Thu 9 Aug 2007
Today I celebrate, along with four million others living here, the 42nd anniversary of the independence of Singapore. I first moved here, on a company posting in 1973, eight years after Singapore proclaimed independence. Since then, I have conducted management consulting assignments in seven of the ASEAN countries. I became a citizen in 1995.
Although we are referred to as a tiny red dot island, we have shown to the rest of the world how a dedicated political leadership and multi-ethnic work force can unite to transform this country from a developing into a developed country in less than one generation.
Yes, we do gripe about a lot of things (mainly trivial) but, from the point of view of one who wasn’t born and did not grow up in Singapore, we have many things to be proud about our system of government.
I would like to compare Singapore with another great city-state in the Ancient World, Athens. The historian, Thucydides, documented for posterity a stirring speech made by Pericles, the legendary general and statesman of Athens, in 431 B.C. This was at the end of the first year of the Peleponnesian War which consumed many Athenian lives.
Here, then, are excerpts from that funeral oration. What Pericles declared almost 2,500 years ago bears, to me, an uncanny similarity to the Singapore of today.