The Singapore Inconvenient Story (We are not as good as we think)

If you CARE to check the meaning of inconvenient under dictionary.com. This post is about a situation I perceive in Singapore social trend. From the people I spoke to, I kind of derived this post.

We Singaporeans tend to follow the crowd or want to be "one" of the crowd. This is especially true when the gahment say something so and so is good and we tend to just blindly follow.

Take for example, in the 1980s, the gahment was pushing engineering and we have flock of engineering students in the 1980s, followed by IT in 1990s (due to the Technology wave). Currently the trend is biomed. I myself have met students in my poly days that have not any interest in computer, yet they signed up the course as its supposed to be the "in" thing.

I even met some friends of mine joining churches because its "cool" in my secondary days. Not to say that most of them don't go to church anymore.

I also met some people who blindly venture into business as others are doing too. Examples from them are mass investments into China (with no results yield) and throwing money into stock exchanges (KLSE) and got burnt jialat jialat.

What about the bubble tea syndrome? Some people see other's business and copied it. These copiers normally have deeper pockets and they will undersell and to kill of other smaller competitors.

So are majority Singaporeans really that talented and good as mentioned in the mass media? I seriously doubt so. I think we are painting ourselves to be too good. The only positive edge about Singapore education is the using of the English language as its main official language. Other than that, most students (including me) are just bookworms who mostly use strategies to get good grades in the schools. Hardworking? Yes most of us are but at the same time, not working as smart as the Chinese or Indians. In short, we are not that good in areas that takes risks and sudden changes in the environment.

In short, I am a bit worry about the future generation of Singapore (our kids mainly). If they are going to compete against the children of China and India, who will win?? I mean we are already lack natural resource in our country and the only reason we are on top is because of our human resource, yet more and more bright local Singaporeans are leaving Singapore. The gahment tries to solve this by allowing more foreigners to be granted PR or citizens but yet, are they going to stay in Singapore forever?