A Candle or The Sun

Their heat made them sacrifice themselves for the nation’s sake. As he though these thoughts, a warmth began inside him. Slowly, steadily. Increasing bit by bit

The heat of revolution moved our leaders. Hot they were against colonialists, communists, communalists, chauvinists, conservationists. Yes, how hot they were. No housing estates then. Just slums. Slums, everywhere you turned. Slums. Dark huts. No electricity. No water. Children living like pigs. With pigs. No running water. Just filth.

“Routine surveillance, we term it. One never knows though what that kind of thing can unearth. Anyway it’s policy to know a little more about the people who work for us than they think we do.

Did they never tell you that on this island paradise of ours trade is a matter of security, education is a matter of security, health is a matter of security, how you wash your underwear is a matter of security. As Samson would

“The great Samson Alagaratnam has been given the task of unearthing the main culprit and stopping him. If he can’t do this fast enough, he’s got to design counter-measures to neutralise the effect of the streetpapers.”

sunset and moonrise on the same horizon, and seeing this had come to understand that pain and solace, frustration and fulfilment were possible in the same moment.
Alaga was fascinated by what she said but couldn’t avoid noticing that she mixed short Singapore vowels with sighing Indian ones, bit off her consonants while rolling her r’s, and it was this that made her speech sound foreign.

She spoke of a land of contrasts and contradictions, a land she had first visited when she was little more than a girl. She talked of the thread of Hindu culture that ran through and united it, but was forever weaving tapestries on the side, which were as beautiful as they were at variance with the main pattern. She waxed long on a religion that identified in its gods, Brahma, Siva and Vishnu, the primary forces of consciousness, change and preservation, then gave them a thousand names and human faces so they were the more easily worshipped. She told him of how she had travelled the land, often on foot, of how she had been warm beside a lingam of solid ice in a Himalayan cave. She spoke of Kannya Kumari, where the land ended and one could see

What he proposed was clear enough. The majority of Singaporeans lived in state-built flats. These, depending on size, location and design, fell roughly into three categories. Everyone aspired to a better flat, and knowing simply where a person lived told you not only the kind of furniture required, it told you the type of flat aspired to and the kind of furniture needed in the future.

I have never felt inhibited by the censorship prevailing in Singapore, nor have I felt the urge for mass communication. However, the possibility that other people might miss what I did not require was not something that escaped me, and in a strange way I began almost at once to yearn for something I had never needed. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that the streetpaper was, in its crude way, right: Singaporeans were denied essential freedoms and I, who had never had anything in common with the mass of people around me, was beginning vicariously to share their deprivation.

It meant modernisation, capitulation to the mass market