8.22pm that night

8.22pm that night was a charade that was never seen before.

You look at the idiot box and you see those people clad in pristine and unbesmirched white pressing their clenched left fists against their hearts.

Their mouths move, as the innumerable pixels and dots of the idiot box congregate into an image. An image of unbridled hypocrisy.

Mouths moving and jaws manoeuvring, and somewhere an Eton-educated tongue rolling to pronounce 'pr' as in 'pr..osperity'...What would you give to smash the idiot box to smithereens and condemn that execrable image of men and women in white reciting falsehoods?

Long ago, we were told to recite the Pledge.

We were kids in shorts and mugging for PSLE. We were adolescents in secondary school experiencing the nascent pricking of a first crush. We were just a couple of years shy of 21, either in polytechnic, ITE or a junior college, wondering what 21 would bring us. We all recited the Pledge then. With gusto, with boredom, with fervour, with languidity.

Today, I've all but forgotten the words of the pledge. There is no capitalisation for the pledge because somewhere the essence of it has diminished. The words, if you do remember, ring hollow or leave you with a bitter taste. You would sooner tell a white lie to assuage your miffed love, than to recite a falsehood, a phalanx of oxymorons, an exercise in sophistry.

8.22 has come and passed. Under the whirring air-conditioning of the public bus that I am on, nobody has moved the slightest finger much less clenched his or her fist to regurgitate the words to the pledge.

There was no idiot box aka TV Mobile on the bus for me to witness hypocrisy in motion.

And for that, I thank God.