East is best

ANYONE who tells you that in Singapore spitting is a crime should be

reported immediately to the Singapore authorities for bringing that city-
state into disrepute.

With almost 10 per cent of its population already over the age of 65 years, could any
Asian city be expected to ensure such unnatural levels of hygienic perfection?

One can understand why such an image of ‘spitlessness’ should have been cultivated.
Singapore was a former British colony and at one time, like other such colonies, believed
in its enforced innocence that the streets of London were so clean that one could eat off
its pavements.

Today’s Londoners eat on the pavements, not off them, and spitting is as local an art-
form as pavement artistry.

Modern Singapore — a collage of 63 islands glued together by seawater — has become

the Far East’s answer to the Gulf states. It is Dubai swathed in a green sarong.

When Singapore and Dubai came into existence within a decade of each other, they were
too small to be truly independent, and too fiercely independent to surrender their
individuality to their neighbours. Each had little to offer the world: Dubai had sand and
below that, finite reserves of crude oil and gas; Singapore had mosquito-infested
marshland and above that, finite manpower.

Their future lay in offering themselves to the world as an entrepôt of goods and services.
Today, Singapore is the world’s fourth-largest financial services centre, the world’s
third-largest oil-refining centre and the world’s second-biggest casino gambling market.
And Dubai has become the eighth-most visited city in the world, a shopper’s Mecca,
each of its numberless malls a shrine to self-gratification.

To open a morning newspaper in Dubai or in Singapore is to shrink from the cares of a

global village to the level of domestics. Dubai’s concerns are about the abuse of migrant
maids; Singapore worries about the high casualties of domestics who fall to their deaths
while cleaning the windows of high-rise apartments. Dubai’s Burj Al Khalifa — the
tallest building in the world — cannily anticipated this hazard. Its heaven-directed
windows will always be cleaned mechanically.

Singapore’s pretensions are on a subtler scale. Its new tourist attraction — Marina Bay
Sands complex — is a three-tower stack building connected at their crown with a
massive elongated cross bar that looks like a Noah’s Ark, stranded 76 floors above sea
level.

This Ark though carries its supply of own water. It has a huge swimming pool spread
across its roof. As if to emphasise the irony, Marina Bay Sands has staged an exhibition
to commemorate the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic and recreated in its
basement saloons and cabins of that ill-fated luxury liner.

Is that exhibition simply a tourist attraction? Or is it a sage lesson by senior

Singaporeans to a younger generation of the hazards of Dubai’s hubris?

If the residual impression one has on leaving Singapore is one of mechanical efficiency
— everything works! — an equivalent after staying in Bangkok is one of benignity.

Everything in Thailand is benign. The expression on the face of every statue of Lord
Buddha is benign. The smile on the face of the ailing but revered King Bhumibol
Adulyadej is benign. The humility of saffron-robed monks of every age (and some were
still in their teens) is benign. Benign too is the excruciating, self-effacing humility of
Thais towards strangers.

This mask begins to crack though on the face of a Thai shop assistant if one haggles but
does not buy. It crumbles when a Thai taxi-driver is outwitted by a canny tourist. And it
disintegrates on the face of the Thai airhostess the moment the plane lands at Lahore’s
Allama Iqbal airport and the Pakistani passengers revert to their natural state of
anarchy.

To nations like ours which are older by decades, once wiser (PIA taught Emirates
Airlines how to fly), equally industrious (the productivity of Pakistani migrants
anywhere in the world is legendary), these states — Singapore, Dubai and Thailand —
would appear to offer tempting recipes for success.

Experience has shown that identical ingredients cannot be guaranteed to produce the
same results. Our wok is of a different shape. We stir in different directions.

That said, one should concede that Thai politics is a shadow of our own. A visiting Thai
opening a Pakistani newspaper would not feel as if he is reading science fiction about
aliens from another planet, but watching a performance enacted by political puppets
controlled by unseen hands.

He would understand the recent utterances of the Pakistani chief of army staff warning
civilians to operate within given norms, for the Thais too have an army that rules while
the king reigns, and parliament governs. That explains why a Thai prime minister
should feel it necessary to call formally with members of her cabinet on the president of
the king’s privy council.

The prime minister is Yingluck Shinawara (the younger sister of the ousted prime
minister Thaksin who is negotiating a political comeback) and the elder privy councillor
Gen (retd) Prem Tinsulanonda who was prime minister from 1980 to 1988.