my diwali mehndi

The Charade of Meritocracy

by Michael D. Barr
published in the Far Eastern Economic Review
October 2006

"In fact, Singapore’s system of promotion disguises and even facilitates tremendous biases against women, the poor and non-Chinese. Singapore’s administrative and its political elites—especially the younger ones who have come through school in the last 20 or so years—are not the cream of Singapore’s talent as they claim, but are merely a dominant social class, resting on systemic biases to perpetuate regime regeneration based on gender, class and race."

Read the full article here

the inheritance of talent

So Kiran Desai won the Booker. Been meaning to read the book, and now I definitely will. It's kinda sad though...I think Anita Desai is quite possibly one of the best contemporary writers in English around, yet she's never won and now her daughter has. I know, I know, it's not fair, i'm pre-judging her (Kiran, i mean), but how do you step out from the shadow of the simplest yet most intricately woven, profound writing around? Guess i'll have to read the book to find out.

Already everybody's doing the "joining the ranks of Rushdie/Naipaul" shpeel. Well frankly if that's the case, i really hope that beyond ethnicity, she doesn't share their racist postcolonial upper-class chest-thumping. Ahh, Rushdie...I learnt so much from you, I really did. You gave me a true-blue half-decent desi anti/postcolonial education (all those As on my English papers really helped push my GPA up) and it was fun while it lasted, but I am so over you. And thank you for supporting Jack Straw on the whole "veils suck" thing; now I fully comprehend what Fanon meant about the native bourgeousie sucking up to the colonizer.

Anyway, I'm getting suspicious about the calibre of the judges of this Oscars-of-literature contest. Here's a direct quote from Hermione Lee, chairman of the judges:

"The remarkable thing about Kiran Desai is that she is aware of her Anglo-Indian inheritance - of V S Naipaul and R K Narayan and Salman Rushdie - but she does some pioneering."

Apparently the judges can't even tell the difference between an Anglo-Indian and Indo-Anglian writer. Bring on the mangoes, mehndi, masala, I say.

The fog of government rhetoric and corporate environmental shenanigans

This probably goes without saying, but the haze sucks. On Saturday, I swear I could smell the fires of Sumatra burning. People have to live their lives, and so I was out and about all weekend when the haze was really bad, and now have been on sick leave for 2 days with tonsillitis. (great excuse to watch half the first season of Desperate Housewives in one sitting, I know, but that’s besides the point.)

Anyway, it’s getting a bit old to keep hearing the Indonesian government make the same lame excuses for why the haze keeps coming back year after year. They keep blaming “farmers and plantation owners” without ever giving specifics. These are not just anonymous little guys going around doing their nomadic agricultural stuff. It’s gotta take a whole lot more slashing-and-burning to cause the kind of environmental phenomenon we are seeing now. A 1998 International Development Research Centre (IDRC) report estimated that at that time (when the haze was the worst it’s ever been in Southeast Asia), “about 80% of the burning in 1997 was caused by large firms and 20% by traditional slash-and-burn farmers”.

I doubt the situation has changed much in the last 9 years. In fact, on October 5, 2006, Greenpeace Southeast Asia activists protested in front of Jakarta’s Ministry of Forestry and revealed that “During our investigations last month, we discovered that big industrial concessionaires, more than small farmers, were responsible for these forest fires”.

And therein lies the explanation for why the haze problem is not going to go away anytime soon. Agricultural practices are difficult to regulate, evidence of large companies engaging in these illegal practices is almost impossible to collect much less ensure their admissibility in court, and corporations can simply get around the law by hiring others to do the burning for them in order to escape persecution.

To this day, not a single individual or corporation has been charged with illegal forest burning in Indonesia. I believe there is no political will on the part of the Indonesian government to do this, because it could signal a potential fall-out in Indonesia’s desirability to large corporations as an agricultural hub (read: cheap land and labour, big profits) in a region ripe with competition.

On a side note, the Singapore government has been offering to help by providing cloud-seeding technology, which expands already-existing clouds in order to increase the probability of rain. Which makes me wonder about the unseasonably rainy weather we had during the IMF/World Bank meetings. Conspiracy theory? Perhaps. But never underestimate the power of a paranoid government with vested interests.

The Singapura Song

Anwar Ibrahim's reply to LKY's recent statements

Clearly Lee Kuan Yew is still trapped by his outdated thinking. His argument exposes the element of racism which has been suppressed for so long. Therefore he recognises the problems of Chinese overseas but not the anxiety of the neglected Singaporean Malays. Furthermore, what is regretted is the fact that he does not show any concern to the plight of other marginalised races in Malaysia or Indonesia, whether the bumiputra or Indians. In fact in Indonesia, the latest statistics reveal nearly 40 million people trapped by poverty.

Lee Kuan Yew should look at racial and development issues from the basis of justice for all races. Clearly he should understand the fact that when the New Economic Policy was initiated in 1970, the stake of the Malays and bumiputra in the economy was a mere 1.8 percent. The success of the NEP in education, producing a critical mass of professionals and providing business opportunities should be acknowledged. However the policy has been hijacked, leading to corruption and cronyism, enriching the few and marginalising the majority of the bumiputra. The fruits of the NEP are also shared by a few Chinese and Indian corporations selected to receive contracts for mega projects, independent power production and the gaming sector.

Full press statement here