Wan of a Kind V2.0

A few days ago, a Friend of 50 years shared with me a story over dinner.  Her lady friend was comfortably seated on an MRT train when a pregnant lady boarded the train.  She stood up to give her seat to her but before she could take it, a young man rushed across her and took the seat. The young man settled down and started to wear his earphones and began watching a show on his iPad, completely ignoring the pregnant lady in front of him. It was obvious to him, and everyone else around that just-vacated seat that it was meant for the pregnant lady as the one who gave it up was still on the train, now standing next to the pregnant lady. Unfortunately, no one spoke up for either the lady who gave up the seat or the pregnant woman who was meant to be the beneficiary of that kind act.  It was a classic case of the bystander effect. The kind lady who gave up the seat then spoke up.  "Hello," she said ever so gently, "I gave up the seat for this lady, not for you," p...

I am seventy and I feel that life has just begun. This feeling is shared by many septuagenarians. May Sarton has written At Seventy: A Journal and Judith Viorst, I’m, too Young to be Seventy . Both are funny, warm and positive. Judith is certainly “glad to be alive” and does not see it as the autumn of life. “The autumn of life,” writes Sarton, “is … a matter of saying farewell, but the strange thing is that I do not feel it is autumn. Life is so rich and full these days. There is so much to look forward to, so much here and now…And right now there are hundreds of good letters to answer and hundreds of bulbs to plant. I do not feel I am saying farewell yet but only beginning again, as it used to be when school started.” I love these positive life-affirming women, full of vigour and humour. They are good representatives of the spirit of active ageing, of which I am an ambassador. So, why do I feel that it’s spring at seventy? For me, it is about being in good health. I...

I am personally delighted that many more acts of kindness are observed and reported in Singapore. Several friends noted that in recent months there are many more notations in the Bouquet Section of the Forum Page in the Straits Times. Recently, the owners of the cafe, Strangers’ Reunion, were met with an overwhelming response from the public when they put out a call for help to raise funds for their cancer-stricken head chef. I was asked for my opinion by the New Paper to which I replied to the effect that there is innate kindness in every one of us. We naturally reach out with a desire to help for we know that the challenges of human frailties and vulnerabilities are common to all of us. These days, I have observed and experienced an increase in the number of people offering seats to senior people on buses and trains. At 10:00 pm one evening, I boarded a crowded train at Dhoby Ghaut station. A middle-age lady immediately offered her seat to me. Just yesterday, my wife and I b...

Many of you must have received a Singa figurine in your National Day Parade (NDP) funpack.  1.6 million from the new series of 15 figurines were distributed nation-wide in celebration of SG50.  Soon after National Day (9th, August), 1,000 serially numbered limited edition sets as well as individual figurines of 14 designs were made available to collectors and others.  This is the second series of Singa figurines.  The first series was created in 2010.  As the Straits Times reported on 12th August 2015 the new series proved to be very popular.  Singa,​ ​the Lion, ​ ​was introduced to the public in 1982 as the official mascot for Singapore’s National Courtesy Campaign (NCC). He was a mascot used for various public education campaigns ​ ​to message the need for courtesy.   In 2001, Singa became the mascot of the Singapore Kindness Movement (SKM) after the NCC was subsumed into the movement.​ ​In his role as mascot, Singa has appeared in numerou...

There is no doubt that our roads and highways are getting more congested even though ERP gantries are more ubiquitous than ever before. There appears to be more vehicles sharing limited space which makes kindness on the roads even more relevant. By kindness on the roads I am thinking about being careful not to inconvenience or harm fellow road­users. Being considerate is an important value of kindness, and very often being kind and considerate is often spoken in the same breath as in “She is unfailingly kind and considerate.” Not to inconvenience or harm others is to be unfailingly kind and considerate. Applying this attitude to driving, it implies attentiveness and thoughtfulness, co­operation and patience. In sum, it implies a degree of civility in our relationship to others. Abdulla M. Abdulhalim, a PhD candidate and a President’s Fellow at the University of Maryland told the Huffington Post, "We like simple definitions. Civility really is a more broad term com...

Easter is a religious holiday celebrated by Christians around the world.  For these Christian friends, Easter is about their faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ whom they believe to be Lord and Saviour.  The resurrection from the dead gives them hope both for the present as well as the after-life.  I posted an Easter greeting last Friday as follows: “He is risen” announced the angels some 2,000 years ago.  Since then Christians around the world celebrate Easter Sunday every year.  To all my Christian friends, I do wish you a blessed Easter filled with Hope, Faith and Love.  To my friends of all faiths, I wish you the same,  for hope springs eternal in our hearts when we have faith in the good that only love can accomplish.  So Happy Easter, one and all.” So much has already been written by so many about the good that was seen at the Padang where thousands queued day and night to pay respect to the late first Prime Minister of o...

On Wednesday 18 th of February, more than a billion Chinese around the world welcomed the dawn of another lunar new year. In traditional Chinese astrology, different animals symbolize the character of the year in a twelve-year cycle. This New Year happens to be the Year of the Goat. Some prefers to call it the Year of the Ram, and yet others, the year of the Sheep. In Mongolia, they prefer their gazelle! There are people who debate about which is the correct animal. According to an official Xinhua news agency, some scholars argue goat is a better option for the traditional Han Chinese holiday, as it is a more commonly kept farm animal for the dominant ethnic group in China. But many Chinese folklorists think that the debate misses the point. What is important is the connotations of the sign rather than the specific nature of the animal. The symbol 羊 (yang) can refer to any member of the caprine family. For example, a goat is a "mountain yang", a...

“The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul... Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.” - G. K. Chesterton. It is often said that New Year’s resolutions are made to be broken. I certainly hope that is not true of us. I do believe that it is a good time to make some simple resolutions. Since people do not care about what we know until they know that we care, it is good to resolve to walk the talk. It is cheap to talk about values without practising them. This New Year I resolved to practice good neighbourliness even as we promote it as a movement. A friend of mine who manages a cleaning company created a calendar for 2015 with a series of cartoons. It is titled “Kindness and Consideration” . It occurs to me that that is precisely how we can practically show care to our neighbours....

When Cheryl Faith Wee of the Sunday Times interviewed me in February this year to celebrate Facebook’s 10th anniversary, I had to admit that my posts were erratic, though I had opened an account since 2008. Since then, I had rediscovered the Facebook as a platform for positive messaging. I am now a much more avid user of the social network and am quite enjoying it. My renewed interest in active participation coincided with my discovery of the PhotoGrid Apps. By putting together a number of photos into a single frame with some variations, I found that I could make my Facebook posts a lot more visually interesting. I also found that my text becomes more interesting when I have something positive to say. In the months since the interview, I have increased the number of Facebook friends though I am still rather selective. In February the highest number of likes was 49 and that has increased several fold to some 200 in some of my posts. I thought it is instructive to find out what ...