The day we became a world class city

Yesterday, Singapore experienced an epochal moment in its history as a wannabe world class city. We had a massive transport breakdown on our much vaunted MRT system.

Now, why am I calling this a massive moment for Singapore, despite the terrible inconvenience it caused? Now, I was one of those 127,000 people inconvenienced by it, so I know exactly what I am talking about.

No major city in the world has anything less than a screwed up transport system. London has strikes on the Tube so often nobody bats an eyelid when it happens. The trains in Paris are as slow as they are filthy. The trains in Tokyo need special employees to pack people in, because they are that full. Even looking across at our neighbour across the straits, they have carriages that are female only but males still find their way in, because the only thing worse than a crowded train full of females is a crowded train full of females and one male. For the females of course.

So in a sense, we have finally arrived.

I am not surprised at all that Singaporeans made a huge uproar about it, but I find it ridiculous that the ones making the loudest noise are not the ones who were actually stuck in the trains. Sure it was uncomfortable, stuffy, and very unfortunate, but anyone who has lived in anywhere that is not Singapore will know that occasional breakdowns are par for the course in any major city, where the transport system is overstrained.

Many of the people affected by the breakdown did not complain. Not because they didn't want to. Not because they didn't suffer. But because they knew that this was a one-off, which in every sense it was. Many of these people have been in a Singapore where there wasn't even an MRT, and that will always be infinitely worse.

It's really uniquely Singaporean behaviour. KPKB until the cows come home when shit happens but when it comes to the time to do something about it, keep quiet.

Honestly, this is still not anywhere near ridiculous. Not to say that SMRT has never tried to be ridiculous, as evidenced by this video. To this day, the name "Roger Foo" is still a dirty word.



I've been in Singapore 25 years, and this is the first time I've seen a breakdown like this at such a scale. I take it as a blessing, because I have had 25 fuss-free years before this. We have actually had it so good all this while that such a breakdown was too much for us pampered citizens of Singapore to bear.

Not to say that it is becoming of any transport system of course. SMRT did badly here in responding slowly and not updating the public on just what the hell was going on. I spent almost an hour in Raffles Place waiting for a train that never came because I had no idea whether it was going to or not, and I still had a class to attend. And the timing of this breakdown was really unfortunate, coming right after the fare increases for taxis.

For those railing about taxi fare increases, they fail to realise that it was inevitable. As it is, taxi drivers barely make $2500 a month on average, and they still have families to feed. Driving a taxi is a very hard job, and it is exhausting. Making the fares too cheap is actually dangerous for the drivers, who will have to drive extra hours on congested and unpredictable roads to make up for their rental shortfalls. And ultimately, it will be dangerous for the commuters, because they are the ones taking the taxis with the tired drivers. Think about that.

Taxis are a luxury good and not a basic necessity. If you want to travel in comfort in a crowded city, be prepared to pay for it. Otherwise, take the bus. I work till 10pm almost every day and I still take the mrt, bus and walk. I don't make excuses for it. I know I don't earn enough to take that many taxis.

In any case, we have bigger things to worry about.



Prease la, don't come out onto the streets. Stay in the boys home. Prease la.

Things to do before you die - #02 Attend a Girls Generation concert

I've seen people ask this question sometimes - What's so great about kpop? And sure kpop has many critics, of its shiny packaged nature, about how it is an endless assembly line of cookie cutter idols and autotuned songs set to dance beats.

All I can say is, sometimes you shouldn't take life that seriously. I like kpop because it is unabashedly superficial. The industry doesn't even bother trying to hide that it is a machine of dramatically over the top dance friendly singalong songs sung by impossibly good looking idols. And in a sense sometimes that is one mother kind of awesome. It's supposed to be entertainment anyway, it might as well look good.

One mother kind of awesome. No actually, nine kinds of awesome. Bring the girls out!

People who know me will know that I'm a very rational person who has the tendency to do random crazy shit, as the entry before this will testify. One of the lines I hear most often is this - "You totally do not look like a kpop fan." By this, I take it to mean that I am not a 16 year old girl wearing braces. Which is a good thing. 16 year old girls are responsible for one of the greatest musical atrocities of the world, also known as Justin Bieber. Also, I need to maintain some form of credibility in the corporate jungle.

This tendency for craziness though saw me queuing in a line for the concert several hours before. However, my friends who were far greater fans than I was had saved a place for me, thankfully, or I'd probably never have made it. Just to give an idea, the tickets for this concert sold out within several hours. And the queue for the mosh pit went an entire round around the whole indoor stadium. Have you ever seen the size of the indoor stadium? Now imagine a two rows of people, seated, going one whole round around it. That's how many people there were just going into one mosh pit. And there were three. A mindboggling number of pink warriors.

It was quite a motley group I queued with though, one of which was a 16 year old girl (but of course), who told me before the concert that she thought she was going to die of excitement because her heart was beating very fast. I thought that she was being crazy, until one of the guys in the group told me the same thing. It was then I realised that maybe I was the only relatively sane one still around.

This same 16-year-old girl would later make one of the most epic statements of the concert. But that's for later.

We were quite lucky, because our group was apparently the last in line of the first group to enter the mosh pit. So when we got into the mosh pit, we were in the 2nd row. You know those crazy people you see on the news screaming their lungs out at their fans? Yeah, we were just right behind them. We were nowhere less crazy, but at least the camera wouldn't pick us up that easily. In front of me was a bunch of young girls, and behind me was a bunch of Indonesian fans who had flown all the way to Singapore just to catch Girls Generation.

Now, I have attended my fair share of concerts. Even concerts filled with screaming girls brandishing lightsticks. But this was easily on another plane. It was a concert filled with the craziest most high fans I have ever seen. And not all of them were girls. Many of them were guys screaming like girls.

The moment Taeyeon opened the first line, the crowd went nuts. If they weren't nuts enough when that metal cage opened to reveal the nine girls, they reached a new level of nuts that superceded anything before it. In terms of energy level, it was like "RELEASE THE KRAKEN!"

The Indonesian guys behind me were screaming but in a manly voice so they sounded like silverback gorillas in heat, and they started shoving. But I could hardly have given a shit. From where I was, at that distance, at that angle, all I could see was pairs and pairs of perfectly straight legs. It quickly became apparent why the guys were shoving. It is one thing watching the music videos, and another actually seeing those live. At least you know for sure that it isn't some camera trick. These girls really do have ridiculous legs.



This video is actually from the 2nd night that I didn't watch but the first night had the same performance, only that the security guy was being a bastard so nobody got good fancams of it. The concert had a strict no photography or videography policy, which meant that the security guy was walking around asking people to read the English on his stupid sign, when nobody gave a flying fuck because all people wanted to listen to at that point was Korean.

And the concert sure didn't pull out any stops. At certain points they had the girls suspended in mid air, and at another they had them on a giant pink boat. And there were countless other songs and solos.

You might wonder, why was everything pink? Well, that was their colour. And it sure didn't stop many guys wearing pink shirts to show their love for them. Well, I am a fan, but even as a fan I draw certain lines. No pink T-shirts. Otherwise, it was a good thing that none of you saw me there, because I was a screaming pink lightstick waving madman chanting in Korean. You only live once, so for 3 hours of your life, you can afford to be a pink lightstick waving madman chanting in Korean. Yes, I'm rationalising it. And no, you are not allowed to show me why that is faulty logic.

And here's where the epic line comes in. Somewhere after that song above, the 16 year old girl on my left tapped my shoulder and pointed to the lightstick I was waving like an idiot.
She said: "You have the most special stick. It's pink and shiny and it flashes."

Innuendo aside, that felt exactly like I had been given an honorary membership to the sisterhood of the unicorn and pony club. Heck, man enough to wave pink lightstick, as long as no one I know ever sees me doing it.

Things to do before you die - #01 Run a vertical marathon

Ever since I've started working I've realised that I don't have a lot of time left to do all the things I want to do in this life. Which sucks, because you only live once. It is really difficult to dream of living the life that you wish you were living, when you only have 14 days of leave a year, and many debts to pay.


But while I was copywriting an annual report for an oil company, I stumbled upon a series of quotes that inspired me. One quote in particular, stayed with me, and I ruminated about it over days, in the empty hours between busy periods at work. It simply said: "The greatest of journeys can be planned on the back of an envelope."

It got me wondering if it was time to put into action all those things I've always wanted to do, but never got down to. Another of my favourite quotes also came into mind, one that I got teased about, but I shall just write it here nonetheless - "anything worth striving for is worth measuring." Because if you can't even be bothered to put pen to paper to track how far you're going, you don't really want to do something.

So I bit the bullet. And here is one of the things I have always wanted to do, that I finally did -Climb the Swisshotel.

Before I did it. there were plenty of naysayers. I got a lot of stick from my own family, who said that I was crazy, that I'd be better off using the time to prepare for my finance papers, that I'd never make it to the top of the tower because I was too fat to run. (that one really rankled, because I've rediscovered a fondness for pastries and dessert and it was starting to show) And none of my friends wanted to do it either, because they didn't see the point of it. Pay money to torture yourself? I'd rather enjoy, they said.

But one thing I've learnt through this entire experience is, it is your life to lead, and your decisions alone will determine the kind of life you live.

It wasn't easy preparing for the race though. I tried training after work, which was okay at first, till work got a little too crazy and started ending at 8pm every day, by which time there was just enough time for me to get home, cram in a bit of studying, and go to sleep. So it became training sessions at 7am in the mornings, before most people got up for work.

And it was really tough getting up every morning. Some mornings, I hated myself. I asked myself why I put myself through all this. And the only answer I had was because I knew I had to do it. Some days I ran up a whole HDB block three times, others I swam, or hit the gym. Really, sometimes it is a lot easier when you stop asking yourself stuff and just do it.

But as the best of plans always do, they tend to go awry. I got hit with an extra caseload of stuff at work just a week before the race, which saw me going home at 10pm most days, a bit earlier if I was lucky, which effectively put an end to all training. And perhaps due to the long hours, I also got a little sick.

So on Sunday morning, the day of the marathon, I was carrying a slight cold, and wondering if I was going to make it. But somewhere inside me was also the rush that I was finally about to do something I'd always dreamed of.

The run itself took a long time to start. There were waves of participants to flag off, and my category didn't start till 10am, a full 3 hours after I'd collected my race pack. And throughout the wait I looked around at all the faces of the different people from all walks of life who had come to put themselves through this. They were normal people, just like you and me. The only difference was, they had decided that on this morning, they were going to run up the hotel, and they would not stop till they were on the helipad atop those 73 floors. I told myself I wouldn't stop either.

The race itself seems unreal, now that I've finished it. I sprinted up the first 10 floors, and by the 20th I realised that maybe this was going to be a lot harder than I'd thought. And at that point, there were still 53 more floors to go. Every 10 floors, I had just one thought on my mind. And that thought was simply to quit and just take the lift down to the first floor. The urge to quit was like an itch that wouldn't go away, and it only intensified with each floor I climbed. At one point I literally felt like the voice in my head was screaming.

By the 40th floor, I couldn't breathe because the stairwell was stuffy and I'd been running at full speed. And to give a sense of scale, 40 floors is running up the average HDB flat maybe 3-4 times. And after another 10 floors, my legs and my brain were literally sending mixed messages. In my mind I would be telling my legs to climb, but somehow lifting them felt like moving blocks of lead. And sometimes, I could feel myself willing my legs to move, only to see them remain stationary. But at that point that was no way out but up. I saw many other tired guys around me, all pushing themselves a step at a time, some of them panting heavily, others leaning hard on the railings. Some of them even puked. And there were others who stopped and sat on the stairs, prompting the race marshals to ask if they were okay.

I realised that this was the part of the race that no one saw. Every one sees the happy faces at the start line, and the relieved ones at the finish, but no one sees the pain and suffering of the runners in between. And in this stairwell, stuffy, hot and seemingly neverending, I was coming face to face with pure unbridled suffering, that of my own, and the hundreds of others who had decided to run this punishing course with me. In a way, it was like a metaphor for life itself, for any journey worth undertaking. You sign up to do something, you do it, suffering like shit along the way, and at the end, it's a massive relief and you feel like you've accomplished something. Sometimes nobody notices, but hell it feels massive ticking that thing off your bucket list.

Indeed, reaching the top was a relief, but it was nothing like I'd expected. I'd always imagined myself running past the finishing line with a big smile and arms raised, but the actual event itself was very different. All I could think of was "this is almost over", and all I could feel was pain. But the amazing thing was, the pain disappeared when I saw the finishing line itself. Somehow my legs started listening to me again, which was amazing considering they'd not been doing so for the better part of 10 minutes, and I sprinted past the finishing line into the ridiculously strong sunlight atop the helipad.

One of the female marshals put a medal on my neck, and I ran towards the edge of the helipad thinking "What a wonderful view" before making a quick getaway back down into the shade. You might be wondering why the hell I ran all the way up there just to get right out of the place, but I can tell you, after a run like that, the last thing you really want is to be under sunlight so strong you can hardly open your eyes. The sunlight made me feel so faint I thought I was going to do so right on that rooftop, and if I had done that it would probably have made the papers and I would never have heard the end of it from my family. So all I could think was, even if I'm going to faint here today I'm not going to faint up here where the whole world can see me. I will run into some dark corner of the swisshotel and faint. It was amazing that even in a time like that I could still think of saving face.

And so that was it. The whole run took just 18 minutes, a little slower than I'd wanted, but finishing it was what really mattered. And the funny part was, after I did the run, my family members couldn't stop telling other people about it. Well, at least it wasn't about how their son ended up passing out on the rooftop.

"This medal certifies you as a veritable pain lover. Some people love lasagna, others love prata, you fucking ran up 73 floors. Congratulations. You're batshit insane, and you have a chunk of metal to prove it. Booyah."

Now, for #2.