The Indian Renaissance

Book Review

The Indian Renaissance—India’s Rise after a Thousand Years of Decline by Sanjeev Sanyal, World Scientific, 2008, US$ 29.95.

Did you read the title of the book under review? Read it carefully. Because when I received the email to review this book and saw the book’s title, I felt a little daunted. The Indian Renaissance—India’s Rise after a Thousand Years of Decline! Whew! In my mind’s eye, I imagined the book to be heftier than Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indians. But when I finally got a copy of the book in my mail, I was relieved to see its manageable heft. In this timely treatise, Sanjeev Sanyal has made his point in less than 250 pages. That itself says a lot about the author’s prudence given the challenge he had in his hands.

Writing a thousand pages would not have been impossible for Sanjeev (the topic would have justified it) who is an Indian economist based in Singapore. He is currently Deutsche Bank’s regional Chief Economist and Adjunct Fellow of the Institute of Policy Studies, Singapore.

The book’s central thesis, which is largely about India’s economic resurgence, is very straightforward at its core: During the “golden age”, prior to the 11th century, India was a country that encouraged innovation and change. By virtue of that, India exercised huge influence, both economically and culturally (the author calls the India of those days as the United States of today), in the entire known world, especially in South East Asia (through the Silk route and the Southern Spice trade route). According to Angus Maddison’s estimates, India accounted for 33% of the world economy in 1AD. Between 1000 and 1820, India’s share of the world gross domestic product (GDP) fell from 29% to 16%. The author concludes that “India’s position was long in decline well before the colonial period. The industrial revolution and colonial occupation only sped up the process.”

The question Sanjeev asks is this: why did this decline in the thriving Indian civilization set in?

Even though Sanjeev seems to agree with V S Naipaul’s “India—A Wounded Civilization” thesis, he argues that per se it was not the Muslim invasions or the British colonialism that that set India back on the path of backwardness. “A change in cultural attitudes by the 11th century created a fossilized society obsessed with regulating all aspects of life according to fixed rules,” he posits. “Not surprisingly, this discouraged the spirit of innovation and led to a long and painful decline. India fell behind not just as an economy but as a civilization.”

Even after India’s Independence in 1947, India’s potential was not unleashed due to the Nehruvian policies, says Sanyal. According to him, the turning point came in India’s destiny in 1991 when India was forced to open itself out to the world. By opening up, Sanjeev means not just the opening up of the economy but all aspects of life—and how it coincided with the communications revolution: cable TV, mobile phones and the Internet. This change was heralded, if you will, by Bengal reformers like Ram Mohun Roy and others in early 19th century when the country witnessed important social reforms and the introduction of the English language.

In the backdrop of a glorious past, Sanjeev provides an analysis of what happened after Independence and how the 1991’s liberalization unleashed India’s entrepreneurial potential. Especially interesting is a chapter on the great Indian middle class in which Sanjeev debunks the myth of the Indian middle class’ size. He claims that the “300 million” size of the Indian middle class is exaggerated, which is quite convincing. What he does not examine is whether this BPO and KPO spawned middle class is solid in its base or will it be washed away by the wave of global economic depression.

To buttress his claims and arguments, Sanjeev quotes a lot of research throughout the book, from ancient text to modern-day research papers, from Kautilya to Surjit Bhalla. Luckily, he has kept the use of footnotes to the minimum and despite the parading of statistics (which is necessary for a book of this nature), the reading is not hampered and there are hardly any digressions.

Towards the end of the book, Sanjeev paints a bright picture for India’s future. He points out that India needs institutional reforms to cope with the changes brought about by economic prosperity but perhaps he relies too heavily on the moral courage of the middle class to make it happen. He also does not invest much thought into the social divisions that beset today’s India.

Even though Indians can rightfully take pride in its current ascendance, there is no point quarrelling with the past except perhaps in drawing lessons for charting the future course. Perhaps that’s what Sanjeev is trying to do in this book.

However, this is not a new idea. All civilizations, as Edward Gibbon had noted, go through cycles of rise and falls. Centuries ago, India went through it and before it many others such as the Greek, Persian and the Islamic civilizations. Even today, as India and China are rising, one could see many already heralding the end of the Pax Americana.

Even though this is an intelligently written book, it skips many historical facts especially from the last thousand years. The consolidation of India under the Mughals and the administrative set up that followed, honed by the British with their laws and technology (Railways, Telegraph) was significant for India’s journey into modernism. Except for the early Mongol and Afghan marauders, the Mughals did not take away the wealth of India. The British did, and hence the drain of wealth of theory, to finance their industrial revolution. Before they built Calcutta and Bombay, it were the British who caused the de-urbanization and de-industrialization of India—otherwise Indian manufactured calicoes were famous the world over. Therefore, to ignore the achievements of the last thousand years flies in the face of history. If the last thousand years were a black hole in India’s history, many of India’s current cultural achievements would not have come about: How else can you trace the origins of the Taj Mahal, Hyderabadi Biryani, and the songs of Taare Zameen Pe? And could the Vikram Seths and Rushdies and Arundhati Roys be possible without the influences of the last few centuries?

Also, while the author flogs Nehru and his advisor Mahalanobis for their “inward-looking cultural attitude” and socialist policies, some credit should be given to them for having the vision to found the IITs and IIMs—the educational institutions that irrigated the field of India’s resurgence.

Besides the book’s core arguments, what impresses me most are the author’s astute observations about the modern developments in India—the way he has described the decline of Calcutta and the emergence of unplanned ‘planned’ townships such as Gurgaon is honest and courageous (Dazzled by the glitz and glamour of the high-rises and malls, quite often the upper middle class Indians tend to overlook underlying problems that mainly affect the hoi polloi—it takes a Sanjeev to write about the lack of municipal waste disposal systems and lack of pavements in Gurgaon, for example).

Whether one agrees or disagrees with Sanjeev’s propositions, the book is worth one’s attention for its sheer intelligence and historical sweep. Subjects like history and economics might not turn everyone on, but believe me, this is one book that can make every Indian heart race—with excitement and pride, and hope in India’s future.

An edited version of this book review appeared in India Se, September 2008.

Short + Sweet Singapore

In the third week of the Short+Sweet Singapore play festival, ten plays of varying quality were staged at NAFA’s Studio Theatre. In less than two hours, audiences were treated with ten ten-minute long performances that tackled themes ranging from sex to consumerism to cultural identity and suicide.

Playwright Jerome Parisse’s Smell the Roses, directed by Candice de Rozario, tried to dissect the (non-existent) sexual life of a Singaporean couple. A few years into their marriage, Andrew and Maree had seen a near total decline in their sexual attractiveness for each other—not only a disappointment for themselves but also for Maree’s mother who wanted to be a grandmother. One day when Andrew is alone at home and helping himself with some porn on TV, his wife and mother-in-law catch him “smelling the roses”. The touch of comedy in this light-weight relationship play set the mood for the evening.

Mark Friend’s Ledge Fetish, directed by Michael Wang, took everyone by surprise because of its weird theme but it turned out to be hugely satisfying and was clearly one of the most well-written and well-performed plays of the lot. An accountant, played by Musa Fazal, has a fetish for ledges and windows of old buildings. One day he is indulging in his fetish when he is spotted in the act by a shoeshine girl, played by Julie Wee. The exchange between them takes fascinating turns, stoking the imagination of the members of the audience. Julie’s Juno-like performance and easy charm enthralled the audience.

Changing the gears was another Singapore themed-play, Sharon’s Scrumptious Pineapple Cake (Playwright: Leon Foo, Director: Sharon Lin). Two daughters reach their mother’s place with two contrasting news—one wants to divorce her husband and another wants to get married to an elderly man. The mother is at first distraught and heartbroken to hear the secrets that were brought to her and she berates her daughters at their stupid decisions. But then as they quarrel and argue, the mother gives in and acquiesces to their decisions, respecting their right to be happy in their own ways. In the acting department in this play, the mother easily takes the cake.

Ken Mizusawa’s Free Fall (directed by Geraldine Paul) deals with a dark theme: suicide. A man, driven to commit suicide by the ever-changing demands of his workplace, climbs the top of a building to “take control of his death”. But even there, he cannot commit the act in peace as he is interrupted by a student who is there to do research on suicide. The play’s premise was good but including too many characters somehow diluted its effectiveness.

Carolyn Seet’s The Bank (directed by Jamie Cant) is not a normal bank. It can also be a place of seduction. Sounds weird? But bank employee Stephanie (Jeane Raveendran) makes it deliciously believable. The Bank was like a one-character play and Jeane did well to hold the audience’s attention through her soap opera performance.

The next two plays, Are you wanting greater coverage? (playwright Raksha Mahtani and director Nur Sahirrah Safit) and Native Speaker (playwright: Dean Lundquist; Director: Muhammad Faizad Salim) tackle serious themes of identity and racism. While the first one is an exchange between a bored Chindian girl and an Indian call centre guy (who calls in from UK, short for Uttra Khand), the second one is set as an interview piece where a white man is hiring for the position of a “native speaker”. The interviewee insists that she is a native speaker. The position is closed, says the interviewer, because, it emerges, the interviewee does not look like a native speaker. A long argument follows between the two characters that explores the racist biases but it all ends with a twist in the tail—which I could guess coming.

Raksha Mahtani’s play has some clever lines but it fails to fully explore the issues of identity and culture. To be honest, there is only so much one can do in ten minutes. In that perspective, it was a commendable effort.

Verena Tay’s Imperfect Family Recipes (director: Claude Girardi) is about generation gap and old age. It had an old and infirmed character as its main protagonist who vented her feeling out through her pre-recorded monologues. I found it clever and the video’s production quality was quite good. For its sheer innovativeness of presentation, this play deserves appreciation.

Also different in presentation was Alex Broun’s Somewhere Between the Sky and the Sea (director: Rayann Condy) but the theme was trite: a lyricist torn between two beautiful women. Truth be told, I quite enjoyed it.

The last production, Permission to Use Fire (writer/director: Richard Lord) was the darkest of all the plays in this lot. A failed illusionist gets a rare gift just about when he is about the kick the game for good. Intriguing, isn’t it? You have to watch it to believe it.

In all, most of the plays were above average and if you get a chance, catch some of the good ones this Friday at the Esplanade.

More play reviews by other writers are here.

Death and Taxis: Chris Mooney-Singh

You might have heard of death and taxes in one breath. But did you ever hear of death and taxis? If not, be prepared to hear a lot about it because Australia-born and Singapore-based poet Chris Mooney Singh has poignantly yet beautifully combined the two in his latest collection of poems, The Laughing Buddha Cab Company. Zafar Anjum takes a ride on a cab from that company to meet author and literary activist, Chris Mooney Singh.

Hop in please, wouldn't you? But first a warning.

When you see Chris Mooney Singh, it would be hard for you to slot him the way we are used to slot people in the hierarchy of identities. Perhaps you also wouldn't know how best to describe the man.

But not to worry on this count. Chris himself has done this job brilliantly in one of his poems, A Council Flat in Leicester. So, listen on.

In that poem, Chris talks about his appearance of being a 'turbaned, bearded--yet a white-skinned sahib' which startles an 'earth-brown skinned Punjabi fellow.

"A beard, a turban, and a white skin brings some kind of a novelty value for some," Chris says self-mockingly. Truth be told, I too was startled to see him first but that was a in a literary reading. For this interview, we meet Chris in Earshot cafe in the Arts House. "Once I walked into a crowded market in Adelaide and I was surprised how people parted ways for me," he tells us over the din of screeching chairs and clinking china.

He then goes into the history of turbans--how turbans have always stood to indicate rank and class and commanded respect, how in the Mughal times, wearing a turban was a sign of class and how Guru Gobind Singh threw a challenge to the powers that be by making it mandatory for all Sikhs to wear turbans, proclaiming that people with low caste or no caste could also wear turbans.

So, you see, this is how Chris speaks. You scratch him and gushes forth the knowledge, passionate observations and articulations of an erudite mind, affording you moments of epiphany as you move deeper into the discussion with him.


Eastern Promises

Of Australian-Irish descent, Chris was born in 1956. He had a typical middle class childhood. His parents were not religious at all. But he had been reading books on mysticism from an early age and that had some influence on him. That love for mysticism led him to the Sikh faith when he went to Indian as a young man to indulge in arts journalism.

Chris was practicing meditation in Australia for almost 15 years. But he was not satisfied. There were questions, a quest, and a thirst to quench. “I wanted to have some deeper experience, with people of some spiritual stature,” he says. Off he went to India. He stayed in Delhi, in a Punjabi neighbourhood.

Once in India, a Western-educated Chris found poetry as an art form in the Eastern traditions. In the Sikh faith, he saw poetry, music and spiritualism all coming together and that resonated well with him. "I connected with the eastern traditions from an artistic point of view, not from a religious point of view," he says.

But this spiritual change muscled into his poetic sensibilities. "Embracing a new faith brought in an inward sort of a change in me," he says reflectively.

Mysticism and poetry engaged Chris’ mind from early on. He got interested in poetry while he was still in primary school. During the composition classes, he says, he was more interested in the language, in the atmospherics, in the micro-moments of the story than in the story itself. "One thing that poetry does is it looks at the mirco-moments and so, I was inwardly always poetry driven," he says. The early interest in poetry sprouted into a deeper passion. Later on, he got to understand more about writing, about narratives, as he formally studied journalism.

But his poetry quintessentially contains a specific flavour—the flavour of narrative. "Even when I write poems, if you look at my collection, I have a narrative element in it,” he says. “I think I have a cross over, sort of a poet inside a storyteller and a storyteller inside a poet."

In search of the rubab

Kirtans, a form of poetry, fascinated Chris. As he delved deeper into Sikhism and its art form, he realized that there were instruments of the Sikh faith that had been lost. "I call the harmonium the magarmach (crocodile) of Indian music or the African killer bee of Indian music,” he says, referring to how it has killed off ancient musical instruments like the rubab and Saranda.

“In Guru Nanak’s time, his companion played the rubab,” he says. “I went looking for that instrument and it took me a decade to uncover it.”

From Himachal Pradesh, he started to make rubab and saranda and took the craft to some villages in Punjab where the youth were trained to make such instruments.

Who would have imagined that it would take an Australian young man to revive the community’s interest in the ancient musical instruments of the Sikh faith?

Turning point

It was only in India where he tragically lost his first wife. His wife literally died in a taxi in India. He puts that experience, from his wife’s last breath to the rites of her funeral, in the initial part of his anthology, The Laughing Buddha Cab Company. The second section of the book is about taxis in Singapore. “Both signified to me as vehicles of transportation, from place to place, a journey of life,” he says.

After his first wife’s death, Chris came to Singapore and settled here. After spending more than a decade in India, Singapore offered him a different experience, and posed a challenge to his muse.

“India was an immediate connection with me,” he says. “Coming from a meditation background, I was inwardly attuned to that culture. I stayed in all kind of dwellings in India, the experience was very wide. I saw tragedy. I experienced life in all its nakedness. In Singapore, though it is comfortable and everything works--lights, buses, taxis—the electricity is always there, the buses are not very far and taxis are frequent and available but somehow it also insulates you from that naked raw reality of life.”

Singapore’s urban jungle, in his eyes, also affects a writer’s sensibilities. “Poets and writers here audit their thoughts for public so I though I had to develop a different sort of skin here,” he says. “I like the Asian society but I needed to find another way to look at it. I realized that I took a lot of cabs and that sort of provided me with a way to look at life in Singapore.”

That’s how he began to think of writing poems on cabs, and The Laughing Buddha Cab Company came into being. This is not Chris’ first collection though. “I have a few collections earlier--one was a collection published in Australia in 1989, then I put out a chapbook in Singapore in 2003 but it was really a privately distributed thing,” he says. “This is my long overdue collection.” In addition, Chris co-edited a poetry anthology, The Penguin Book of Christmas Poems, and has three spoken word CDs to his credit, the latest being ‘Living in the Land of the Durian Eaters’.


Singapore soirees

Meanwhile, Chris became restless with the prevalent literary culture in Singapore. “After settling back from India in 2002, I saw events where poets were there for poets,” he says. He wanted to bring literature and poetry out of the closed doors to public venues.

“I went to America in 2003 to a writers' festival and saw the poetry slam and took it as a model for Singapore,” Chris says. “In Singapore, we have this kopitiam culture and I tried to marry poetry with that culture,” he says on his idea of the poetry slams. “Poets should meet with a non-poet audience and hold their interest. That's the challenge of poetry slam.”

Since 2003, he has been a full-time organizer of literary events, writing groups and, of course, the Poetry Slam in Singapore. All these activities, including the Writers’ Connect programme for emerging and established writers, are held under the aegis of Word Forward.

Word Forward has turned a publisher with The Laughing Buddha Cab Company, and two other poetry books by Marc Daniel Nair and Pooja Nansi. “Publishing and performance go together; I first needed to develop a sense of community,” he says. “Before publishing, we ran other programmes--poetry slam, writers connect, festivals, lots of creative programs in schools, we developed a national youth poetry slam league--we have been doing for the last two three years.”

And what has all these activities achieved? “I can't speak for others but from our points of view, I think we have added a necessary injection of energy into the scene,” he says. “Earlier, much of the literary activities were mystically invisible.”

Chris, with his life partner Savinder, have proved that a life committed to arts and literature can be built around here in Singapore. Now they are going beyond Singapore, exploring new horizons. They are soon starting a poetry slam in Malaysia, on the lines of the Singapore one. “As we have developed here, we have unconsciously become a model for others,” he says, with a grin of satisfaction.

An edited version of this story appeared in India Se, March 2008.

Impressions from a reading

I had been looking forward to Rana Dasgupta's reading ever since Deepika had informed me about it. Rana too was kind enough to drop me an email reminding me of the event. There was no way I could have given it a miss, even though I was working on that day.

Why was I interested in Rana Dasgupta?

To be frank, I have not read his debut novel, Tokyo Cancelled except in snatches. Like many other good novels, it lies unread in my list of must-read novels.

Was it the celebrity value then? The star power of a novelist? Maybe not. The star power of a novelist, seeing and listening to a writer about whom one had only read in the media and talked amongst friends, has got diluted over the years. He is among the dozens of young novelists that India produces on a regular basis year after year. He is not a Naipaul or a Rushdie, with many works and numerous awards under his belt. He has so far written only one novel. So why was I interested?

Rana is not a run of the mill author, I believed instinctively (unlike so many other young Indian writers crowding the scene today), that's why. I carried this impression after reading some of his pieces that appeared in newspapers and are available on his blog. Chucking a well-paying marketing job and globe-trotting lifestyle for the dead calm of a writerly life in Delhi is a gutsy decision for anyone to take. Rana had done that, and that impresses me most about him. "To decide to become a writer was an arrogant decision," he said during the one hour plus talk. There it is. I like this kind of stuff, when a writer says these kind of things, because when one talks like that, one knows that here is a man who understands what it means to be a writer, to decide to be a writer which comes with a certain obligation to the calling. That kind of seriousness in a writer is what impresses me most.

It took Naipaul five books to writer whenceupon he became sure of the fact that he had actually become a writer. To believe that you have become a writer, that you are a writer, is a big leap of faith. It is not a hollow pronouncement. It comes with certain givens that you have to respect and live with. That is very important to realise and I believed Rana was that kind of a Writer, a writer with a capital W.

Whatever passages Rana read from his forthcoming novel, tentatively called "Half Life" (a term taken from atomic physics, bears no connection to Naipaul's Half a Life), were mesmerising to say the least. In the reading, a retired, over 100-years-old, nearly blind methusaleh in Bulgaria takes in the view of the city from his window. The tapestry of images and sounds that Rana has woven is marvellous and reminded me of the prose of Borges, Marquez and Coetzee. It was sheer pleasure to hear him read those passages.

During the talk, peppered with innocuous yet perceptive questions from some of the students, Rana talked about many things. Why he decided to settle down in Delhi (love, conversations with a set of creatively-inclined friends), why did he name his novel Tokyo Cancelled (he didn't and it could have been NY Cancelled or London Cancelled but he wanted to shift the focus to an Asian setting for his tale of globalisation), how cinematic images inform his sense of setting a scene in his works (he mentioned a little known movie that showed New York's highways and bridges completely empty of people or vehicles, I forgot the name of the film), how he admires the short stories of Roald Dahl (when a kid asked him about his fav children's author) and what he was trying to do in his next novel (Half Life), due out in early 2009.

For a view from the other side of the table, read Deepika Shetty's post on the event. You will enjoy reading it.

Talk Singapore

In his blog, filmmaker Shekhar Kapur asks an interesting question: All of us have heard about scientists saying we use only 10% of our brains. So what is the other 90% doing?

Gossiping, he says.

Ninety percent of our brain is reserved for an art that we are fast losing in our hurried daily lives—the art of gossip.

This observation was very much in display when I first arrived in Singapore three years ago.

Singapore came across as a 'silent' city, a ghost town, despite all its progress and efficiency.

The entire city looked like a well-organised library, if you will, with proper indexing for each shelf, and a big sign hovering over in every reading room: Silence Please!

All the hustle and bustle of commuting was observed in silence. In the elevators, people observed a deathly silence, looking down on the floor or looking away from each other. In offices, people paid attention to their work and barely talked, let alone gossip.

If achieving human silence were the apogee of the civilizational process, then Singapore had perfected it.

After all, the Western civilization had taken centuries trying to get people to shut up. Alexander the Great’s armies were mesmerized to see him read a letter from his mother silently—because he alone knew how. After the dawn of Christianity, the ability not to vocalize, not to talk, was admired for centuries.

Silence was not just an achievement, it was a heavenly experience.

Didn’t Confucius say, in reply to his pupils’ enquiry of his request to not speak, “Heaven does not speak. Look at how productive it is.”

But this was a huge contrast from my home country: the land of "argumentative" Indians. There, every hour of work was compensated with fifteen minutes of discussion on the latest cricket match or Bollywood.

And all this talking didn’t do the Indians any harm. It has rather resulted in a flourishing culture of democratic media, literature and cinema. Now you should know why India has thousands of newspapers, hundreds of news channels and an army of writers and filmmakers, some of whom have gone all over the world winning some big awards.

Conversely, a highly successful Singapore made me wonder: Why is this prosperous nation wrapped in such a deafening silence? What has taken the conversation away from them? And what is the psychological toll of this silence?

It is not that silence is engraved in the genes of Singaporeans. As journalist Ravi Veloo has noted elsewhere, Singapore's best ideas were birthed by conversation and debate: a nation of tenants (Singapore's immigrants) threw out the landlords (the British) and this overthrowing had its genesis in the revolutionary conversations that Lew Kuan Yew and his friends had had in the UK while studying there.

So, where has that conversation vanished now?

Forget those ground-breaking conversations. There's not even that small talk. If a stranger uttered as much as a hello to a Singaporean or wished her a good day, she would have a culture shock. How? Why?

I think it can all be pinned down to two major factors: ease of living and a general sense of self-censorship.

It is like what Shekhar Kapur feels about London: “…there is an ease of living, an addiction to security, a secure tomorrow, a secure future - that is almost cloying.”

In that sense, Singapore is like London. The government does so much for its people that there is nothing left for them to figure out on their own. They are born into this life of ease, where each step has been planned for them to follow, and they snugly fit into this lifestyle. Just follow la! That mantra leaves little room for them to be creative and questioning. And all talks start with questions, big or small. The innocent 'how are yous' can lead to a great conversation.

Then there's too much emphasis on political correctness. That stifles many a conversation right in the beginning.

That brings us to the other factor of censorship or rather self-censorship. Many of the interesting topics of conversation lie outside the so called "OB markers". Interestingly, this censorship may not have come from the government--people inflict it upon themselves. And that's it. They won't cross the unseen line. Result? No conversation.

I asked one of my Singaporean colleagues this question. Why don't people talk here?

It's all about attitude, she said. Youngsters don't talk because it is considered so ‘uncool’. You do your own thing--listen to your ipod, read your books, do your own stuff.

On the other hand, she explained, the office culture here is such that talking tantamounts to negligence of work. If you are seen to be talking often, you are marked as an unserious employee.

And which Singaporean would run the risk of earning that label? Because of the constant inflow of "foreign talent" they are too scared to upset their bosses even at a miniscule level lest they should get "replaced" by a cheap but efficient foreign worker--their carefully planned installment-based life might come unstuck.

But that's not the complete picture. Another form of conversation does exist here.

It exists in the chat rooms, forums and the blogosphere.

A digital, not a verbal, form of conversation. An image that is a befitting metaphor for a high-tech nation.

But is that same as a live, face to face conversation? I don’t think so.

In a face to face conversation, there is physical closeness. It makes us feel less isolated as humans. Also, it is a “responsible” conversation as we cannot hide behind the anonymity of chat rooms and forums.

And what is the implication of this lack of face to face conversation, talk and gossiping?

Again I am tempted to quote Kapur as he puts it so succinctly: “The ability to gossip is the ability to indulge in a sense of humour. We lose that and we are lost.”

We are human beings, not dolphins. We need to talk, gossip, tell each other our stories. In fact, American novelist Henry James went to the extent of saying that conversations, exchanges of words, are all that matters.

All nations are talking. Singaporeans too need to talk or they will get lost in the babble of the humanity at large. Not a pretty choice for an otherwise proud nation, right?

An edited version of this piece appeared in The Weekend Today on July 7, 2007.

Update: Here's a reader's comments on my piece that appeared in Today.