Life Is A Whack And We Created It

I recall the moments of tenderness I shared with my father. On my mother's exhortation, I would wait for him at the bus stand, umbrella in arm, on rainy days, waiting to shelter him the distance home.

This bus-stand still stands along the Jalan Toa Payoh highway, though it has been made over.

I know from my mother that I was the son he coveted after a string of girls. He would treat us to visits to flea markets on occasions and it was purchases of stickers for our collection albums and sweets and candies.

It has been quite a week. My property hunt led me face to face with more real estate vultures. Just yesterday I sat down at Northpoint's McDonalds, marvelling at all the man-made and economic structures we have instituted, making our lives one miserable wreck. I really wonder who is it that made it the way it is. What right do they have in making it the way it is. If it is for civil order and for the common good, I don't see why not. But they were instruments made to profiteer, pitting one against another.

And yes, I saw a whole troupe of girls while at it. I hope this does not confirm fears and reaffirm suspicion of a higher female-to-male birth ratio. We are really sending ourselves to the gallows if this is the case.

And woe befalls a purchaser in your property quest if you do not take heed of caveats, which in property terms, mean a totally different thingy from caveat in an everyday usage. But the real loophole here is someone can lodge a caveat which is only evident the same day or the next day by 9am, thereby creating various claimnants to the aforesaid property. It would be a pure and simple case of cheating and I want to know if the law protects me from that if I should ever file a police report, with time-stamping as evidence of my lien.

So I wrote to Mr Housing Authority pleading for a roof over me head and wrote thus: "Please Mr Authority, I don wanna be homeless, cavorting in the park with stray female cats caterwauling on heat or bathing in the public bathrooms."

Christ! It seems like aluminium so exalted for its light-weight, porous and tensile strength is now derided as a holding rivet for our public housing windows. Engineers, learn your physical properties of metals correctly and use this in a practical context. The same goes for mathematicians who teach scale representations of maps.

An ordinance had been repealed or revised. If so, can we have its revised edition clearly laid out for our perusal or if repealed, the subsititue by which it has been replaced if any? Cases in point, the Stamp Duties Act and the Pensions Act.

And I am not sure, apart from Asia and in particular South-East Asia, if living has been made a hotter and more contentious issue. Condominiums, flats, apartments, bungalows, semi-detached and terrace properties. All socially stratify and divide people worlds apart.

It is like education. Integrated programmes, gifted programmes and special assistance program schools. What's more with autonomous and independent ones! I don't see as much "gifted" nor "special" traits the graduates exhibit sometimes which warrant their being so labeled. Can they dissect issues and bring forth the salient features or critique as well? Have they examined social issues and have had healthy discourse in the due process?

So it is with air travel (first class, business class and economy class), hotels (deluxe and standard) and food (hawker fare, fast foods, food-courts, restaurants and hotels). What must surely have begun as air flight meant to surmount physical terrain and ease travel time have degenerated into socially stratified travel. Homes as shelter and food as sustenance have similarly been debased.

Read this if you are the future professional of the world. A checklist to take with you before you embark on your chosen vocation and swearing by the Hippocratic oath.

If you are an engineer or architect,have you designed and planned your buildings meaningfully, functionally and aesthetically? If you are a teacher, have you touched lives, enriched them or liberated the minds and spirits? If you are a judge, legislator or lawyer, have you applied, other than the tenets of law, your experiences, the practicalities and unique circumstances surrounding the case rather than an across-the-board 'stick-by-the-book' one? If you are a doctor, have you healed and touched psychologically, more so than a mere medicinal dispensation that cures only physiologically. That human touch.

Life is one big whack and we messed it up.