the wizard's wizard

JK Rowling recently delivered an enchanting commencement speech, turning Harvard into Hogwarts.





If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

words

It's eleven at night and I'm in my cubicle in my 'lab'. I spend quite a lot of time in here; it's a great place to be - ultra-modern facilities like movement-activated lights, ultra-hot/ultra-cold/-all-filtered tap, even LCD PC screens (!!!), comfy armchairs overlooking huge bay windows onto err.. the library lawn, my own work desk and PC, book cupboard, meeting rooms, even sofa-beds. If they had installed shower facilities I'd have saved on rent and lived here permanently.

I've been trying to hammer out the paper proper, in time for my Melbourne trip. Over the past two weeks I'd put in scraps and bits, and have some 4000 words now. In a more credible spurt of concentration, I managed to properly think and write, and churned out 1000 words over two three-hour blocks. In terms of having a presentation paper, it's quite done, I've got my ideas in their right place, and supporting evidence marshalled. But I do want it published as a journal article, so I'm looking at 7-9000 words eventually. That means much more work, more editing. And in order not to let this huge commitment go to 'waste', I want to insert it into my thesis, and, that means even more work, even more editing.

Like I'd told S one despairing night, "I really don't know how I'm ever gonna graduate; and on that day I do, ask me how I did it, and I'll tell ya." Thesis-wise, I've written a grand total of one page. That's less than 500 words (out of the final 80,000-word thesis). The semester is coming to an end, and if I'm honest with myself, I suppose I've been quite a waste of time during this period. I've been continually reassured by fellow postgrads that this is Normal, and that It Will Pass. I sure hell hope it will, and quickly.

But essay-writing does get easier over time, with training. I've been marking some first-year assignments, and looking at the things they say, and that reflect their thought-processes, I believe it really is a matter of training (though old habits die hard and I mark out a lot of their grammatical errors). But back to my difficulty, it is concentrating to write, as opposed to reading novels, whining on MSN, youtubing, etc etc etc. I remember writing my very first undergrad Arts essay, a 1000-word piece on 'liberal democracy', and spent almost a month on it. Then as I progressed, the essays I wrote became 2500, 3000, 5000, and the last I heard, I did successfully write a master's dissertation in three months that came back with a distinction *pat pat* (but that is not something I encourage on a regular basis. One can very easily go mad). So if there is one thing that serves to encourage me, it'd be this paragraph. Let me visualise... writing those 80,000 words... word.. by.. word...

I must say my time here so far has confounded my sense and expectations of myself, and I suppose I've come to be better acquainted with who and what I am. And I've only been here three and a half months - who knows what the next three years would spring? The three letters, 'PhD' seem so quick, so easy, one imagines getting enrolled into a PhD programme, spend a few years thinking, reading, writing, and pop out at the other end with 'Dr' prefixing one's name, every step of the way a comfortable stroll. I never believed those who'd gone before when they said it's a test of character that would change one entirely. Now I do; and I'm already seeing myself changing, and not just intellectually. For one with a solitary and quiet temperament, who has experienced not a few of life's tragedies, I've nonetheless never felt so lonely, so unsure of myself, so daunted. It's not loneliness as we commonly refer to - it's a deeper, more consuming sense of loneliness that's not about being bored or restless or alone. It's the constant reminder from the deepest abyss of one's mind, that for all the friends and company and laughter and blue skies out and around, there is a journey that one has to and only one can undertake, with no firm ground, no signpost, no destination. There's only pitch-dark to point the way, to this vague point of light at the far end, another world.

I look forward to being in Melbourne next month, the city I once found myself and always loved and never really left. Just imagine, the wintry air and the laneway cafes, the smell of burnt coffee, the old streets with new shopwindows, the rumbling of the trams, whispers in the art gallery, the echoes in St Patrick's cathedral, footfalls on cobble stones, Old Arts of Melbourne University, rustling the fallen maple leaves. Just imagine - you latch onto the passing airport coach, and then the train, and then the tram, and then the right bringing wind, and spread out before you, is all of Melbourne.

DeGraves Cafe, Melbourne, June 2007

back for a week

I've confirmed all my flights, and I'll also be delivering a seminar paper at NUS during the week I'm in. I expect lots of shopping and eating and catching up with family and friends and be the generally mild but excessively-consuming Singaporean that I've been engineered to be.

Heil Shopping Centres!

travel, conferences, holidays

It seems I've a packed schedule all the way to next March.

First up, some good news. My paper has been accepted and I shall be presenting it at this 4-day conference :) The next good news is the uni has agreed to pay for me. weeeeeee.



Thus I'll be in KL from 20-25 Aug; wondering if I should do a few days' stop over in Singapore and say hello.

I'll be in these following places in these other days:

14-26 Jul: Melbourne (to see Phil and S is coming down from the UK, and we can all talk about my thesis)

19 Nov-2 Dec: Rome and Venice (because on the way to Britain)

2 Dec-22 Dec: Britain (3-month sojourn, will teach a class for S, then present two seminar papers)

23 Dec-2 Jan: Norway (because very near Britain, and because I can't wait to see Samna and Hakon again)

3 Jan-15 Feb: Britain (more research ...)

(mid-Feb possibly New Delhi to deliver a conference paper) ...

... before returning to Sydney on 28 Feb 2009, and what do you know, one year's gone, and i'd be in my second year of candidature.

I submitted my paper for another conference in October in Austria, and I'll know in three weeks' if I've been accepted. Papers are refereed and will be published, so as we say, die die must go if can go!

then the lamplights

The evenings are starting to turn in earlier, as if they're getting tired of daylight, slowly shutting their eyes and slowly letting in the dark.

Now, the lamplights come on, and the streetscape resembles something out of a movie scene you would see in the darkened cinema, a little distant, a little unreal. You would wish for a dash of drizzle, just to finish off the picture with a token cinematic denouement.

And then, the cold. The evenings bring the cold. Autumn is almost coming to an end, and the puffs of vapour you exhale as you walk home after yet another day pirouette and disappear into the neat rows of lit-up air, precursors and a preview of the winter that is soon to come.

room of one's own

friday night started me on an earnest househunt the next day. i've been to a few the past three days, seen some cheap bad ones that had me vacillating between an outright no-i-can't-live-there and yessssss...-maybe-i-can, and some good ones that's an immediate yes but a more immediate no from my wallet. sometimes i wish i were less sensitive to noise and more tolerable towards people. if it doesn't affect almost everyone else, then it must be my problem right? the problem with noise is you can't close your ears as you would your eyes if you don't want to see. neither do i want to live in a perpetual world of enforced earplugged silence - i want the natural sound of silence. when i pause for a moment and let my thoughts hover and gently fall, i want to hear the quiet sound of air. ultimately, i'll be happiest living alone in a small book-filled cottage out in the woods. but till then, the room that i went to see this morning will do. it's got almost all that i need in a room that gives me peace and sanity - well-ventilated, huge windows that let in lots of light, quiet as you'd find in a quiet house, and, very importantly, no noise of ceaseless traffic. the perfect situation is of course, that i own the entire house. but the life of a student is generally full of struggle, empty of money, and would be grateful for a quiet bed, some books, and a few decent and occasionally indecent thoughts.

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(And he was so exhausted after penning a lengthy letter to his friend, that he could barely stop the streams of tears and the thought of home! - anonymous)

... and i kissed her

We are just breeding feral thugs, who live on advertising jingles and drugs," she states baldly. "I go into schools a lot because I really care about kids and I like to see what is going on. And what scares me is that there is nothing in their heads, not even anything for them to want, because our government has said things like telling kids stories, teaching them music, giving them a wider world, is elitist. So there are kids of five or six and they can hardly string a sentence together ... There is nothing going in there that gives them any templates, or way of understanding the world. And that's why they grow up into these strange, sub-human creatures. ...

Kids are continually wired and what we are doing is criminally insane. I just see a world coming where we split off into the ferals that we are breeding because it suits corporate values to have passive consumers, the 'gimme, grab me, go' thing ... and then an elitist group, who will somehow survive all this and have other values. It's going to split off more and more, and when you chuck in a few robots, what on earth are we going to do?

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That's Winterson in the Sydney newspaper interview, where you already know, she opened this year's Sydney Writer's Festival. (I'm sure she wasn't referring to schoolkids back in Singapore, where everyone not only can string together cogent, coherent sentences in their heads but also roll them eloquently off their nubile tongues.) She'd stopped over in Singapore overnight on her way down, and she did say she quite liked Singapore, but we agreed that it's too noisy. Must be the resplendent symphony of erudite conversation echoing and abounding all over our tiny but ever-articulate island. oh stop me.

another packed Winterson event - "Ask Winterson Anything!" She adopted a very clever strategy: she was open to questions, but she made sure to give lengthy answers, that were frequently impassioned, yet funny, and the one hour just zoomed.

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Politicians often secretly believe that art is a waste of time, they think it’s a kind of luxury item that you do when everything’s going well and there’s a lot of time and money to spare so you can fund a few poetry readings and make people feel better. My view is, there is a creative continuum which is central to life and that we’re hardwired in our DNA to be creative. Now there’re different dilutions and doses of creativity and some people’s creativity is stronger than others, and some turn out to be the artists, but all of us want to participate, I think, in this creativity continuum. I mean you look at kids, as soon as they can start walking around and talking, they want to tell stories they want to paint they want to play instruments they want to sing – it starts straightaway. And I’ve always felt that we stop that, artificially, and then we claim that art and creativity is something that we impose upon people later as a kind of elitist activity, invented to fill a wax on an afternoon, whereas in fact it’s central to the way that we are to our human expression. People lived in situations much tougher than the ones we live in now, where there was no running water and you had to grow your own food locally or there was no heating no washing machine, where people were eking a living backbreakingly from the land – what were they doing? They were singing they were painting they were telling stories – it was absolutely not a product of a rather comfortable, fattened society that’s got no leisure time. Quite the contrary.

In order to express what it is to be human, what it is uniquely human. I worry that we’re always giving away our humanity and becoming less human as we have increasing reliance on machines, on technology, the fixes and the seductions and the glitter of science. You know, what about us, what about our humanness. Anything art that is definitely on the side of the inner life is always saying that life has an inside as well as an outside, is helping us to express that unique humanness, from the high-end really to the modest. It’s not just going round museums or listening to great music or reading fabulous literature, of course, they’re there for all of us but it’s also about the modest end, from the child’s drawing, to the Picasso, it’s the woman singing as she cleans the windows, to going to the Sydney Opera House – that, is the creative continuum, and what I hate about popular culture is that it has wrecked the creative continuum at the lower end where people would just to make their own culture, and replaced it with this phoney-Sony-Disney-bought entertainment, so that people are no longer part of the creative continuum – the thing’s been severed – and that’s where the damage is done. It’s not about art imposing something on people. It’s about corporate culture robbing something from people.

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It's little wonder that her writings have influenced a generation, opened up previously closed spaces, created new and additional ones, and transformed not only people's lives, but also the face of modern English literature.

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The tyranny of my facts – the pre-Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit facts, were that I was adopted by working-class Pentecostal parents who wanted me to be a missionary. I was stuck in class, stuck in religion, stuck in a dead-end northern town. I was female, both of my parents had left school at 14, and my father can barely read. Line all that up and it doesn’t look like the route to where I am and who I am now. ...

I believe in stories, in story-telling, because a story can answer a question without reducing that question to banality. ‘Who am I? is a huge question, and the answer develops, unfolds, reveals itself throughout the whole of our life. At birth, we are only the visible corner of a folded map. The geography of the self is best explored with a guide, and for me art is such a guide. I write fiction because I want to get nearer to the truth.

So is Oranges a self-willed autobiography of a kind?

I don’t think so. I think it is an explanation, in code, of myself to myself, but all my books are that, and if they were only that, no one else would want to read them.

The trick is, the gift is, the miracle is, that what begins as private notation becomes language other people can use. The books we love speak for us and speak to us. I am always in dialogue with the books that have affected me. Stories start other stories. That’s how it is.

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Her stories started mine, and that's how it is, that I wrote her a valentine, and then, a parting kiss.

to the opera house and i met

sundown over the harbour, the bridge, the house. I had time to kill before the night's event, and strolled into the botanic gardens. didn't know this spot would offer the best view of these sydney icons.


this year's writers' festival. thank god for such events that help keep literature and words and books alive. i love how the festival's logo is shaped after the opera house's. and guess who gave the opening address but ...

JEANETTE WINTERSON!!!

lemme finish hyperventilating and i'll tell you how absolutely rousing her speech was - more like a long piece of poetry, about art, about life, about the world we live in, and the earth we walk on - it kept the audience rapturous for a good forty minutes, and the ovation from the packed House afterwards refused to die down.


there was a rush for her books and a line was quickly formed for the booksigning (ths photo only shows about 1/4 of the queue). everyone was still talking about how great the speech was, how they loved winterson, or how they'd now start reading her books. I always knew that winterson was a fantastic public speaker, and her books are divine and her followers legion, but to see this one fan kneeling down and gushing and weeping and telling winterson how important she was to her was a bit too much. I thought only movie stars and pop tarts received such theatrical adulation.
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I deliberately waited for an hour, just so I could be at the end of the queue and profess my undying devotion and love more privately, but alas, when I reached the altar, I could only manage a barely decent tete-a-tete:

me: hello jeanette ... it's terrific to finally see you in person.
she: (she said something but in all my excitement i can't remember).
me: i've read all your writings.
she: that's a lot of reading!
me: yeah ... (...was all i could muster)
she: (bends over and continues signing The Passion, The Stone Gods, and Art Objects)
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Art Objects is one of the most important books in my life, and I bring it wherever I go like an amulet. Naturally, it's very well-thumbed, mildly tattered, generously annotated and underlined, and necessarily scotch-taped.
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she: [points to Art Objects] this looks like it's been travelling.
me: stutter. yeah... i read it all the time... stutter.
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jeanette once wrote in her preface to later editions of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, that as a writer, she'd only wish for one thing, and that's the knack to know when to stop.
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me: jeanette, please never know when to stop writing.
she clasped her hands together, paused for a moment, and looked into me: I won't.
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You are browsing through the shelves in a bookshop as you always do, and one day you pick up a book whose words lance your heart. What can you do but to spend every day after reading her all, savouring every phrase, praying that she'd continue working magic and casting spells, and hoping that perhaps one day you might meet this sorceress in the flesh? ...


jeanette winterson and i :)

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Why choose the insistence of winter and a book? I took it home, lit my fire and made a proper sacrifice of my comfort. Snow and hail are nothing compared to happiness and I was happy. Two hundred copies and one was mine.

-- Winterson, Art Objects.

In Visible Cities

When a city drains itself of people and leaves only its buildings breathing, it is invariably redolent of a dead future that we collectively and inexplicably conceive of, always at present. Yet should a city be devoid of buildings - its myriad metaphors of steel, and glass and obdurate modernity - it no longer becomes a city, but an aimless habitation where time has dropped final anchor, and the present becomes trapped in the past. One wonders about the difference between a dead city and a non-city, the triumph of staid human will over the resplendent geography of nature, and is unwarily led to the question: amidst the dead weight of stasis, how shall he live? Encircled by the illusive glow of false riches, how can he live?


Something prompted me to look outside my window one clear morning. There was an unusual presence of movement and energy. Overnight, without my noticing, a colony of wasps had built a nest. I clambered atop my desk for a closer look, separated by a vertical plane of glass, and was transfixed in awe for many a minute. Why did they choose this spot? How did they communicate, what words what language? Who taught them these rudiments of construction? From what did they use to build honeycombs of such beauty? Where is their queen? You see, when man thinks of God, he conceives of God from the narrow eyes of man. When man thinks of insects and animals, his stubborn ego similarly speaks. And the wasps, teeming on their kingdom, unperturbed, resolute, dignified, secretive, mysterious, themselves nature’s living palette of liquorice, honey and caramel.


They call Leichhardt Sydney’s little Italy. He has never been to Italy, though he has lived in another little Italy – Lygon Street in the suburb of Carlton in Melbourne. So his frames of reference are akin to comparing an ersatz with an epigone, never knowing what the real place is like. His sole purpose there, after a very long bus-ride, was simply to while away a Sunday afternoon and explore a new precinct. Café Italia served up a delicious café latte, and one need not have had visited Italy to know when an intoxicating alchemy is at work right in the cauldron of one’s tongue.


Tucked quietly away from the main street, along a two-lane road, is a café with an espresso machine placed on the window sill. It was mid-afternoon on a Saturday, and the surrounds were strangely quiet. The grey clouds above cast a mild otherworldly pall, and the surreal pallor infused the al fresco café with a lambent continental mood. The girl comes over to take his orders, and then gives the table a once-over, vigorous wipe. “There! Doesn’t haveta be cleaned anymore till tomorrow!” she says with a light flourish. This is a place he can feel right at home, and lean at his table for hours on hours, savour a book, a coffee, be at times distracted by the traffic and the world and the occasional stranger-by, and dip into the random conversations from nearby islands of tables that would inadvertently, but gently, lure his traipsing reverie.


Can you still write? You have not been able to read a novel in earnest the last few months, or be inspired by a line of poetry. Even longer have you last fallen in love and embarked on a capricious wanderlust, the torrid, heady stuff that keep florid pens aflutter. You remember how during one such thrall, one never before, the pages of the notebooks you carry about yourself were filled as quickly as you could turn to the next page, although without your realizing, that name – one that could send tremors at the mutter of a syllable, one whose name when called could call you swiftly home – turned gradually, into a rock, a fort.

You can never bear to throw away your notebooks, no matter that they have come to resemble cemeteries, those pages tombstones, those words epitaphs, all left to languish at the mercy of an evanishing memory, this memory the solitary clue to the coffin buried dead beneath.

I hope you can still write. Words are meant to be written, to be latched on voices, etched on paper, fragile repositories of your deepest, fragilest yearnings. Never mind that there would be times when the voices you long to hear would become silence and disappearance, never mind that at times words inscribed would become indecipherable hieroglyphics. When the sentence is ended, it is for another to embrace.

State's Times, The State & Two Kids from another

Did you read the latest ranking released by Freedom House?

Singapore's The Straits Times* is the only "first world" (i always wonder why people refer to Singapore as first world - more like First Reich) press to rank at 154th out of 195 countries for press freedom.

(*the ranking includes all newspapers in Singapore - I take the Straits Times to be my representative whipping boy)

I think it's a huge embarrassment for a newspaper (which self-respecting newspaper has an ex-minister and current MP (Tony Tan) as its chairman?!?) that likes to tout itself as some premier prestigious national paper. (And former and current spies as journalists?!?)

But I think the bigger embarrassment is reserved for Singaporeans, especially those who ingest the Straits Times' daily drivel and propaganda and end up regurgitating its embroidered offal ad nauseam infinitum. I'm sure we've all met such citizens - their entire trove of opinions are formed from scanning the Straits Times' headlines ("Singapore the Garden City"; "Singapore ranks #1 for competitiveness"; Singapore busiest port for 5th year"; "Singapore best blah blah blah"), without a shred of critical, original thought, and they inadvertently speak like robots. And that's the point - the overall objective of the PAP-controlled Straits Times is to engineer a dumbed-down economically-productive ever-consuming human-prototype called "A Singaporean" that lives to serve its political master.

That's why I cringe whenever I hear Singaporeans talk about being first in this and fastest in that and their sole claim to national pride is that the country is very rich and all they can show about Singapore is some snazzy snapshot of our 3 CBD skyscrapers taken from the top of the Swissotel (has it changed its name yet again?) at sunset. 

If you can't imagine how foreigners view us thus, just think how you'd view that smug classmate whose sole claim to excellence and superiority over you is that his/her parents went from coolies to tycoons in one generation and that bugger just can't stop yakking about his/her latest purchases and shoving them into your face. 

Is that all there is to Singapore?!? Of course not, our achievements run the gamut from the ingenuous to the inspiring and we're so humble we seldom mention these mentionables that produced and maintains our first world economy:

We have the world's most efficient state-organised killing machine - our judiciary! In the words of our former chief justice, "condemned prisoners can be disposed of by the prison authorities in about six months." Never mind that due-process is compromised. Never mind that that guy might be innocent. Never mind, dispose quickly and all will be well. 

Sometimes I wonder if Singapore's low crime rate's due to the death penalty - not that it deters; if the death penalty is an effective deterrent, by logical reasoning, there'd be no more heinous crimes by now and therefore no more death penalty need be meted out. The fact that the death penalty exists is a proof of its failure as a deterrent. (Don't give me that shit about what if that person killed my mother or grandmother - that person might kill your entire family but that doesn't give you the right to take that one life - that's revenge; not justice.) All the more condemnable that this is state-sponsored, systematic slaughter. Sometimes I wonder if our low crime rate's due to having them wiped out (but no, refer to above).

So you see, living in a country with the death penalty (one of international abnormalities) can be quite harsh. No wonder we need to have courtesy campaigns and have prime ministers urging us to be a more gracious society, especially when we have a looming ageing population that one can't just simply send to our Changi gallows that's obviously giving our brilliant and brilliantly-paid civil servants and politicians lumps in their throats: 

"We have to be realistic. There is a limit to how much re-training we can do for some workers, so we have to look overseas. Look at my generation, more than half of them didn't even complete primary school education. What are we going to do? They are not going to conveniently die off..." [Bilahari Kausikan, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 10 May 2006]

So after much consideration, a solution is found for our uneducated, un-train-able, ... inconvenient senior citizens:

"our land is expensive. But we have nearby neighbours in Johore, Batam and Bintan. The elderly want to reach their doctors within half to one hour. So retirement villages in neighbouring countries is possible, barring the cross-border hassle. It is best to find cheap land on short leases" [Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan, 17 April 2007]

Like how the British Empire founded Australia to house its hardened convicts it couldn't be bothered to kill off, rich and prosperous Singapore does not dissimilar to its old and infirm - ship them to Johor and Batam. 

There're also (in brief summary) our much-vaunted meritocracy (in such good schools like RI, ACS, SJI etc), pragmatism (like supporting the US invasion of Iraq, corroborating with Burmese drug lords, North Korean money laundering syndicates, assorted arms smuggling etc), materialism (24/7 indoor/outdoor advertising seducing you to Orchard Road for the latest gadget/fashion splurge, ERP (that causes more jams, and revenue), mass housing aka HDB (civilian barracks), homeless cardboard-collecting aunty (but the government says there're no homeless and they're helping the poor) and her multi-millionaire minister (because if they don't get S$2.5-$3 million a year they'd be corrupt and Singapore's economy would perish and our women would be sent abroad as maids!). 

Singaporeans have so much to be proud of!

And now, there is one more accolade Singapore can achieve! - The Best State-Controlled Newspaper in the World! If you look at Singapore's past record:

2003: 144 out of 166
2004: 147 out of 167
2005: 140 out of 167
2006: 146 out of 168
2007: 141 out of 169
2008: 154 out of 195

We have been consistently ranked at the lowest percentile of press freedom, along countries we love to despise - Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, China etc. In fact we even slipped from being initially 'partly free' to the current 'not free' status. So given that achieving press freedom is almost a lost cause (as impossible as voting the PAP out of power), we could aim to be the best at the other end.

Come on, Straits Times! You're only 39 places to top prize! Buck up! I'm sure your PAP masters will reward you greatly when you bring that honour to Singapore!

So, how does the free world outside see Singaporeans? - brought up to regurgitate slogans and platitudes from its #154th press, cruising along in its self-satisfied smarmy contentment occasionally writing an angry letter to its 154th press about its latest petty, trivial eating/shopping/generally splurging tribulations ("I was at XYW restaurant at this time and date and I order this and that but how come I never get this, this, and this service and on top of it the manager so rude and obnoxious I'll never return again but I want to demand compensation and may I remind everyone including myself that Singapore is a cosmopolitan first-world country with a highly-educated English-speaking population that has one of the highest GDP/GNP/foreign reserves and I am shocked that this has happened and will the relevant authorities please look into the matter?"). 

oh yes... our golden child of national identity, Singaporeans' precious pride and joy, the nation's shimmery and infinitely poetic, elegant, erudite... Singlish.... 

How does the outside world see us indeed ... I don't know, I'm not supposed to have a mind of my own what. Will the relevant authorities please comment, and our 154th press come up with a slick headline?
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But the two 12 year-old Australian kids who wrote the following article do seem to have their own minds, and good hearts too. When a country's children ask such questions and think such thoughts, I think that country has some hope. The world is (and always has been) in deep shit - it's these young people that'd make the world a better place.

Lose the shiny plasma TV and find your community
Sydney Morning Herald

by Imogen and Freya Wadlow
May 1, 2008

It's Friday afternoon and everyone is talking about what they are going to be doing at the weekend. Sometimes it's sleepovers or parties, but mostly it's hanging around at home, doing nothing but playing on PlayStations, texting absolute drivel or going on msn.

In the school holidays, we became aware of just how damaging this is to our society. For National Youth Week Baulkham Hills Shire Council organised free activities, including a chance to learn about the bush, plant trees and have a sausage sizzle.

We went along and were disappointed to find no one else turned up. It was even more disappointing for the rangers and volunteers who had given their time to run the day.

We walked from the car park into a magical green grove where volunteers had worked tirelessly to clear introduced species. Everything was 100 per cent Aussie - otherwise it was spotted by the eagle eye of a volunteer and ripped out. We saw the work that these people put in behind the scenes.

Another Baulkham Hills event, a treasure hunt at Rouse Hill, had a prize of a PlayStation Portable. Two kids turned up but couldn't be bothered with the actual activity, so the prize just sat there unclaimed. What a waste. We'd love to get our hands on such a prize. But, then, we don't have parents who buy us whatever we want. (We only got a PlayStation at Christmas and Mum takes it from us when our rooms are messy, so we don't get to see it a lot.)

It seems that people are so pre-occupied with sitting at home watching their big plasma televisions they have forgotten how to live in a community. Parents have forgotten that "going shopping" isn't a true family activity and that even teenagers like to be included in stuff.

This kind of slothful behaviour is very disappointing, and damaging when you consider that to be part of a vibrant, friendly community you need people who are interested in other people and who say, "what can I do?" rather than "it's too much bother".

We offered to go in and teach children at a local school about the environment and to help them adopt their local park and save the endangered Red-crowned Toadlet, which lives there. We tried and tried but the school wasn't interested. If the teachers can't be bothered, then how will the students learn to care?

We letterbox-drop about 300 houses twice a year to get neighbours to help with our Save the Trees Day. Out of these 300 families, about 10 turn up. Those that come work hard and learn all sorts of interesting things.

Seeing privet removed and lovely gum trees grow back is wonderful - but there are too many who are happy to stand by and watch others work. Are you one of those? What's your excuse? Too many excuses!

We are rapidly becoming a "checkout community". "How are you today?" we ask, but there is no eye contact and we don't really care.We all have the daily grind of going to school or work, but that's not really living, is it? You may as well just sit and wait for your coffin to be delivered.

If you want to add value to your life, you have to put the effort in.

So read the local paper and see what you can join, chat to someone at the shops and invite them round for tea, get together with neighbours and clean up a park, and shape the future by being a living, breathing example to them.

Identical twins Imogen and Freya Wadlow, 12, run the Planet Patrol website for kids, located at: www.planetpatrol.info.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/lose-the-shiny-plasma-tv-and-find-your-community/2008/04/30/1209234954729.html
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Now compare young Singaporeans with these two kids... and we sorta get an idea of what Singapore would be like the next 30 years on. (unthinkable.)