The Singapore formula for ethnic harmony

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It is dia­bol­i­cally sim­ple — just don’t talk about it. When you don’t raise race issues, they won’t sur­face, and every­one is none the wiser, and Con­fu­cius did say some­thing to the effect of doing away with knowl­edge and grief con­se­quen­tially not being known.

It makes me really upset to hear about the Police dis­al­low­ing a Speak­ers’ Cor­ner appli­ca­tion to speak about the CAAS not hav­ing Tamil lan­guage sign­boards at Changi Air­port (they have Eng­lish, Chi­nese, Malay and Japan­ese ones).

I thought there was some lib­er­al­i­sa­tion or some­thing, and that the National Parks were in charge now, but appar­ently, it now seems if the Parks receive appli­ca­tions with key­words like “race”, “lan­guage” and “reli­gion”, they refer them to the police to be disallowed.

When pressed, the CAAS, who, bless their hearts, are doing a fine job of run­ning air­ports, but who need PR peo­ple des­per­ately, appar­ently responded like this:

The CAAS replied last week that direc­tional sign­boards were pre­vi­ously only in Eng­lish. From April 2005, they were also in Chi­nese, Malay and Japan­ese, to cater to the large num­ber of vis­i­tors speak­ing those languages.

As Eng­lish was India’s sec­ond lan­guage, it was advised by the Sin­ga­pore Tourism Board that Eng­lish signs were sufficient.

Bravo, Sin­ga­pore Tourism Board too. So Eng­lish comes sec­ond, between Hindi and Tamil, issit?

I hear they’re chang­ing the lines of the National Pledge:

...pledge our­selves as one united peo­ple who will not talk about race, lan­guage or reli­gion… to achieve hap­pi­ness, pros­per­ity and progress for our nation.

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