Sunday, July 19, 2009

The hidden ugly side of Singapore

Vijay Kumar Jul 3, 09 6:48pm
Source: Malaysiakini
In between the glamarous buildings and shoppings complexes of this city state, there is huge suffering that the world has never seen. Something that the Singapore government or media will try to hide from the rest of the world. And this is the lives of 80 percent of ‘true’ Singaporeans who live in the republic’s Housing Development Board (low cost) flats.
I, like many young youths, went looking for a better future in this Lion City of opportunity, After four years of working experience in Kuala Lumpur. It was my first experience outside Malaysia and I was very happy to be offered a job in Singapore with a basic salary of S$3,500. Then, with huge hopes, I started looking for a master bedroom to rent being single. I finally got a master bedroom in Clementi for S$700 a month but only after being rejected by many other landlords for being Indian.
The ensuing eight- month ordeal that I spent in this HDB flat really opened my mind to what Singapore is for those who can't earn. It made me ask if this is the type of development that I ever wanted in my country Malaysia. This is the first time that I felt gifted to be born in Malaysia. Anyway, I lived with a family of three (husband, wife with one daughter) who rented out their master bedroom to me while they slept in the common room.
It was a three-room flat (but unlike in Malaysia, a three-room flat has only two bedrooms). I did not believe it was the master bedroom that I was staying in until I went into the other room and saw that there is no attached bathroom there. I was given a bed and a mattress and also two fans. Then I noticed that the couple with their daughter sleeping on the floor with a thin mattress in the other room. Not even a fan in that room. Both husband and wife are born Singaporeans and were employed.
It was after one month that I realised that the daughter was not going to school regularly and most of the time there would be a quarrel in the early morning between the father and daughter as there was not enough money to pay for the bus to go to school. There were times when the daughter was very sick and father had no money to take her to see a doctor. It was a real pain in the heart to hear a small girl suffering through the thin walls of this HDB flat. It was unbelievable for me to see this happening in this ultra-modern city.
It took me another two months to realise that what was happening in this flat was not an isolated case of urban poverty in Singapore. It was every where in those HDB flats. There was a Chinese neighbour (an elderly man) and his son had no money to get a taxi to send his father to the clinic for daily diabetic wound-dressing. I soon understood that poverty in Singapore transcends racial boundaries. The whole family of my landlord got a shock that I own a car in Malaysia. My landlord would keep pestering me every time I come back to Malaysia to bring my car over so that his whole family could go sightseeing in Singapore. In all my life, I never believed people in a developed country like Singapore would ever consider car ownership a privelege.
Three months later, one fine day, I came back home and realised that there was no electricity in the house. This time, my landlord did not have the money to pay for the utility bills. I was back in the Stone Age, using candles. This lasted for days until finally he borrowed money from somewhere and settled the bills. My landlord as a person I have known during that period never come back drunk or looked like a gambler. He had to pay for his mother’s medical expenses, that much I know. This was the time in my life when I learned what is was like to live in that poor quality HDB flat, drying clothes in the rooms and listening to what the couple talked about in the next room via the thin walls.
It was this time in life that made me to think, ‘Is this what I want Malaysia to be? For those who talk great or look up to Singapore's success, have they ever come and lived in Singapore like I how I did? Have you seen a HDB flat and how it looks like? Bring your whole family for a dinner using public transport and then rush to catch the last bus. Is this what a 10% growth rate a year is about that we want boast? Does this growth figures mean anything in the first place? Do we want to open our country to expats so that they can progress at the expense of our own Malaysians? Do we want to ‘progress’ to a level that even our children can't buy a house in our own land?
Last, I ask myself. Do we Malaysians look at GDP growth as the only measure to choose our government or are we much more matured than that? Achievement at whose expense?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

And yet the ungrateful species still complaining and complaining...no one barred u from leaving Malaysia..

Smiling Sukri said...

Malaysia is a lucky land but getting deteriorated.
Let learn the lesson and make our country a better place to live.

[i] said...

every country ada good and bad... tapi tak semestinya kita just let the bad to consume us.

kalau satu perkataan yg boleh mencerminkan govt nowadays = greedy.

Adzimi said...

I think asking the 'ungrateful' people to leave Malaysia is counterproductive to making our country a better place for all of us. We are Malaysians, we all love our country, i think it is a direct insult, at least that is how i would feel, if someone were to call me unpatriotic and asks me to leave my beloved home country. Lets face it, there's so much potential wasted in our beloved home land. We are rich in resource, so much richer compared to other modern nations, yet our income and quality of living is so far apart. I believe we should learn the best that we can take from other nations to improve the standard of living here. It may be true on the problem that the writer wrote about Singapore, who knows, but we also have our own share of poverty, every country has this problem. Being a developed nation doesnt mean that you're completely free of poverty. Look at Europe and US, unemployment and homeless are still abound of course. There are a lot of factors why there are poverty. You have to visit countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia, the African nations to realize and be grateful of how lucky we are, but you also have to look at modern countries like Japan, Korea, Singapore etc to know how much potential is it that we're missing should we be free from corruption and able to fully utilize the country's resource to build the nation. So, should we just sit still and let the powers that be run the country down to the point of the poorer nations, or should we push them to strive so that eventually we could do much better than the modern nations?

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