up the Singapore electorate, provide the most memorable quotes of local society. Cooling-Off Day, a play produced by Wild Rice, is an excellently arranged collection of thoughts and opinions from lay Singaporeans, (opposition) politicians, and civil servants. Mostly hilarious, sometimes poignant, but always reflective of the Singapore populace, the six-member cast brings out the meaningful and thought-provoking bits of political discussion in the local scene.

Second spoiler alert. If you read any further, it’s too late.

The play begins with Janice Koh depicting an 18-year-old who wonders if the people at the kopitiams who are declaring that their vote goes to the opposition are doing so only for the sake of opposing the PAP. “I worry for the next generation,” she thoughtfully says, then is quickly juxtaposed by a lay taxi driver who finds Meet-the-People sessions in the constituencies by the ruling party impotent as compared to those in the opposition wards.

Whether you stay in the “West” or the “East” of Singapore matters, says a civil servant (portrayed by Janice Koh): her justification is that the West is drab and dull and lacking a heritage that reminds people that the ruling party is not impregnable or the all-achiever that it appears to be. There is something about the shophouses, she maintains, that make people understand that the Singapore culture is more than the current government. Two Malay ladies (brilliantly and hilariously depicted by two male actors – Najib Soiman and Peter Sau) concur wholeheartedly, even saying that the Malay boys of the East side have more class. Whether the allegations are fiction or fact is to the audience’s interpretation. But to an aspiring boy on the West side, remember that it only takes 45 minutes by train to become classy again.

Opposition politicians take up a noticeable portion of the play; Vincent Wijeysingha and Teo Soh Lung, two candidates for the Singapore Democratic Party in the previous election, are given strong and vivid portrayals by Jo Kukathas (even the head tilt and the trademark accent of Wijeysingha!) and Neo Swee Lin (“When they asked me if I wanted to run, I said ‘Okay lah’.”). Jeanette Chong-Aruldoss, a Siglap resident and candidate for Mountbatten running under the National Solidarity Party member, lamented about how the government seemed to look at people as “digits”, rather than with dignity.

But the part that surely most of the audience will remember after leaving the theatre must have been the re-enactment of a brilliant Mr Brown Show pre-election favourite: two bickering food-stall owners attempt to prise potential customers away from one another, in a thinly veiled satire of the bitter fight between the PAP and the opposition parties. Watch as Rodney Oliveiro channels the PAP’s multiple representatives as a composite character who attempts first to use performance legitimacy, then criticising, and finally by appealing to the divine. (For those who have yet to catch the Mr Brown podcast, please do listen to it here.)

This is where I’ll end the spoilers and make a spirited appeal to all who have yet to watch the play – tickets cost between $44 to $59 and can be purchased through SISTIC. Cooling-Off Day ends this Sunday and plays at the School of the Arts Drama Theatre.

The missing ingredient in education?

I attended the recent Ministerial Forum in my university hoping to hear answers on the state of, and the future of, education in this country. Unfortunately, however, the Minister for Education provided few compelling points that gave me any sort of confidence for the future. Instead of providing a clear concept of what he imagined the future to be, the speech – broken into two separate parts that mainly covered (strangely enough) the economy and the future of trade in Singapore – was filled with past and present figures of GDP, as well as how we are quite unable to compete with the developing country juggernauts of India and China.

My friend, a graduating student who runs his own social media marketing company, asked the Minister what he thought could be changed about the culture of risk aversion that pervades the local environment. While the moderator might also have to take some blame for allowing seven consecutive questions to be asked before the Minister answered all of them (at once!), the Minister merely acquiesced about the state of affairs; as an aspiring entrepreneur, I was hoping at least for a little more on some form of a policy that could change things.

But perhaps I was asking for too much. The main takeaway at the end of the Forum, I concluded, was that this Minister appears to be particularly interested in the economy and how education serves as a cold, hard input into increasing national income. Never once was there any mention about how education makes people creative, makes society vibrant, and increases mutual understanding. The 300-strong crowd filling the Mochtar Riady Auditorium was treated to a plethora of paranoid statements that most of us already know: Singapore lacks the drive, the critical mass, to succeed in almost anything. Right. So what’s next for us?

It is strange that I, as a university student, am unveiling the missing ingredient in education: entrepreneurship. As I type this I am imagining that some of you are trying very hard to stifle a groan. We’ve heard all these things before as well: we need to nurture our own Silicon Valley, we can be just like entrepreneurial Israel, blah blah blah. But I’m going to avoid talking about these cases in particular. Instead, I’m going to talk about an example that might be far removed from most of our minds today: Pakistan.

That’s right, Pakistan. In the 1970s the country was prospering from a wave of their overseas expatriates who remitted money back to their families. So? The interesting thing is that these families, who were now flush with a little bit of cash, decided to start what might best be defined as some form of a mom-and-pop shop. These little cash inflows helped stimulate and create a vibrant economy – until 1988, when the government decided to adopt the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment measures. The moral of the story? Cash grants can help to stimulate the economy – and not just that, it has the possibility of creating new jobs.

But yes, this country is known for quite a bit of risk aversion. We can encourage a more vibrant educational curriculum that includes ideation and creative thinking from young (according to some studies it seems that our creative levels start decreasing beyond a certain age – so it makes sense that we should tap on it early!). We can make sure that the syllabus includes principles of accounting and economics for as many students as possible. Perhaps most importantly, we can relax the restrictions for cash grants or loans that are provided to entrepreneurs.

The traditional middle class was dominated, as Donald Low mentioned in another discussion in my university, by bean counter-like occupations such as typists and clerks. As technology makes drastic adjustments to the workplace environment, these jobs, along with others, have become redundant. I foresee that the only way to prevent the inevitable income inequality from those at the “top” – CEOs, directors, and other leadership positions – compared with those at the “bottom” is to create new jobs. In short, we need to create a new middle class which is creative, flexible, and enterprising. And to me, this is why it is imperative to help young entrepreneurs succeed.

When the Minister spoke about how Steve Jobs was asked by Obama how engineering jobs could be brought back to America, and Jobs answered, “Sir, they’re not coming back”, it seemed that what he was thinking about was the jobs, with small letters. But what I was thinking – along with several of my peers – was Jobs, with a capital J. Apple today sits on a huge cash pile; the value-add of the iPhone and the other Apple products continue to surpass the assembly jobs that helped create it. What we need isn’t to make ourselves more competitive and hence join in the race to the bottom in the global sweatshop; instead, we need to create new jobs, in this economy, to propel us forward into the future. Unfortunately, I didn’t hear this during the Ministerial Forum.