I must say that I have enjoyed Pankaj’s wide-ranging commentary and masterly use of the English language. It was great lesson to me and I have learnt a lot.

Truman’s sock-puppet.

But does Mr Brown recall British aggression against Burma in the hey-day of empire (19th century)? Britain invaded Burma twice – in 1839 and again in 1852.
The governor of India, Lord Dalhousie demanded £100,000 compensation from the Burmese for imaginary insults to two Brit sea captains. When they refused, Burmese forts were shelled and hundreds killed. The war ended in 1853 and in due course a big chunk of Burma was annexed – that being the motive for the invasion all along.

The Burmese king was eventually deposed and exiled to Ratnagiri, north of Goa. And incidentally, the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah of India was also exiled by the British (after the Indian Uprising was quelled in 1858) to (guess where?) – to Rangoon!

Once in control the British ripped up Burma’s economy and environment. The mangrove forests were replaced with rice paddies, while British monopolies looted the country of oil, teak and rubies. Over the following 20 years of British rule Burmese society disintegrated. The British maintained control through “divide and rule” tactics, setting Burma’s various national minorities against each other.
SOURCE: John Newsinger’s ‘The Blood never dried’ (2007)

India’s stand on Burma is understandable. India is a big zero in international diplomacy – tired old ancient men like Manmohan Singh or Pranab Mukerjee simply don’t have the intellectual capacity, communication skills, the suavete, the subtlety to assess a tricky situation quickly and respond firmly.

As for Singapore, I agree with Pankaj wholly – I have passed through Changi some 20 times. Give me Singapore’s repressive ethos anytime in preference to India’s pathetic democracy riddled with mediocrity and corruption.

monks murdered in 100s and all you can write is about India. Shameful selfish publicity

Great comment. Shame about the tone and content.

Personally I think the barbs in Pankaj’s little dissertation would have hit home harder if it wasn’t for the fact that I imagined him sounding exactly like Truman Capote.

OMG this is too funny. I was a teenager when I lived there and I don’t really deal with Java. Maths is more my thing, LOL.

And yes wow, Singapore is really got an impressive army that’s why it’s always bending over to the US and Australia to make sure big scary Malaysia and Indonesia don’t invade. Almost reminds of apparent Swiss prowess in WW2 LOL. By the way aren’t you supposed to be Indian?? So why all the racist crap being hurled at the Indians as well. Jesus if you’re so blind to see that you being racist to the Burmese reduces any sympathy I may have for your family’s supposedly traumatic experience in Burma that you really are a silly billy. As I say again, I have a massive amount of respect to the older generation in Singapore and how they turned a Kampung into a metropolosis, but unthinking and ignorant twats like you really make Singapore look like a joke. Thank god I don’t have to live there anymore.

Alas…

I’ve –- only just — been overcome by the subfecal stench wafting from the infantile responses to my post and subsequent remarks.

To begin with, isn’t it depressing that the likes of Sad Sahil chooses to spend his weekend wading through the iffy world that is Wikipedia to build a shambles of a case against Singapore and me.

I suppose when one holds unsubstantiated, uncorroborated, ill-formed views on Burma, and then has them scythed down by someone with credible, first-hand knowledge on the situation inside the country, the person in question retorts cowardly to the extent of launching a little dig, if not a tirade against the other’s nationality – thereby hijacking the thread.

Before venturing further, I note with hilarity that Jai kicks off with an ad hominem attack on yours truly before requesting that I stop using such tactics myself.

Selective chiding – isn’t that right Jai?

Which is fine.

For I have no qualms whatsoever stooping to the level of runty guttersnipes like Doug Clark (initiator of the ad hominem mania) and Sid – the latter so smug in his views that he merely opts for the predictable, perfunctory slight.

Clark meanwhile, the degenerate – he can’t even spell ‘argument’ (wonderful, don’t you think?) – that he is, resorts to swearing when confronted with issues way beyond his intelligence.

Jai claims there are several members of the investment banking –- inferring deference to them –- community loafing about on this thread.

Don’t make me laugh.

Most of these jokers would struggle to open a savings account at a high street branch, let alone operate in the world of high finance.

Speaking of cretins, I must pay some due attention to Sad Sahil.

Now here’s a guy who’s still hung over at being a failure in Singapore – couldn’t quite cut the mustard over here, could you big boy. (Seven years, and bitterness is all you’ve got to show for it? Were you that insignificant, that irrelevant, and that dispensable that you clung on, unhappily, to the whims of your employer? Well, then again with a name like that, your Java programming gig probably got outsourced to the Philippines or something.)

He remembers 1998 in response to my position that the Singapore Government has delivered year upon year of unprecedented wealth since independence.

The Asian Crisis (and the 2003 downturn as a result of the SARS epidemic) was not of the government’s doing. When it has been in their hands, they have delivered abundantly. Fact.

And besides, they were both one-year blips at most. If you ask me, two unforeseen, uncontrollable economic downturns in forty-two years of independence is pretty good going.

Moving on, I’d urge you to revisit the link in the Economist that you’ve provided me. Take a look at the heading atop the chart in question and then reacquaint yourself with my first assertion.

Then again, I didn’t expect you to be anything other than blinkered seeing that you’ve used a right-wing arse wipe of a publication to substantiate your first counter claim.

Your references regarding transportation (“virgin-vacations”? You cannot be serious!) and healthcare are risible to say the least.

Oh and here’s a fact – Singapore is Asia’s foremost air hub. How you manage to keep a straight face upon returning with figures showing traffic movements to counter my claims vis-à-vis Changi’s status is nothing short of utter buffoonery.

You don’t need me to clobber the word ‘hub’ into your skull, do you?

Look at the (type) destinations that Singapore Airlines, Qantas, BA, Cathay Pacific, Air India, Garuda Indonesia, Japan Airlines, Indian Airlines and several Chinese Airlines connect out of Singapore and then show me a more critical node in Asian aviation.

It’s not by quirky happenstance that the A380 will launch its maiden commercial voyage from Singapore next week.

You were, it must be said, a little too kind with Changi – Terminal 1’s interiors have looked dated for a good few years now.

As for the one on oil refining, I’ll hold my hand up high and admit I got that wrong.

However, you, dear boy, have chosen very flimsy hooks by hanging your counterpoints on Wikipedia references. You shouldn’t trust a site on which your Nana and her wrinkly pet pug could make wholesale revisions to.

Those entire points aside, you seem, also, to have a cloying belief in the passivity of Singaporeans. Nothing could be further from the truth.

You ought to –- difficult though it might seem to someone with stunted intellectual faculties –- think things through a bit more. Especially since you’ve already spent seven years here in Singers.

How can a passive people drive a country to dizzying industrial heights?
How can a passive people deliver an efficient, technologically advanced world city?
How can a passive people create so much wealth year after year after year?

With only four million of us, might I add.

And it’s worth remembering also our 2-year national service stint, and the reservist duties that we carry out well into our forties. A country that can turn out 300,000 citizen soldiers at the polyphonic tone of a text message is anything but passive.

You will never find anywhere else a government and a people working hard — getting things done efficiently, smartly (that sound passive to you?) — together on the same page towards the same goal, which is giving ourselves the best standard of living possible. [Lest I get headhunted to become the PAP's head pamphleteer, I better end the point here ]

(Go to the Smithsonian website and read the September issue on Singapore.)

You, Sad Sahil, have fallen into the lazy man’s trap of equating being passive with demonstrativeness or lack thereof. I suppose it’s an Indian (and perhaps, American) notion that one has to stand up and rant and rave to get anywhere, and that doing so is good.

Yet the Indians –- with their so-called non-passivity (industrial action, pointless wingeing, political melodrama) –- themselves prove that this does not work. With all that arm flailing, head wiggling, crotch grabbing and throaty yelling, nothing gets done…ever.

Now the reason we’re here – Burma.

To most of you on this site, Burma is just a tab in your bookmarks list.
To most of you Burma is just a march to get stoned at on an unseasonably agreeable October afternoon.
To most of you Burma is just a cool t-shirt, or an arresting photograph on the cover the Independent.

Or for that matter, people like Sad Sahil, for whom Burma is but a few Pagodas and a Wikipedia entry.

Yet, without having been there, he prefers its squalor to Singapore’s sophistication. (Incidentally, there are pagodas in Singapore but I suppose some people prefer necking puris in Serangoon Road than going around Singers and having a look-see).

Fact: most of you lot know bugger all about Burma.

So I’d urge you lot not to be too smug there in your shabby terrace homes after gleaning third hand information from newspapers whose sources are questionable at best.

Don’t you think its odd when media outlets say “Oh it was impossible get news in 1988…” yet conveniently managed to sneak out the figure of three thousand dead.

If three thousand people did in fact die, then in a city of four million people like Rangoon, one would be able to find scores of relatives, friends, somebody-who-knew-somebody who perished in those brutal crackdowns.

Yet the numbers don’t add up. I have over my ten or so years there not come across too many people with ultra-tragic nightmares of 1988.

And remember, people will talk to someone like me, who they know and have been employed by for years sooner than they would to some mock whisperer of a journalist under the dancing shadows of a candle.

I’ll say it again. The numbers of 1988 don’t add up. This junta is too inept to kill that many people, even by accident.

I’ve mentioned it before; I’ve done business in Burma and will continue to do so. I have sponsored Burmese students to study in Singapore and that (not to mention those in my employ in Rangoon) is more than anything any of you will ever do for the people Burma – in your entire lifetimes.

I’ve mentioned the indolence of the Burmese and that seems to have rankled you lot the most. It’s funny how people will sooner believe fourth-hand half-truths than first-hand facts.

As we know, corporations run the world. And these entities would be in Burma in two seconds and in cahoots with the junta if money – pots – could be made. Some are already there, sniffing minerals amongst other activities.

But most global firms (of course the junta can be bought) won’t come. You know why? Because of the Burmese fondness for being bone idle. Guess where most able-bodied dudes were when the monks seized the initiative? Chilling in teashops.

If the Burmese were serious about the reordering of their country, thousands upon thousands would return to take up the cause. Thirty thousand alone live in Singapore, a few thousand in London, and yet thousands more scattered the world over. (When I last checked (err, about a day ago), flights were still available from Singapore, other ASEAN capitals and India.)

Yet now, most of these overseas Burmese –- the most educated, and most moneyed citizens of their nation -– instead of returning and taking up cudgels themselves have suddenly developed a taste for acting as media go-betweens for various news organizations in their adopted abodes.

A sorry state of affairs indeed.

My apologies to newer readers of the thread, who would have had to wade through the scat to get to the notes regarding Burma.

But you should direct your annoyance to the imbeciles who left the turds behind.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/6386543.stm

My, my, my. I certainly must have offended your cozy, Home Counties sensibilities, coz you’ve worked yourself into a right ol’ snit.

No surprises then that you’ve gone on to make a complete hash of picking through the bones of my argument.

Bit of an intellectual lightweight aren’t you?

Your riposte is laughably undercooked — you’ve merely wrenched two paragraphs out of context from my original post upon which to vent your misguided anger — and completely misses the nub of the issue I’ve raised.

The Burmese have had, for generations now, an insecurity complex regarding ethnic Indians and one can’t help but feel a sense of ironic justice as they now go boo-hooing to Manmohan Singh for help.

India’s priority (and rightly so) is to protect its borders and its citizens.

You actually had an arguement? Well, fuck me, I missed it.

Well, it seems to be OK to play the nationalist card here. At which you seem to be an expert. Nuff said, you are a someone who can’t see beyond borders. It is a pathetic, though all to prevelant attitude.

I don’t live in the Home Counties. Do I get Brownie Points for that?

On India’s stand on Burma, I agree with columnist PRAFUL BIDWAI (Frontline Oct 07) when he dismissed
India’s foreign policy approach to Myanmar as a sham and abject failure.

“New Delhi somersaulted over Nepal until it recognised the inevitability of the absolute monarchy’s end. there was the failure to anticipate or influence major developments in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and, more recently, to support the movement for full democratisation in Pakistan.

“Just as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi were extolling the virtues of Gandhian non-violence, the new Army Chief, Deepak Kapoor, said that the happenings are Myanmar’s “internal affair” but “we have good relations” with its government and “we should maintain these”. General Kapoor stressed that the support of the Myanmarse military is vital to the success of India’s counter-insurgency operations in the northeastern region.
“Out go our “romantic” notions such as democracy, human rights, and peaceful resolution of disputes, from which other things follow… In realpolitik, everything is OK so long as it promotes “the national interest” (for example, counter-insurgency).

“It is only in New York that External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee sensed the international mood on Myanmar and proposed an inquiry into the unconscionable use of force in Yangon and other cities…”

The truth is India is a big zero in international diplomacy – tired ancient men like Manmohan Singh or Pranab Mukerjee simply don’t have the intellectual capacity, communication skills, the suavete, the subtlety to assess a tricky situation quickly and respond firmly.
Why not ask the Chinese for some help?

Amnesty 2007 report on India

http://thereport.amnesty.org/eng/Regions/Asia-Pacific/India

A BBC report on how India gets help from Burma to combat its own separatist movementsand its commercial interests.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7013975.stm

Following on from Sid’s accurate remarks, you might have a more receptive audience here if you just discussed your experiences (and quoted any relevant facts) in a civilised manner, without resorting to condescension and ad hominem attacks against commenters you may disagree with. The majority of people who participate on PP are decent folk, and the individuals you have targetted on this thread for your insults certainly do not deserve such a derisive and dismissive attitude from you. Have some manners, especially if you are as educated and successful as you claim to be.

You’re also making some erroneous assumptions about the background and financial potential of your audience, considering that (for example) a number of regular participants on PP are members of the investment banking sector, including several people on this thread.

False, deluded and arrogant as ever, Singapore is even less relevant than Shanghai let alone HongKong:

http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9753240

“The same Singapore government that created the most efficient transhipment hub with the busiest port in the world?”

Again false and deluded:

http://www.4to40.com/QA/index.asp?id=931&category=science

“The same Singapore government that created the world’s most remarkable transportation system”

Surprise, wrong again:

http://www.virgin-vacations.com/site_vv/11-top-underground-transit-systems-in-the-world.asp

“most cutting-edge bio-medical and health care systems around?”

Do I even need to say it you fool:

http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_development/previous_issues/articles/1470/biotechnology_start_ups_in_singapore_inspiring_future_entrepreneurs/(parent)/158

“The same Singapore government that created the world’s most important oil-refining centre”

Heh:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_refineries

“the same government that created the most important air-hub in Asia?”

Not the busiest even in Asia, but I have to say I do think Changi is a beautiful airport:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_busiest_airports_by_traffic_movements

You know the problem with singapore is arrogant idiots like you who just sit back on past achievements and now have fallen behind on the work laid down by the previous generations. Wake up and stop being so deluded.

No one seems to have discredited your ignorance, prejudice and personal bitterness better than yourself. In that regard, thanks for saving many people a lot of time in taking your foolish views apart.