Egg-Hatching

As a country, I feel we have a general disdain for any work or trade that is "manual". Maybe our predominantly Chinese population has laid on us that mandarin preference for all things scholarly. Labour is reserved for the buffalos, which you'll be reincarnated as if you had been way too lazy in your past life. Add to this the colonial inhertiancei.e. the British civil service. Plus probably some "founding father's" enthusiastic reading of Plato's Republic. And voila! We have all the ingredients for the birth of the public service scholarship (go read Tym's excellent/personal take on this).

But what this disdain sometimes translates into is the lack of pride and passion in the things we do, make and create with our hands. Why create when you can just sit behind the desk and manage?

If you'll lay the egg, I'll hatch it

Of course I am generalising. So does GR, a friend and hairstylist (his place is called Frontiers). He has seen too many apprentices come and go - and fail. For their lack of patience, dedication and - for want of a better word - fastidiousness. The ambition we have reserved in the area of wealth and comfort, we have taken away from the pursuit of a craft until it is an art. GR told of how, years ago, he had learnt how to use a pair of "double-headed" scissors (a scissors with 2 pairs of blades, simaese-twins scissors) from an 18 year-old Japanese hairstylist who had invented the scissors. If not for his family here, I think GR would have moved to Shanghai by now, where he set up Shanghai's first Toni & Guy ("the italian hair mafia" - that's what GR calls it) last year. There, he thinks he will have better luck finding colleagues/staff who will venture to imagine that what they do is an art.

But we place our values on our own misunderstood ideas of education and literacy, where the word and the craft, and the knowing and the learning, do not always meet. It is no wonder that in Singapore we give our artists an education divorced from scholarship, and our scholars an education divorced from all notions of art.

This way, we will continue to breed a nation of civil servants (like me) and managers. Though I fear we will soon run out of anything meaningful to manage.