Never retire

So the Minister Mentor has spoken.

With those words 'Never retire', he has consigned whatever hope I have of enjoying my retirement in bliss to the rubbish bin. And mind you, my retirement is about 36 years away if you base it on the impending retirement age being raised to 67 by legislation in 2012.

MM has plumbed the depths of his (dark) conscience and articulated what he genuinely believes and feels - that Singaporeans are just digits. Singaporeans are just the donkeys pulling the cart towards the final destination that is bright, shiny GDP numbers. So as digits, donkeys and what-have-you, we proles will have to slog, slave and shed (sweat, blood and tears) just to continue building the monolith that is Singapore Inc and supporting the pantheon of the intellectual class ruling over us.

In fact MM doesn't even need to utilise the platform of the sycophantic national broadsheet to give us his hi-falutin two cents' worth. If he deigns to look around, he would have seen his elderly fellow Singaporeans picking cardboard, scavenging used drink cans, and cleaning up after him in the foodcourt. He could have seen old uncle or aunty if he could deign to see him/her when he steps into the toilet at your neighbourhood market on one of his many shake-the-hands-with-the-hoi-polloi sessions.

But for some people sequestered in the comfort of their ivory tower, getting down from the moral (or socio-economic) high horse can be tough, even for an 86-year-old in yellowing dotage drawing a fat pay cheque of S$3 million per annum. With his rheumy and weakening eyesight, I doubt MM can register the sight of his fellow hoary counterparts working their asses off for a pittance as (pick one) cardboard collector/scavenger/cleaner/insert some other lowly, underpaid job fit for a senior citizen. Hang on, I don't even think MM has eaten in a foodcourt or stepped into a neighbourhood market's toilet once in his life.

No wonder MM didn't know about the plight of the poor elderly Singaporeans scrounging a living in metronomic Singapore Inc. The old, lowly-educated, the proles, the true-blue Singaporeans, the hoi polloi - we work our asses off to grease the machinery of Singapore Inc so it runs like clockwork as we tick into the sunset of bright shiny GDP figures.

So, as you come to the twilight of your working life, and start to contemplate retirement, remember MM's words - never retire.

Retirement is not an option for proles like you.

The unbearable idleness of being

Ok, Milan Kundera, I am sorry to vandalise/besmirch/desecrate your opus of a similar-sounding name by ripping it off (almost) and using it as a heading for this blog entry. Blame my lack of creativity, or a surfeit of campiness that gets worse with advancing age.

So it's August. A few more days to come, and Singapore turns a grand old 45, and I will mark two years in this GLC I am working at. How time flies. I could still remember that frisson of excitement when I stepped into this almost swanky building for my first day of work. I thought of new vistas opening up on the career landscape, imbibing new knowledge and finally achieving something.

Alas, the verdure of youthful (deluded?) passion and (misplaced?) optimism is destined to weather into a wasteland of dead hopes and dashed dreams. So two years of disappointments have accrued with each passing day that's somewhere between Dante's different levels of Hell.

I suppose when you are scrapping rock bottom, the only way is to go up. And hopefully, I will get my wings when I get that piece of paper called a degree and worth a handy $14K come the next August.

Until then, leave me alone as I stagnate/sink/simmer in this unbearable idleness of being a nondescript, underachieving and brain-dead office worker.

Will there be change?

It is unfair to label me as one of the easily disgruntled, rebellious and ungrateful younger-generation Singaporeans. True, I did not live through the turbulent days that followed our painful separation from Malaysia. True, I did not experience the traumatising period that was the Japanese invasion and subsequent occupation of Singapore.

I grew up in a cossetted and comfortable environment. I grew up in a time of peace and stability. But today, at the age of 31, there is seriously something wrong with my country and it is not the air.

The flags adorned on HDB blocks, fluttering in the gentle breeze - they scream patriotism in loud capital letters. Corrinne May goes on TV exhorting me to sing a song for Singapore together with her. The preparations are afoot for another NDP extravaganza.

Scrape away at the facade of this treacly display of patriotism and nationalism, and you find nothing. Just a hollowness that is carved and burnt into my psyche.

To paraphrase Marcellus in Shakespeare's Hamlet, something's rotten in the state of Singapore, and no, that putrefaction does not stem from the murky ochre flood waters submerging Orchard Road now.

The rot lies deeper. The rot is the festering sore of apathy that is our (uniquely) Singaporean psyche of taking things for granted and living in the comfort zone.

Change, we must, as a people - before it's too late.

Of cephalopods, birds and a leather ball

The gates have swung close in the prepossessing Soccer City Stadium.

The last dregs of humanity have seeped away and melded into the oblivion of everyday life.

The admixture of sweat, blood, and tears on the lush green carpet must have long evaporated into the cool night air of Johannesburg, the epicentre of a month-long antipodean revelry.

The mindless and tuneless drone of the vuvuzelas has disintegrated in the ether of the environment, our memories.

A lone Jabulani football rests desolate near the corner flag where Xavi's boot had graced moments ago. Moments that are so far away, and moments that have long yellowed away in my memory, our memories and the world's memory.

World Cup 2010 is no more. Booted aside by the short attention span of our memories, the exigencies and responsibilities of everyday life; by the overarching fame of the octopus, Paul and his animal kameraden, Mani, the parakeet.

So long Xavi, Busquets, Sneijder, Suarez, Mueller, Forlan.

Punch drunk lassitude

Counting down. A matter of months, translated to weeks and further broken down into days, before atomising into the minuscule binary equivalents like seconds, microseconds and nanoseconds?

March 2011 - the first milestone. When I will have completed my 1.5 year of part-time tertiary education.

August 2011 - the second milestone. Get that bloody degree, stick on the jodhpurs and gallop out of here pronto.

Getting old

Gawd, it's awful going through the revolving door of AGE and facing the 31st year of your existence.

Insurance premiums shoot through the roof; your joints creak and get crankier; you find yourself sitting in class with a bunch of tykes plugged into I-phone, I-pod and I-whatever...

Seriously, what has happened to those carefree days of my childhood?