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efficient. safe. protected. controlled. a utopian city-state run like a multinational company. welcome to singapore incorporated. this beautiful world felt the cool rain on my shoulder found something good in this beautiful world i felt the rain getting colder shchlt ah la la la la sha la la la singapore. one could be forgiven for thinking it s a giant, ultramodern shopping mall. an interconnected, fully wired, air-conditioned nanny state, where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts. and those things are kind of true, especially if you read the papers or the carefully monitored internet. you look around the litterless streets where everything seems to work just fine, just fine. and you think, or you could be forgiven for thinking, gee, maybe a one-party system is just what we need. you look at all the social problems and ethnic strife, street crime, drugs that singapore has managed to avoid, and you could think, is this the life we want? it ain t ....
Have a good life. that s the message. we are starting to define the definition of success. i think before, we were very clear with the five cs. car, condominium, credit card, cash, and career. wow, that sounds awful, dude. yeah, dude. i mean, i grew up with that idea. you grew up with that idea? yeah, exactly. that sounds kind of depressing. kind of, but that s the past, i think. the muslim quarter, just following afternoon prayers. i m here with najip ali, the singaporean malay entertainer and producer. yeah, okay. oh, looking good. this is it. so this is long tong. long tong. and this? this is mee siang. wow. we re having long tong, rice cake, coconut gravy, vegetables, and a hard-boiled egg. ....
And mee siang, fried rice noodles with chili paste, prawns, bean sprouts, and a spicy, sweet, and sour gravy, fried bean curd, and an egg. they re delicious. i mean, we like to make fun of singapore in the west, and call it disneyland with the death penalty. and we re skeptical, of course, of one-party rule. we re skeptical of constraints on freedom of the press, or the things you can t do. yeah, you can t, yeah. do you think that young, creative singaporeans feel those constraints and suffer from them? i think some of them who travel knows better. most of them are over-educated and under-exposed, meaning they are very little experience in what they know. and i think that s what we are lacking. they re looking for things to do. and the problem with this is always that we re living in a small country, and we have nowhere to go, and where do we experience these things? ....