As regards mr brown

There is a con­spic­u­ous void in your friendly TODAY news­pa­per this morning.

I was asked sev­eral times this week what I feel about mr brown’s TODAY col­umn being sus­pended, and what I feel about MICA’s let­ter to TODAY.

While I’ve declined almost all inter­view requests, I think it’s only fair that I say some­thing here.

When I first heard about the mat­ter on Sun­day night, I was shocked, scared and then when I went to work on Mon­day morn­ing, puz­zled as to why any­one in the gov­ern­ment would react so strongly to his col­umn last Fri­day, which I found to be pretty-run-of-the-mill as far as his writ­ing was concerned.

Later in the week, we received news that Kin Mun’s col­umn would be sus­pended indef­i­nitely. There was no rea­son given, but I kinda expected that by this time.

I was heart­ened by the del­uge of com­ments on Kin Mun’s blog, and dis­ap­pointed by the lack of response in the newspaper’s Voices sec­tion, where columns and let­ters from the pub­lic are usu­ally published.

How­ever, there was work to keep us busy still, (and for those who aren’t in the know yet, Kin Mun and I are col­leagues in our lit­tle busi­ness ven­ture), and our “I am Sin­ga­porean” pod­cast series meme to do for the lead-up to National Day.

But I was a lit­tle scared, that our frag­ile lit­tle busi­ness might be affected by the fall­out from this issue, and that spon­sors might pull out from our show, which is just begin­ning to chug along at a nice lit­tle pace.

I’ve often said that we’re in the busi­ness of enter­tain­ment — pod­cast­ing and writ­ing to enter­tain. But it wouldn’t be true to pro­fess that we don’t have an opin­ion on seri­ous mat­ters. We do, and some­times, we let our opin­ions be heard. And If our opin­ions are skewed one angle or another, that’s just because they are opinions.

At first, I felt for Kin Mun, that he had been labeled a par­ti­san player. Then I asked him, ‘Nabeh, how come play par­ti­san never call me?’.

We dis­cussed this fur­ther, over lunch and din­ner, and I con­vinced him that MICA and the pow­ers that be were really after me, see­ing as I am often mis­taken for mr brown.

So he, and our other busi­ness part­ners decided that it’d be a good thing if I car­ried on writ­ing for TODAY for as long as our edi­tors deemed my con­tri­bu­tions good enough for their read­ers to enjoy.

That way, if MICA were to send another let­ter addressed to TODAY, refer­ring to the anony­mous mr brown, then we’d really know that the pow­ers that be were really after me right from the beginning.

Besides, we need the money now more than ever.

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