An official religion in the making?

From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Religion is "a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith" or "a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices".

Apart from the "religious attitudes" part, feng-shui seems to be in many circles, from personal decisions such as home-purchasing and collecting one's car to the design of an office layout or even an entire building, a general collection of beliefs that many adhere to. And as with most established organised religions, feng-shui observers have had their fair share of internal clashes of views (schisms?) over publicised issues.

The latest and somewhat benign but still interesting incident I encountered was the decision of an individual concerning a career move - instead of consulting one's life-partner or perhaps a career guidance counsellor, advice was sought from a feng-shui master....

My latest toy

Yes, and it's a Sony-Ericsson k610i.

Ok, it's not so new, actually - got it 2 Sundays ago but it came free with an auto-shutoff feature which was really irritating and necessitated a trip to the service centre.

Alright, I admit, so it's not the latest and greatest money can buy (well, it is quite, given the money I have....) but, yes, I'm now armed with a handly little phone which negates the need to carry with me a proper camera.

Why I like it? It's decently sleek, fits into my pocket well and has features which are pretty decent, and that includes a 2 megapixel camera, quite a bit of memory (which is expensively expandable) which will be handy in snapping the little things one sees along the street, 3G, which I've not gotten round to using and a few other nifty tricks. It's got a painted exterior tho', so it scratches easily.

Meanwhile, let the fun begin....

Chaos, confusion and contemplation

Imagine a place with people running to-and-fro, screaming, shouting at the top of their voices. In one corner two individuals in the midst of a sword fight while some, keeping a safe distance, watch on. There is much pushing, shoving by others to get past. Every other person seems to be in a mad rush to get somewhere and human traffic wasn't going to be an obstacle. Farther down, an object is thrown on the floor in angst while another is kicked about. Utter chaos.

Throw in some smoke, fire and maybe a torch-bearing horse rider or two and it could almost pass off as a pillaging scene one of Ridley Scott's masterpieces. Sadly, exaggerated language aside, this was a local toys store, not some ficticious village and the perpetrators children, not a crazed barbarian horde although at times these felt strangely similar.

I spent a good part of 15 minutes at Toys r' Us and what I witnessed was something I felt just had to write about. Children running, literally, amok, shoving other slower kids out of the way, snatching toys from the hands of others only to toss them aside, balls being kicked off the shelves....and all this while the parents (or guardians ?) watching from the side, keeping silent and seemingly oblivious (or in total approval ?) of the lack of control.

While this wasn't the first time (won't be the last either, I'm very sure) I've seen kids misbehaving in public while the parents did nothing, the sheer audacity of it - particularly memorable were the pair of kids who were knocking items off the shelf with toys swords while running around hitting each other and another who was repeated kicking a ball (really hard, mind you) at the shelves around him - made me wonder - why do the parents allow, no, condone, such behaviour? Surely they weren't raised in that manner - or is this part of the reason behind them allowing their kids to be?

And, taking it one step further, what part does education play in this?

Sing a Song of Singlish

A topic that's so uniquely Singaporean and derided almost as much as praised on so many different fronts. Singlish (that's a highly localised variant of English with a dash of every other local language added to it, for the uninitiated - am I correct to say that?). Is it good? Is it bad? Is it an unstoppable force that, like it or not, helps define what "Singaporean" means or just one of the many areas that, despite all that's been achieved, needs serious fixing? Honestly, to me, the on-again off-again debate over the virtues of Singlish is a dead horse that's been beaten to pulp only to be ressurected again to undergo the same treatment once more.

So I'm not going to do that - flog the dead horse all over again, that is. Don't see the point anyway. There are lots of places which already do. However, I must admit, love it or hate it, I do find one question popping up in my mind when faced with Singlish, and it's "why?". Why did Singlish happen the way it did? Where did it begin, especially when English is the medium of instruction in schools islandwide? This is something I've asked countless contacts, ranging from those who were educated locally all the way up to their tertiary education to those who never experienced any form of formal education here as well as those who fall in between these extremeties.

One of the many whom I've asked - locally educated right up to pre-university, tertiary education in the West - feels it boils down to the way the language is taught. No, not the official syllabus and content - that's very well thought out by the some of the best minds around these parts - but the way things are executed. To summarise the conversation I had with this contact, students right from late pre-school are made to learn words and sentence construction. A typical situation described to me was where early primary-level kids are required to be able to spell anywhere up to 50 new words in a week. Almost concurrently-occurring is sentence forming, where the same kids are taught and tested on forming sentences. What this contact of mine feels is, if and when improperly executed, students just end up learning lots new words and forming sentences without understanding what they're really doing. They end up knowing words and how to spell them but can't or don't know how to use them in a real-world context. They have an idea of how sentences are formed but, in an actual dynamic conversational environment, and without adequate guidance from other sources, are unable to fill in the gaps proper.

Is this an accurate description of what's happening? I don't know - I'm too old to remember what pre- and primary school were like and not in that stage to find out all over again. Yet. But more to the point, is this a possible early-cause which leads eventually on to Singlish?

Boy, that's a scary thought....

Belt them up, for heaven's sake....

I saw today two (or was it three?) toddlers jumping around the middle row of an mpv and it made me wonder - why don't people strap their kids down?

Laws and confounding regulations concerning child seats aside, don't they realise how dangerous it really is to have an unsecured kid in a vehicle traveling at 60km/h down a wet road?

I've actually asked people I know who do this and they give me responses like, "oh, my kid doesn't like being tied up".

As these thoughts were being entertained, I watched this executive saloon zoom past with its rear passengers unstrapped....

Test Post

Here goes my first ever - late to the blogging party, but eager to try it out all the same....