motivations...

The basis for social change is HOPE and HOPE alone. That God gave us hope to believe, hoping in HIM, and similarly, in the hope that things can happen if we HOPE in it enough to do something about. The reason I'm doing what I'm doing is not really about enabling Singapore to move on to the next phase of the future or whatever. My deep desire is to give people the hope that they can do things for themselves, and they can do it to the best of themselves, that they should always be striving for that. And through this process, coming to know Christ - at least for me...

Social change is not just change for the sake of change. Social change, is again, the hope that there is something better out there, that we can work towards a better place to live in. This is the main driving force behind the people that do these, that we may not be Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, but with enough dedication and a community, we might be able to achieve something that improves the lives of many. Another possible theme might even be: People Deserve Better! Or something like that.

We want to live in a place where people believe that they can do something more, something greater than themselves, something great in itself. But we aren't. And this gap between expectation and reality is really one of the core reasons why people find life in Singapore unsatisfying, always having half a mind to emigrate if not for the costs involve. So what if our friends and family are here? There's always Skype and Facebook to keep track. If not just fly back every now and then and spend some time together. Lots of people do that already. Or maybe it could be just the lack of guts. But whatever it is, I'm beginning to see myself not just as part of another social change project that promises nothing in terms of action, but just another dude trying to make living more bearable in Singapore...

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an extension of 'Questions Never Answered' - the psyche of the NS to be

I thought about the content of Questions Never Answered, and I've come to realised how outdated I've become.

The generation of kids today haven't exactly watched Black Hawk Dawn or Saving Private Ryan. No for them, the images of war come in a far more visceral manner, and faster, and with greater interactivity. No, today, war for our younger kids mean Call of Duty 4, Company of Heroes, Gears of War, and other military-themed FPS games. They see the bullets, hear the gunfire, experience the chaos of war and battle, but all in a 32-inch flatscreen tv. War has become a game for them, but even the war that they experience is nothing compared to the actual circumstances of war. Game-war, is completely different from war as it is fought in physical reality. Real War is slower, infinitely times more messy - even though I haven't fought in a real war, but war from a console is definitely different from war as it is fought with real guns and bullets.

Ok. So we all know that console war is different from real war. So what's the deal? The point is that, from here on, there will be huge gulf between expectation and reality, and truth be told, not many people will accept it. Young men who have never had any real military experience save for the console would be in for a rude shock when they enter NS, and realise that military life isn't the point and shoot in the FPS games. And then, what you get - disillusionment, low morale...

For these young sheltered people... it will really mean something for them, who have already had high expectations of the military.

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questions never answered

So here we were, young and fresh to the world still, having been sheltered from the outside world for almost 2 decades, and now the forces that be threw us all together on these island, all not knowing what lies ahead in our lives. The question still remains to be answered. Just what on earth were we doing on this Island?

Other fresh faces abound, some tired, some not caring the least, all of us only knowing that NS was just… something that had to be done. That if you were a Singaporean, that you needed to go through this NS in order to be properly called a Singaporean, especially a Singaporean man. So we were told, by our fathers, by our brothers, by our uncles, by our grandfathers who suffered untold suffering from the Japanese. And then a history lesson would follow about how small we were, how weak we are, that we need to own the land and the only to own what we you have is to protect it. Even after 2 years doing what seemed to be a little bit waste of my time, it somehow still triggers some pangs of patriotism. But then all of it just fades away after a night’s sleep.

Senior commanders would come and talk to us, about how we felt serving our nation. We are the Black Hawk Down generation, the Saving Private Ryan generation. I don’t a lot of us had watched films like, We were Soldiers by Mel Gibson about the Vietnam War… We had watched Jarhead, and we thought that Jarhead was the most realistic of films actually, because it represented what most of us felt and did during our time. We are trained to fight, but we never do. A taut string can’t stay taut for long. If a taut string remains taut long enough, it becomes slack and never taut again.

Feeling high on those images of war, it never occurred to us that people don’t become soldiers overnight, never occurred to us that it takes a special kind of person who is willing enough to take on the mental and physical punishment that soldierhood entails. Yet there we were, in the cinemas, taking it all in, as Eric Bana and Josh Hartnett went about their business in Mogadishu. Why didn’t we appreciate Jarhead more?

All of days there, in military camps or in the outfield, in the jungles, in the mud, never really quite answered our most burning questions in our hearts. Why NS? Why the commanders? Why here? Just what the heck am I doing here?

These questions were always with us, all the time. Yet, they were never really quite answered. In defence of this country? In defence for our family, for our loved ones? In defence for our way of life? Just what exactly was it we were defending?

‘In event of war, you will be here to protect the country and your loved ones’. That was the most common thing that we heard. Well, because you guys have been militarily trained, you guys will do really something useful here.

It makes sense for like 5 seconds, until you realise that in event of war, my parents would be trying to get on the ticket to Australia, China, Indonesia, Taiwan… anywhere but stay here. And once I know that they are safe, well, there’ll be nothing left for me to fight for but to scramble for that last transport to… anywhere but war zone.

What is Singapore to us? Is it anything at all? If what we have here can mean nothing, then NS would be for… nothing, ain’t it?

Why are we dissatisfied?

We are not satisfied simply because we can’t see beyond the lives that we live. We don’t have hope for our future in Singapore. It is not that we don’t have hope for the future of Singapore. Deep inside every one of us, we want to believe that things can be better, and that things WILL be better. Yet in all of us, there is still a longing that we can do something else, something greater than the things that we are doing today, something that will really define our existence in Singapore, as Singaporeans. And that is the key thing that is missing in this country.

We want our voice to matter, that as individual persons, we can make a difference – to belong to a community, for the happiness of the people around us in that community. We want to make our own meaning to our lives, not merely as economic machines constantly growing our GDP, but as real persons, not just as another face in a crowd, but as unique individuals, all of us. In other words, we want to be valued as persons, not as another cog in the Singapore machine. Until and unless we are valued as persons, the dissatisfaction will always remain, and Singaporeans, in their deepest of hearts, will always want to emigrate, and NS will always seem a waste of time.

While we serve National Service, are we serving for a machine, or are we really serving a Country of 4 million people?

Is this the country worth defending?

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brainwaves on 23rd janueary - adaptive software and... the NS reflection

Is it possible to have software harmonising with the hardware environment for better performance, without external inputs? Is such programming possible? Is it possible for all software in a computer to adapt, by themselves, with each other and with the hardware environment, to produce better performance for the user?

And something else. Today I felt resolved to write out the NS reflection and the meaning of living in Singapore. This is going to take a while, I'll be trying to write it as soon as possible, and have it out during uni time. Hope this time, things will work out well...

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