This is just a little bit of what we’ve seen wandering around this confusing city. Its level of exotic mystery is considerable; so too is the sense of an over-governed, highly disciplined universe. These photos are just a peek at the color, variety and mystery popping up all around us. A diverse community of Hindu, Muslim, Chinese, Malay, Indian and Anglo live together sharing four national languages (Malay, Mandarin,Tamil, and English.)
As we made our way in from the airport just past 1AM Thursday, we saw wide avenues and planned parks that seemed stifling within their neighborhoods, so we were delighted to learn how much more there is to this city than that first impression. However.
This is a tough, tough government. Even the tour guides note ruefully “Well yes, but I can’t talk about that.” In other words, if it’s about government rules, or the fines for littering or parking in the wrong place or or or — no comment. And caning transgressors – nope.
I thought it was just me who felt like I’d walked into a scene from Fahrenheit 541 or 1984 but no. Rick agreed that it’s kind of spooky here despite the ethnic variety and history and hodgepodge of design and architecture.
Whether at the gigantic conservatory “Gardens by the Bay” or the Chinatown Heritage Center or Orchard Road – an endless Rodeo Drive crammed with shoppers and women dressed like Donatella Versace – there’s a sense of programmed unreality.
Then there’s the government-sponsored Singapore Kindness Movement. designed to “improve the characters” of the people of Singapore. Kind of weird but OK… Still, on a tour bus the recorded guide’s rhetoric was infused with defense of the rules and policies that govern this place and its behavior. Government rules and monitoring affect attitudes, sense of humor and behavior. I was in Eastern Europe when it was behind the Iron Curtain and it was scary but people laughed about it and spoke with irony and a sense of the absurdity about much of what they faced.
In Singapore, the impact is worse, I think: scary, resigned acceptance and a spooky inhibition that slowly but surely lands upon a visitor.
It’s quite an experience to swing between the visual (and culinary) feast here and these authoritarian undertones.
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Cynthia Samuels
Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families.
For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million.
She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings.
She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com.
Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World.
A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.
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