The Foreign Issue (240 days left)

Singaporeans are a funny bunch.



Scouted the following from Wikipedia:

The Foreign Sports Talent Scheme is a scheme used by sports officials and organisations in Singapore to scout, identity and facilitate the migration of non-Singaporeans deemed to possess sports talent to play in Singapore colours in sporting events. Introduced in 1993[1] by the Singapore Table Tennis Association,[2] it also aimed to boost local sporting standards by importing sporting expertise. A similar scheme, the Singapore Foreign Talent Scheme, was introduced in 2000 but was limited to scouting talent for the Singapore national football team.[3]


In March 2008, it was announced in the Parliament of Singapore that 54 athletes had benefited from the programme and received Singapore citizenship, of which 37 were still in active training.



This incident has sparked the following debate, very tightly summed up in the following:


The achievement of Singapore's women's table tennis team in winning a silver medal at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, the country's first Olympic medal since 1960, reignited debate over the Foreign Sports Talent Scheme. Some critics said that the Singapore Table Tennis Association (STTA) has relied too much on it, as the team comprised three China-born players, Feng Tianwei, Li Jiawei and Wang Yuegu. On 19 August 2008, a correspondent to The Straits Times wrote that he was not proud of the way Singapore had won its medal through a team of imported foreign-born players, one of whom was granted Singapore citizenship at the beginning of 2008. He continued:


When I think of Wang Yuegu, Li Jiawei and Feng Tianwei, I can think of only foreigners brought in by Singapore to win medals and are paid handsomely for it – Singapore's pragmatic way of problem solving. My challenge to the Singapore Table Tennis Association and other national sports associations: Do you have the plan and – more importantly, courage – to send an all-native Singaporean team, for the London Olympics in 2012?[4]


A day earlier, STTA president Lee Bee Wah had said: "It doesn't mean that we should look at them [foreign-born table tennis players] differently because they're not born and brought up in Singapore. The important thing is that they have embraced Singapore and want to be a part of it. And they wanted so badly to win a medal for our country. We should not be harping on where they are born. I hope mindsets change."[5]



In addition, during his Mandarin National Day Rally speech on 17 August, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said:


In the Olympics contingent, there are 25 members, half of whom are new Singaporeans. Why do we need them? Make a single calculation. The Chinese have 1.3 billion people. Singapore has a population of four million ... If we want to win glory for Singapore and do well not only in sports but in many other areas, we cannot merely depend on the local-born. We need to attract talent from all over ... Look at the Beijing Olympics. Tao Li, the swimmer, she's done very well. The women's table-tennis team ... they have won an Olympic medal. We welcome foreigners so they can strengthen our team, and we can reduce our constraints. So let us welcome and let us encourage them.[6]


There's something scary in the way that line reads - That 'if we want to win glory' we 'cannot rely on the local born'.

I was brought up to believe that there is something about my blood that transcends all sense of ethnicity and race - That as a Singaporean, my grandparents paid the price for their citizenship through their nation founding efforts to build Singapore into the modern city-state it is today. I honestly regard highly the fact that we have an all-conscript military capable of launching integrated air-land strike operations, a finance sector that is strong enough and RICH enough to constantly dirty-float the currency market to maintain the strength of the Singapore dollar.

China believes in our model of governance and economic management - India has occasionally glanced at us and winced. The United States sees us as a firm foundation for conducting its SEA foreign policy, I think...

So what's this talk about us not being good enough... if we are local born?

My PSLE/O Levels/A Levels aren't good enough? I didn't make it into some new talent scheme that checks the genes for suitability for high and mighty civil positions? Probably. Oh yeah, maybe I'm Catholic too - and that's why there's this slight government aversion towards me... ISD got their hands messy in the heyday of '89... wouldn't want to mess up that bit again.

Wait a second, no one's listening.

Hey that's odd - You know, after this entire debate on foreign talent beating us at ping pong and thus bringing glory to our WIN-obssessed city-state, there's this whole new debate on making sure the classy Serangoon Gardens district doesn't get infected with foreign workers descending in a swarm next to the elite.

A Timely Update

One Messed Up Evening Before the Storm

Man, I am right now awake on a Saturday afternoon typing at the computer... feeling like there's sandpaper in the throat and a chunk of cast iron in my head. That's right, I've been drinkin... all night long and sloshed all day. See this guy on the left - Yeah that's about how I feel right now. We had drinks to celebrate the end of the week... OK, pardon the melodrama. It was a BAD week. It's been a week of working on slides, rehashing slides, and on one terribly bad day... Sitting at a computer, with five heads and coming up with only one slide.

FUCK yeah, ONE slide.

Look - I'm not trying to be mean, or trying to be sarcastic. I'm just going to be brutally honest. If we are trying to come up with a plan to do something, shouldn't we base our ideas on something more than just intuition!? For five blooming days - FIVE DAYS man, it's been - Are you sure the public would think this way on this? I FEEL maybe not. You might want to explore FEELING something else on this issue. WHy don't you have the message of this cos it FEELs like it's better that way. So from crap ideas, we came up with compost and sold more crap. The almight and all knowing COLONEL K of course saw through the whole plan. saw through what we were doing and failed us. Imagine - When you've had 72 hours of crap, trying to salvage a situation and churning out more stuff that you hope and pray will help the situation... and it all fails, how man, how?!?!?

A man can do 2 things:

1. Head for Drink

(Note: This by the way is fantastic whiskey - The Glenmorangie, Nectar D'Or. It's absolutely serendipitious how The Boys and I could be in 2 separate countries at the same time (They Malaysia, me Vietnam). And without communicating, we looked across the whiskey shelves, saw the Nectar and decided that that would be the drink for the night. And I would like to imagine that at the same time, while they were there and I was here, we had put the glass to our lips and unanimously realised the beauty of this whiskey... Imagine a sweetness and strength to a warm shot of single-malt whiskey.)

2. Play the Blame Game

Let me tell you a story of a boss that is so evil his subordinates die from stab wounds caused by the evil boss's enemies, who have been tricked into thinking that his subordinate is the actual doer of his crap work.

I know the above sentence sounds convoluted, but read it, think about it, and it will all make sense.

It was a Wednesday, I recall. The team of us were running on andrenaline after having spent Tuesday morning, afternoon, night, late night, uber late morning of wednesday night, doing up THE SLIDES. We worked at a feverish pace with the slides because there was absolutely that need to ensure that the plan was seen through.

We had ideas, we also had justifiable points and fresh research to aid us in fkeshing out our work. With one main meeting to clear the slides at, this was the be-all and the end-all. Every man on the team threw in his weight and more into the work. Everyone except... the Evil Boss...

(Oh yeah, you would need a picture)

Haha, yeah he looks like that. With or without the hat. So I'll leave it up to your imagine. After you have the mustache frame in your mind, add beady eyes and fucking flappy ears. Add some sperm looking hair on top and you're pretty clear about his looks.

He was told about the presentation. Told about what needs to be done. Told and told again that the presentation involved X factors, Y details, needed to cover so much in detail.

Bastard child. That bastard child. Wednesday morning, in our absolutely tired out state, we went to his cubicle, with the print-outs, and told him,"Look, you have to carry this now, we worked all night and we produced this plan. It's in line with what Boss was looking for in the last meeting..."

He blinked his beady fucking eyes and said ok. Fine, you the man.

Then we stepped in for the meeting - And mind you, this meeting wasn't a typical meeting with missing members and that sort of thing. Somehow the brilliance of COLONEL K had impressed the surrounding stakeholders to pull together and work on this project. We stepped into a full house meeting, a group of twenty, eagerly waiting to hear the synchronised plan that we had drafted. While he had rallied the stakeholders to be present, to us, we were facing the fucking Gestapo.

I'll stop lying to you now. There wasn't really a 'we'. There was a me. There was also an occasional lieutenant Colonel too caught up in a bit of baggage from the past. He wasn't in a right or fit state to carry the presentation, and I didn't expect him to.

The Evil Boss, blinked. his beady stupid eyes.

he was shown the first slide - and he looked at my boss, and just stared. He just stared. Not because the slides were bad, but because the Evil Boss had NO IDEA what he was about to present about. He hadn't read the slides, hadn't been part of the planning, had no idea what the situation was about that required planning... WHAT THE HECK WAS HE DOING!?

A stakeholder drummed his fingers on the table in apparent impatience.

Another tweedled the straw of his drink, drawing circles in the air.

The BOSS looked at him, and said

"Sometimes alot of work is put in, and really, it is about the presentation. OK, we'll move on to the next item. For this, we'll take it offline."

WHAT THE FUCK!!??!??

WHAT THE BLAZING FUCK HAPPENED!?

What I felt there and then was the Moby Dick Syndrome , White Whale, Holy Grail, dig it out and murder him... etc etc. But after going through the Penal Code, I kindof figured that it would probably be best to avoid touching Section 300 on murder, since that entails the death penalty.

And it is best summed up when i say, "I am beyond this".