SLOW Movement

FT: Far-sighted but no visionary

Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/90804618-f8b0-11e0-ad8f-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1cEY0I254

October 21, 2011 10:19 pm

Far-sighted but no visionary

By Harry Eyres

Steve Jobs was an undoubtedly impressive human being, but I am still not convinced that it qualifies him to be called a visionary

Claudio Abbado rehearsing at the Royal Festival Hall

It would have been too easy (reader, I was tempted) to write a column dismissing all the hype about the late Steve Jobs. I must say for a non-Apple user – I have never owned a Mac, an iPod or an iPad – the effusiveness of the tributes, and in some cases the grief, was hard to fathom. The last time I remembered anything comparable was after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Whatever his other achievements, it appeared that Steve Jobs had arranged a posthumous coup: he had made sure his obituaries were written by his own PR department.

President Obama mourned him as a “visionary” who “changed the way each of us sees the world”. With still less restraint, the philosopher Alain de Botton gushed: “there are businesses that redraw the landscape entirely, creating needs we never knew we had, and remoulding our sense of what we have to have in order to be happy.” Goodness, was I only dreaming when I thought I still recognised those blue remembered hills? Might it be an advantage to remain unaware of needs I do not know I have?

You can imagine a Slow Lane line on all this: that, after all, the man had only been a creator, or refiner, of gadgets, which I for one have managed to get along quite happily without. Maybe Jobs “transformed our lives” (Obama again) somewhat, making them even more full of annoying electronic gizmos that render living in public spaces progressively less bearable. Perhaps I am missing something, but we seem to be just as fractious and addicted to short-termism as we have ever been.

But this was all just knee-jerk stuff. Not only was I not an initiate of the Apple cult but, frankly, I had little idea who Steve Jobs was. Reading his famous Stanford address was a sobering experience. Here was an undoubtedly impressive human being, a man of substance and originality.

Jobs was unusual in many ways, and not least in his approach to education. In contrast to the ever more streamlined, synchromeshed idea of expensive university degrees leading seamlessly into jobs (the normal kind), Jobs needed to drop out of university to find his way. More precisely, he dropped out of the required classes he found boring, in order to drop in to classes which inspired him. One of them was a calligraphy class which influenced all his subsequent thinking, and ensured, as he said with no false modesty, that personal computers would have “the wonderful typography they do”.

That was a very considerable achievement. I am still not convinced that it qualifies Jobs to be called a visionary. One of the qualities of visionaries is that they see far ahead; not just 10 years ahead but maybe a century or two. Often visionaries are little appreciated in their own time, dismissed as oddballs or madmen. Jobs might have been a maverick but was hardly an unappreciated one – and he became one of the richest people in America.

Might it be an advantage to remain unaware of needs I do not know I have?

A week after Jobs died I was in the Royal Festival Hall listening to Claudio Abbado conducting Anton Bruckner’s towering Fifth Symphony. If there was a Jobs connection, it might have been that Abbado has fought life-threatening illness; he made a remarkable recovery from cancer and, though he now looks gaunt, skin stretched tight over his long bony face, he stood spry and upright as he conducted the immense symphony from memory.

I am not sure Abbado would consider himself a visionary. I see him more as a supreme facilitator, a great clarifier of textures. He looked humble, not full of ego, as he took waves of applause and a standing ovation at the end of the symphony, and eventually stood to one side of the podium, as if to direct the applause away from him, towards his hand-picked Lucerne Festival Orchestra(I have never heard more hushed and precise pianissimo playing from a string section), and ultimately towards Bruckner himself.

I have a feeling that Bruckner and this symphony in particular are finally coming into their own 135 years after the Fifth was completed (amazingly, Bruckner never heard the work performed by an orchestra). For the composer Arnold Bax, hearing the corrupt Schalk-conducted version in 1906, it was a monumentally boring piece of Austro-German pedantry.

I didn’t find it boring when I first heard it, as a teenager at the Proms. It was certainly extreme; extremely long, extremely slow, extremely desolate, extremely unruly and extremely loud, especially at its thrilling ending, one of the grandest perorations in music. I found the extremes exciting (as teenagers tend to). It was like being taken on a tour of the Arctic, or Patagonia, a landscape of arresting splendour and strangeness.

Yes, Bruckner did change the way I saw the world, and myself within it. It felt vaster and more thrilling; and, if it also felt frightening, the fear was tempered by the fact that a brave soul had been there before me and charted the territory.

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More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

NY Times: The Power of Taking the Big Chance

October 8, 2011

The Power of Taking the Big Chance

By STEVE LOHR

STEVE JOBS, technologist and tastemaker of modern digital culture, described himself as a captain of product design, inspiring his teams of workers, as he once said, to go “beyond what anyone thought possible” and to do “some great work, really great work that will go down in history.”

And he did, time and again. Mr. Jobs did not make the technology himself; he led the teams that did, prodding, cajoling and inspiring. His track record as a business team leader is unique — as Apple’s Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad testify. In two stints at Apple, he made computers into coveted consumer goods and transformed not only product categories, like music players and cellphones, but also entire industries, like music and mobile communications.

Mr. Jobs even failed well. NeXT, a computer company he founded during his years in exile from Apple, was never a commercial success. But it was a technology pioneer. The World Wide Web was created on a NeXT computer, and NeXT software is the core of Apple’s operating systems today.

Part of Mr. Jobs’s legacy will be the lessons learned by those who worked closely with him over the years. Here are just a few:

DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO DELIGHT CUSTOMERS Six weeks before the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, Mr. Jobs ordered a crucial design change. Until then, the planning for supplies, manufacturing and engineering had been based on the assumption that the smartphone’s face would be plastic, recalls Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive who led iPod and iPhone development from 2001 to 2009. Plastic is less fragile than glass, and easier to make.

But the plastic touch screen had a drawback. It was prone to developing scratches. Those scratches, Mr. Jobs insisted, would irritate users and be seen as a design flaw. “All the logical facts told us to go with plastic, and Steve’s instinct went the other way,” Mr. Fadell says. “It was Steve’s call — his gut.”

The glass choice was a challenge that seemed “nearly impossible” at the time, he says — a last-minute scramble to get supplies of specialized glass and tweak the design of the phone’s casing to reduce the chances the glass would crack when an iPhone was dropped. But with extra investment and a frenetic work regimen, the switch proved doable, despite the tight deadline.

The episode, Mr. Fadell says, points to a principle he took away from his years working with Mr. Jobs. “You do not cut corners and you make sure the customer gets an experience that is an absolute delight,” observes Mr. Fadell, who heads a Silicon Valley start-up company whose product has not yet been disclosed and will not compete with Apple.

GOOD IDEAS TAKE TIME After he was ousted from Apple, Mr. Jobs founded NeXT in 1985. It produced a powerful desktop computer, a stylish black cube, and its initial market was going to be in education. The idea was that the machine would be more than hardware and software; it would also offer content, “a universe of wisdom,” recalls Michael Hawley, a computer scientist who worked closely with Mr. Jobs at NeXT and lived part time in Mr. Jobs’s house, as Mr. Hawley shuttled between California and his post at the M.I.T. Media Lab.

NeXT computers, in Mr. Jobs’s vision, would marry technology and the liberal arts by including digital books, music and art. Mr. Jobs began pursuing the rights to works that could be converted to digital form. He persuaded a few publishers that because they would save the expense of paper, printing and distribution, NeXT should pay a royalty that was a fraction of the cost of a printed book. Mr. Jobs, Mr. Hawley recalled, struck a deal with the Oxford University Press for the complete works of Shakespeare for a royalty of $1 a digital copy.

NeXT’s foray into education fizzled; its machines were too expensive for that market. But Mr. Jobs’s concept and business model for digital media were “the instinct that was translated to Apple with the iTunes store, 99-cents-a-song pricing and all the media offerings that have followed,” Mr. Hawley says.

“When Steve believed in an idea, he was both passionate and patient, scratching away over the years until he got it right,” says Mr. Hawley, a scientist, concert pianist and host of the EG Conference, an annual gathering for technologists, educators and people in media and entertainment.

DON’T DWELL ON MISTAKES Steve Capps, a computer scientist, describes creating the Macintosh, which shipped in 1984, as a constant process of making decisions — part experiment and part product development, with steps ahead mixed with many setbacks. “Steve kind of knew what he wanted, but he didn’t precisely,” says Mr. Capps, who designed software for Macintosh.

Mr. Jobs, Mr. Capps remembers, was the arbiter on countless hardware, software and design choices. “His combination of incisiveness and decisiveness, I think, really explained his success,” Mr. Capps says.

Mr. Jobs was also decisive in recognizing mistakes, even when they were his own. For example, he favored one model of a disk drive — for reading computer programs stored on small, removable so-called floppy disks — while other members of the team championed another design. They kept their disk project going surreptitiously. When they showed him the result, he embraced it. “He turned on a dime,” Mr. Capps says. “Don’t dwell on your mistakes. It’s a great lesson.”

PASSION COUNTS FOR A LOT The relentless intensity and total commitment that Mr. Jobs brought to his work, former colleagues and friends agree, had a simple explanation: he genuinely enjoyed what he did and found it worthwhile.

Andy Hertzfeld, a member of original Macintosh team who is now an engineer at Google, says: “The most important thing that I learned from Steve is to always follow your heart. He believed that the only way to do truly great work is to adore what you are doing.”

Mr. Jobs made a lot of money over the years, for himself and for Apple shareholders. But money never seemed to be his principal motivation. One day in the late 1990s, Mr. Jobs and I were walking near his home in Palo Alto. Internet stocks were getting bubbly at the time, and Mr. Jobs spoke of the proliferation of start-ups, with so many young entrepreneurs focused on an “exit strategy,” selling their companies for a quick and hefty profit.

“It’s such a small ambition and sad really,” Mr. Jobs said. “They should want to build something, something that lasts.”

WSJ: Steve Jobs - The Secular Prophet

THE SATURDAY ESSAY
OCTOBER 8, 2011

Steve Jobs: The Secular Prophet

Steve Jobs turned Eve's apple, the symbol of fallen humankind, into a religious icon for true believers in technology. But can salvation be downloaded?

By ANDY CROUCH

For every magical thing Steve Jobs revealed in his Apple keynote addresses, there were many other things he concealed. Like the devices he created, his life was more and more opaque even while becoming more and more celebrated. So his death this week came as a shock for nearly all of us, even though we knew that only grave illness could be keeping him from the company he co-founded and loved. He told us almost nothing about his prognosis—right through his last public appearance he was as turtleneck-clad and upbeat as ever. But suddenly, this week, he was gone.

Portrait by Tim O'Brien

Portrait of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was extraordinary in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (demanding and occasionally ruthless) leader. But his most singular quality was his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple's early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and turned it into a sign of promise and progress.

That bitten apple was just one of Steve Jobs's many touches of genius, capturing the promise of technology in a single glance. The philosopher Albert Borgmann has observed that technology promises to relieve us of the burden of being merely human, of being finite creatures in a harsh and unyielding world. The biblical story of the Fall pronounced a curse upon human work—"cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life." All technology implicitly promises to reverse the curse, easing the burden of creaturely existence. And technology is most celebrated when it is most invisible—when the machinery is completely hidden, combining godlike effortlessness with blissful ignorance about the mechanisms that deliver our disburdened lives.

Brett Arends discusses on Lunch Break why he believes Steve Jobs was the best chief executive of his generation and wasn't just a technology genius but also a hype master.

No company combined simplicity and hiddenness better than Apple under Mr. Jobs's leadership. Apple made technology not for geeks but for cool people—and ordinary people. It made products that worked, beautifully, without fuss and with great style. They improved markedly, unmistakably, from one generation to the next—not in the way geeks wanted technology to improve, with ever longer lists of features (I'm looking at you, Microsoft Word) and technical specifications, but in simplicity. Press the single button on the face of the iPad and, whether you are 5 or 95, you can begin using it with almost no instruction. It has no manual. You cannot open it up to see its inner workings even if you want to. No geeks required—or allowed. The iPad offers its blessings to ordinary mortals.

WSJ Personal Technology Columnist Walt Mossberg joins this special edition of Digits to discuss Steve Jobs's post-PC vision for the future and what his path would have been had he lived longer, as well as what he believes motivated him throughout his legendary career.

And so it came to pass that in the 2000s, when much about the wider world was causing Americans intense anxiety and frustration, the one thing that got inarguably better, much better, was our personal technology.

In October 2001, with the ruins of the World Trade Center still smoldering and the Internet financial bubble burst, Apple introduced the iPod. In January 2010, in the depths of the Great Recession, the very month when unemployment breached 10% for the first time in a generation, Apple introduced the iPad.

Reuters

A tribute to Steve Jobs in front of a Tokyo Apple store Thursday. The 2000s were defined by disappointments—except technologically, as Mr. Jobs strode on stage always with another miracle in his pocket.

Politically, militarily, economically, the decade was defined by disappointment after disappointment—but technologically, it was defined by a series of elegantly produced events in which Steve Jobs, commanding more attention and publicity each time, strode on stage with a miracle in his pocket.

Steve Jobs was the evangelist of this particular kind of progress—and he was the perfect evangelist because he had no competing source of hope. He believed so sincerely in the "magical, revolutionary" promise of Apple precisely because he believed in no higher power. In his celebrated Stanford commencement address (which is itself an elegant, excellent model of the genre), he spoke frankly about his initial cancer diagnosis in 2003. It's worth pondering what Jobs did, and didn't, say:

Betaworks CEO John Borthwick and Dow Jones's Neal Lipschutz discuss Apple's future and the challenges any company faces after the loss of its innovator-in-chief.

 

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become."

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died on Wednesday at age 56. Wall Street Journal managing editor Alan Murray and editors discuss Jobs's legacy, early reactions to his death and how his showmanship changed the retail and tech landscape.

This is the gospel of a secular age. It has the great virtue of being based only on what we can all perceive—it requires neither revelation nor dogma. And it promises nothing it cannot deliver—since all that is promised is the opportunity to live your own unique life, a hope that is manifestly realizable since it is offered by one who has so spectacularly succeeded by following his own "inner voice, heart and intuition."

Mr. Jobs was by no means the first person to articulate this vision of a meaningful life—Socrates, the Buddha and Emerson come to mind. To be sure, fully embracing this secular gospel requires an austerity of spirit that few have been able to muster, even if it sounds quite fine on the lawn of Stanford University.

Upon close inspection, this gospel offers no hope that you cannot generate yourself and only the comfort of having been true to yourself. In the face of tragedy and evil—the kind of tragedy that cuts off lives not just at 56 years old but at 5 or 6, the kind of evil bent on eradicating whole tribes and nations from the earth—it is strangely inert.

Perhaps every human system of meaning fails or at least falls silent in the face of these harsh realities, but the gospel of self-fulfillment does require an extra helping of stability and privilege to be plausible. Death is "life's change agent"? For most human beings, that would sound like cold comfort indeed.

But the genius of Steve Jobs was to persuade us, at least for a little while, that cold comfort is enough. The world—at least the part of the world in our laptop bags and our pockets, the devices that display our unique lives to others and reflect them to ourselves—will get better. This is the sense in which the tired old cliché of "the Apple faithful" and the "cult of the Mac" is true. It is a religion of hope in a hopeless world, hope that your ordinary and mortal life can be elegant and meaningful, even if it will soon be dated, dusty and discarded like a 2001 iPod.

It is said that human beings can live for 40 days without food, four days without water and four minutes without air. But we cannot live for four seconds without hope.

It's probably true for nations as well.

Mr. Jobs's final leave of absence was announced this year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And, as it happened, Mr. Jobs died on the same day as one of Dr. King's companions, the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth, one of the last living co-founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Dr. King, too, had had a close encounter with his own mortality when he was stabbed by a mentally ill woman at a book signing in 1958. He told that story a decade later to a rally on the night of April 3, 1968, and then turned, with unsettling foresight, to the possibility of his own early death. His words, at the beginning, could easily have been a part of Steve Jobs's commencement address:

"Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now."

But here Dr. King, the civic and religious leader, turned a corner that Mr. Jobs never did. "I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything, I'm not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!"

Is it possible to live a good, full, human life without that kind of hope? Steve Jobs would have said yes in a heartbeat. A convert to Zen Buddhism, he was convinced as anyone could be that this life is all there is. He hoped to put a "ding in the universe" by his own genius and vision in this life alone—and who can deny that he did?

But the rest of us, as grateful as we are for his legacy, still have to decide whether technology's promise is enough to take us to the promised land. Is technology enough? Has the curse truly been repealed? Is the troublesome world simply awaiting another Steve Jobs, the evangelist of our power to unfold our own possibilities?

And, correspondingly, was the hope beyond themselves, and beyond this life, that animated Dr. King and his companions merely superfluous to the success of their cause, an accident of religious history rather than a civic necessity?

For people of a secular age, Steve Jobs's gospel may seem like all the good news we need. But people of another age would have considered it a set of beautifully polished empty promises, notwithstanding all its magical results. Indeed, they would have been suspicious of it precisely because of its magical results.

And that may be true of a future age as well. Our grandchildren may discover that technological progress, for all its gifts, is the exception rather than the rule. It works wonders within its own walled garden, but it falters when confronted with the worst of the world and the worst in ourselves. Indeed, it may be that rather than concealing difficulty and relieving burdens, the only way forward in the most tenacious human troubles is to embrace difficulty and take up burdens—in Dr. King's words, to embrace a "dangerous unselfishness."

Whatever the limits of Steve Jobs's secular gospel, or for that matter of Dr. King's Christian one, our keen sense of loss at his passing reminds us that the oxygen of human societies is hope. Steve Jobs kept hope alive. We will not soon see his like again. Let us hope that when we do, it is soon enough to help us deal with the troubles that this century, and every century, will bring.

—Mr. Crouch is the author of "Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling" and an editor-at-large at Christianity Today.

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

FT: Architect of modern Singapore steps down

Architect of modern Singapore steps down

By Kevin Brown in Singapore

Published: May 15 2011 12:34 | Last updated: May 15 2011 12:34

Lee Kuan Yew, former Singapore prime minister, has resigned his cabinet seat after 52 years

Singaporeans woke up on Sunday to the prospect of a government without the country’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew – a dominating political figure who unexpectedly resigned from the cabinet after more than half a century in service.

Mr Lee, 87, quit along with Goh Chok Tong, prime minister from 1990 to 2004, exactly a week after the ruling People’s Action party suffered its worst election result since independence in 1965.

In a joint statement, the two former prime ministers said they wanted to provide “a fresh clean slate” for Lee Hsien Loong, the current prime minister, who has promised to respond positively to voters’ concerns.

Mr Lee, who has been prime minister or a senior cabinet minister since the beginning of colonial self government in 1959, told state media his resignation was “the right thing to do, to give PM (sic) and his team the room to break from the past.”

He added: “We want to make it clear that the PAP has never been averse to change.”

As a founder member of the PAP in 1954, Mr Lee is regarded as the architect of modern Singapore, setting it on a free market course designed to attract foreign investment that has given the tiny island state the second highest living standards in Asia, after Japan.

He successfully fought far left opponents in the 1960s, locking up many without trial for years, and became associated with a tough approach to dissent that many dismissed as authoritarian. However, the PAP was repeatedly re-elected in general elections, usually winning between two-thirds and three quarters of the popular vote.

In a joint statement, the two former prime ministers said they wanted to provide “a fresh clean slate” for Lee Hsien Loong, the current prime minister, who has promised to respond positively to voters¨concerns.

The PAP won 81 of 87 elected parliamentary seats with 60.1 per cent of the popular vote in the last election on May 7, but was clearly shaken by an increase in the total opposition vote to 39.9 per cent from a third in 2006.

The retirement of the two former prime ministers has few implications for policy, since the government has already undertaken to address election issues such as high immigration, income disparity and the price of government-subsidised housing.

However, political analysts said it was not purely symbolic, and speculated that the prime minister, who is the son of Lee Kuan Yew, might take the opportunity to replace a number of other senior ministers with younger faces.

Eugene Tan, a politics specialist at Singapore Management University, said the changing of the guard suggested the PAP was serious about promises to reconnect with younger voters, many of whom dislike the governing party’s authoritarian style.

“Government policy is seen as bearing the imprint of [Lee Kuan Yew], and the fact is that the announcement comes a week after the general election and that voters did not take kindly to what some might say was negative campaigning by [the elder Mr Lee],” he said.

“We are transitioning towards a post-Lee Kuan Yew era, and many did not expect it to come so soon. But it is not a revolution. That is not the way government is conducted in Singapore.”

The elder Mr Lee will remain a powerful figure in Singapore, as a leading member of the governing party with the ear of the prime minister, untrammelled access to the state supervised media and significant moral authority, especially over older Singaporeans.

However, his standing has been tarnished in recent years by controversial statements such as a claim that the country’s Malay muslim minority had failed to integrate, and an appearance of being out of step with Singaporeans born after independence, who now make up a majority of voters.

Mr Lee caused controversy during the election by appearing to threaten that the government would discriminate against constituencies that elected opposition MPs. His comments were in sharp contrast to the emollient tone adopted by the prime minister, who offered an unprecedented apology for any mistake the PAP might have made.

He became the first prime minister of independent Singapore in 1965, after the union broke up amid acrimony over Malay political rights. He stepped down in 1990, and has since served as a cabinet minister without portfolio, latterly with the title Minister Mentor.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: Time to listen to Tagore

Time to listen to Tagore

By Harry Eyres

Published: April 29 2011 22:17 | Last updated: April 29 2011 22:17

Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore are probably the two most famous Indians of the early to mid-20th century. The tiny, shaven-headed, dhoti-clad Gandhi (1869-1948) appears to us more sharply in focus than the lavishly bearded, robed Gurudev (Tagore’s nickname), with his air of an ancient prophet. You can’t imagine a film called Tagore filling the cinemas. Tagore (1861-1941) was a poet, a dreamer, an idealist; Gandhi combined his idealism with political nous. Yet in some ways, Tagore right now might be the more relevant, even essential figure. Perhaps that is the thinking behind the Tagore Festival at Dartington Hall, Devon from May 1-7, when poets, musicians, thinkers and environmentalists gather to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Tagore’s birth.

Gandhi, born in western India, and Tagore, born into a prominent intellectual and artistic family in Bengal, were friends with differences. They held each other in great mutual respect – Gandhi’s title of Mahatma was even given to him by Tagore – but that did not preclude outspoken disagreement. That disagreement was perhaps more tactical than strategic – both shared the aims of Hindu-Muslim unity and the abolition of the caste system – but the tactical divergences could be acute. Tagore did not hesitate to criticise sacred tenets of Gandhi-ism, including the practice of passive resistance: “Passive resistance is a force, which is not necessarily moral in itself – it can be used against truth as well as for it.”

He demurred most strongly when Gandhi declared that the 1934 Bihar earthquake was divine retribution for India upholding untouchability; Tagore insisted that purely physical events should not be laden with metaphysical interpretations. As for Gandhi’s belief in the importance of spinning at a wheel, Tagore saw it as potentially dehumanising, risking turning human beings into machines. On all their points of difference, Tagore stood up for the inviolable freedom, dignity and creativity of the individual. If those sound like noble, woolly abstractions, they did not appear that way to Tagore. In the essay “My Life”, originally a lecture given in China in 1923, he explains how he was born in Bengal at the coming together of three great movements, one religious, one literary, and one political or national. His family happened to be prominent in all three areas; his father became the leader of a religious movement combining Hindu and Christian elements, which made him deeply unpopular with traditionalists. In fact, their unconventionality and revolt against orthodoxy made the whole family virtual outcasts.

Tagore was a poet; he had “a deep sense, almost from infancy, of the beauty of nature, an intimate feeling of companionship with the trees and the clouds”, and the urge towards expressing this feeling. All poets have to make their own idiom out of the common stock of language; or, as Tagore put it, the poet “should not only have his own seeds but prepare his own soil”. He started reading the Vaishnava erotic poems and then to write his own before he was 10; by his mid-teens he was a celebrated poet. Internationally, the culmination of his poetic career was the award of the Nobel Prize for his collection Gitanjali in 1913 – the first time the prize had been awarded to an Asian.

Formal education played very little part in all this. Tagore was suspicious of it; he strongly disliked the period he spent at a school in Brighton, England, and then left University College London without a degree; later he said he “never ... had what is called an education” and that “the main object of teaching is not to give explanations but to knock at the doors of the mind”.

Quite strange then that he should have founded his own school. But Tagore’s school, founded at his father’s ashram in Santiniketan in 1901, was unconventional. He instituted open-air classrooms to give the living world of nature and human kindness priority over the dead world of rigid book-learning. He believed that “the object of education is the freedom of mind which can only be achieved through the path of freedom”. (The school, called Patha Bhavana, still exists, surrounded by Visva-Bharati university, and numbers among its alumni the economist Amartya Sen.)

What would Tagore make of the success of the galloping Indian economy? For him success depended on much more than national self-determination and economic growth. In his addresses “Civilisation and Progress” and “The Voice of Humanity” Tagore questions the western ideal of material progress devoid of a spiritual core. Already in the 1920s, he saw an aggressive force of greed linked to a science “smothering all time and space over the earth” and “all that was human ... broken into fragments.”

Tagore speaks to us of the need for a return to simplicity: for the peace that “comes from the inner spirit, the power of sympathy, the power of self-sacrifice”.

www.tagorefestival.com

[email protected]

More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

BT: Choo, a name that sets one heart a-flutter

Published October 4, 2010

KWA GEOK CHOO, 1920-2010

Choo, a name that sets one heart a-flutter   By ANNA TEO DURING a constituency visit years ago, then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew dropped in on a kindergarten class. He spoke to one of the kids, asking the boy question after question, until Mrs Lee, who was at his side, stepped in to the child's rescue. 'He's only five!' she gently chided her husband. Moments in a remarkable life: Mrs Lee with Mr Lee at the Foreign Correspondents Gala Dinner in Singapore in 2006 Only Kwa Geok Choo could have done that. She had been, for 63 years, more than his life partner - Mr Lee described her as his 'source of strength', his intellectual equal if not better and, yes, a 'powerful critic and helper'. Not least during the writing of his memoirs, published 12 years ago, when she would stay up with him until 4am, going over the drafts, scribbling comments and corrections, arguing with him over some parts. As she later told a reporter, it's what she had been doing for years: 'I have been proofreading and sometimes correcting his speeches from his earliest 1950 speech to the Malayan Forum in London.' Theirs was a great love story never told, until the revelations in Mr Lee's memoirs, The Singapore Story, in 1998. He had first learnt about her back in Raffles Institution, as a fellow contender for the Queen's scholarship, and then at Raffles College as the girl who, to his horror, beat him in English and Economics in the term exams. Ms Kwa didn't just ace her classes - she topped the 1936 Senior Cambridge exams for the whole of Malaya, went on to study law at Cambridge University on a Queen's scholarship, and became the first woman to bag First Class Honours at Cambridge after only two years of study. It turned out, serendipitously, that she was a sister-in-law of a friend of Mr Lee's. He pursued; she was won over. Their romance was sealed before he left for England to study law on his 23rd birthday, and after she finally joined him in Cambridge about a year later, they married in secret in Stratford-upon-Avon in December 1947. Some three years later, on Sept 30, 1950, back in Singapore after graduation, they had a second wedding ceremony, this time before family and friends. As Mr Lee would recount later, the time he spent courting her in the 1940s, even during the thick of the turbulent Japanese occupation days, was 'the happiest' of his life. For her part, Mrs Lee had been fully and utterly devoted to him ever since, supporting his work and career closely and staunchly, behind the scenes. A highly successful lawyer herself - she was widely known to be among the best conveyancing lawyers in town - she ran the Lee household, and later Lee & Lee, the law firm the couple formed in 1955 jointly with his brother, Kim Yew, as Mr Lee began to immerse himself in politics. As the Minister Mentor said in an interview to mark his 70th birthday in 1993: 'My wife is my source of strength. She puts my mind at ease. In case anything untoward should happen to me, she would be able to bring up my three children well.' He has also declared that it was Mrs Lee's income as a lawyer that had enabled him to continue in office over the years - and enabled them to buy property for their children when they were growing up, to help them set up home later. And though she had no official political role to her name, Mrs Lee was a founding member of the People's Action Party (PAP), and had a hand in drafting the party constitution. She was one of the first women to join the PAP - and even delivered a political speech on radio in the 1959 general election urging women to vote for the party. That was her first and only such broadcast. Intensely private, Mrs Lee said precious little in the press in all her years as a public figure. Not that she isolated herself. In earlier years, she had been regularly spotted buying vegetables at Pasir Panjang, where she had grown up, with just a plainclothes security officer in tow. Reporters who covered Mr Lee's overseas work trips found her to be warm, kind and friendly. And she was candid enough, if matter-of-factly, the couple of times she did open up to the media - about her part in the writing of Mr Lee's memoirs, and on the occasion of his 80th birthday in 2003. She was reluctant initially, for instance, to have her husband write about their secret marriage in his memoirs. 'I was afraid the press would make a big fuss about it,' she said later. 'That would give me goose pimples.' But she thought about it - if eventually the 'secret' got out one day, it could be said that Mr Lee might also have hidden other facts when writing his memoirs. And she believed that in writing a biography, the entire truth has to be told. Mr Lee himself put it this way in his preface to his memoirs: 'She went over every word that I wrote, many times. We had endless arguments. She is a conveyancing lawyer by profession. I was not drafting a will or a conveyance to be scrutinised by a judge. Nevertheless, she demanded precise, clear and unambiguous language. Choo was a tower of strength, giving me constant emotional and intellectual support.' Even after suffering her first stroke in 2003, Mrs Lee recovered well enough to continue to accompany her husband on his numerous engagements here and overseas. But two more strokes in 2008 left her unable to move or speak. Still, until this past Saturday, she remained cognitive and continued to keep awake for him, Mr Lee told The New York Times recently. 'She understands when I talk to her,' he said. She might have been the proverbial quiet loyal wife, but there can be no doubt about her influence and role behind Mr Lee's policy decisions - and her own place in Singapore's political history.

ST: When she hears my voice, she knows it's me

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Oct 4, 2010

'When she hears my voice, she knows it's me'

Over the course of 2008 and last year, Straits Times journalists conducted 16 interviews with Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew for an upcoming book on issues critical to Singapore's future. In one interview, Mr Lee paid a quiet yet moving tribute to his wife of 63 years, who was by then bedridden. Here are extracts from Lee Kuan Yew: Hard Truths To Keep Singapore Going, due out in January next year.

Mr and Mrs Lee Kuan Yew at MacRitchie Reservoir in a photo taken in September 1946, when he was 23 and she was 25. They had first met at Raffles Institution in the late 1930s, and married in 1947 in Stratford-upon-Avon while they were law students at Cambridge University. -- PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE LEE FAMILY

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Can we start by asking how is Mrs Lee and how difficult is it for you coping with her illness?

Well, at the beginning it was. When it happened in May last year it was traumatic...She had recovered from her first stroke in 2003, reasonably unimpaired. We dashed her to hospital - the National Neuroscience Institute. There they found a new bleed (in the brain), this time in a more difficult position where it affects the movements. But there was still hope that she would recover with some physiotherapy, although maybe the quality of life would not be as good as before. Then while she was undergoing therapy, within the first two weeks she had two more strokes, one after another. The doctor said it's no use, physiotherapy cannot do anything because it was traumatic. So we brought her home, and I had to shift into my study room, which is next to my bedroom, because she had to have nurses round the clock. All the trauma meant I could not sleep. I developed a heart flutter and all sorts of problems that may have come on a few years later but came on earlier because of the stress.

After a while you adjust yourself mentally. I can do nothing except provide good nursing, so I've resigned myself. So have my children. She's gradually losing more and more of her faculties. There must have been more minor bleeds. Now she has cognition but she can't speak. But that's life. I was thinking to myself when I fell off the bicycle recently - had I knocked my head against the floor, I would be in a similar condition. We can't choose how we go. It's a difficult way of going but life is like that. So I've adjusted and accepted the inevitable. The doctors say even though you expect it, when it happens it's still a blow. I can only wait and see, and I've mentally sort of prepared myself.

It also reminded me of my own mortality and how quickly it can change in the flicker of a second if there's an internal bleed. That's life. I cannot choose how I'm going to go. I just carry on my life and that's that. If you start thinking about it, you will go downhill. Every day is a bonus, so let's carry on.

Is she conscious of what's happening around her? Can she recognise...?

I'm the one she recognises the most. When she hears my voice, she knows it's me. This is after 62 years together, which makes it more difficult for her and for me. Because there's full cognition - when I tell her, look, our daughter is in hospital with some problem, she's suddenly alert and listens. But the hours of cognition are becoming less and less because she's sleeping more and more. Energy levels go down...

I have to psychologically make adjustments. I've adjusted. But there will be another adjustment when she finally isn't here. Then this big house will be empty. Fortunately I'm able to concentrate on my other work, so life goes on. I travel and do all the things I have been doing. If I don't carry on with life, I will degrade. If you think you're going to sit down and read novels and play golf, you're foolish - you'll just go downhill. Every day is a challenge. Every day has problems to be solved.

Who do you turn to if you're feeling a bit down or you want somebody sympathetic to talk to?

I would say my wife.

And now? Do you go to her bedside to talk to her?

I do that every night. I read to her, I tell her what I've been doing for the day and the news of the day from The Straits Times, IHT and Wall Street Journal. Then I read her the poems that she likes and has flagged over the years.

She can't speak. How does she convey how she feels to you?

She blinks. Yes, one blink; no, two blinks.

What were some of the best times you had as a couple?

Well, my greatest joy was when my wife won the Queen's scholarship and I managed to get her into Cambridge immediately after that, because that meant she didn't have to wait for me for three or four years in Singapore. Had she not got a scholarship, I'd have gone back (to Singapore) in three years and finished the bar exams as soon as possible. Before I left, she had said, after three years we will become strangers to each other. I said, no, we won't. In the end, she took a risk and so did I, because we might have drifted apart. She got the scholarship, I got her a place and we got married that December (in 1947) quietly in Stratford-upon-Avon. Then we came back and remarried again in 1950. I don't think that's an offence (laughs), to marry a woman twice, the same woman!

What would you say is the secret to a long and happy marriage?

First of all, we accommodated each other. There was nothing we fundamentally disagreed on. She knew my quirks and I knew her eccentricities. She's a voracious reader. She read Horace, the Iliad and Gibbon's Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire. She read books on fishes, on food - the books on her bookshelf at home. I'm not interested in those subjects but she is. I'm interested in what I am doing. In the case of my memoirs, she would read my drafts and would simplify the English to make it easier to read and understand. Because as a conveyancing lawyer she's particular about the meanings of words, they should be clear, they should be simple. As a result, she influenced my writing style. I used to write convoluted sentences, the way I speak. She says, no, no, speaking is all right because you can repeat yourself and you can pick up where you left off. But in writing, you write a sentence and you move on. So you make it clear and crisp. If you look at my writings before my memoirs, my written style has more loops. She cured me of loops. She said, you want this to be read by O-level students. Don't use multisyllable words when you can use a single-syllable word, which is what (British style guide writer) Ernest Gowers advised. It was good advice. One of my doctors told me, I read your book and I found it very simple. So my wife succeeded. We adjust to each other.

How else did she influence you?

In almost everything. I left the domestic chores to her. She runs the household and the maids. Now I have a problem. I got a man who fixes things up and looks after the maids. It's not satisfactory because he doesn't know what the maids do in the bedroom and it's not cleaned as before. It's a problem. I have to get my sister to teach the cook because my daughter is not interested in these things. She's interested in her work and writing the next article and her BlackBerry. Her cooking is to take raw salmon and put it in the microwave. My wife is a good cook and she gave instructions to the maid on how to cook.

She'll know when something is not right. She's got highly sensitive taste buds and sensitive nostrils. She can tell straight away, oh, you've put too much lengkuas (galangal) and so on, reduce it. I would not have known what was wrong. I just knew it didn't taste good. She would know. I miss all that. Life goes on. Now my sister helps to train the cook. She's a good cook. Life means adjustment. We make do after a while.

ST: Farewell, Mrs Lee

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Oct 3, 2010

KWA GEOK CHOO - 1920-2010

Farewell, Mrs Lee

A nation mourns the death of the wife of Singapore's first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew

By Chua Mui Hoong, Deputy Review Editor

Mrs Lee trod softly through Singapore's history but her imprint was no less significant. She was a tower of strength who saw Mr Lee through the nation's toughest moments in almost 60 years in politics. -- ST FILE PHOTO

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In life, Madam Kwa Geok Choo was a quiet, dignified cheongsam-clad presence by her husband's side.

In death, she leaves behind a void that not only her husband, but also the entire nation, will feel.

Madam Kwa, known to the world as the wife of Singapore's first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, died yesterday evening at 5.40pm at her Oxley Road home, with her daughter Wei Ling, 55, by her side. She was 89. Her younger son Hsien Yang, 53, had been by her side earlier in the day.

Her husband of 63 years was in hospital with a chest infection.

Elder son Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, 58, yesterday cut short an official visit to Belgium where he was to attend the Asia-Europe Meeting summit. He is due to arrive in Singapore today.

A statement from the Prime Minister's Office said the wake will be held tomorrow and on Tuesday at Sri Temasek, the official residence of the Prime Minister located within the Istana grounds. Mrs Lee had spent many hours watching her children, and later her grandchildren, play at Sri Temasek, while their father went about his business or exercised.

Visitors may pay their respects there from 10am to 5pm on those days. A private funeral will take place on Wednesday at the Mandai Crematorium.

In a moving tribute, President S R Nathan said: 'To know Mrs Lee's greatness, one has to listen to what has not been said of her until now. Mrs Lee was great in many ways - as a legal luminary, as a mother of an illustrious family, and more than that for her stoic presence next to Mr Lee Kuan Yew during times of turbulence and tension in the many years of his political struggle.

'There was not a single important event or development that she was not an intimate witness of. Indeed she lived a life that had its fair share of pain and uncertainty, which was not evident in public.'

He sent his condolences to Mr Lee, 87, saying that his 'grief over her passing must be heavy and immeasurable.'

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou also conveyed their condolences to the Lee family.

Mrs Lee had been ill for some time. A stroke in 2003 had left her frail, with weakened peripheral vision, but she remained bravely active, accompanying Mr Lee on numerous official functions here and overseas.

On one trip to China, she gamely donned a long-sleeved swimsuit with long pants, and swam in the hotel pool, never mind zig-zagging across the lane. Her gait was uncertain and she needed a supporting arm, but she continued in good cheer, her sharp wit intact.

In 2005, on a visit to Temasek House in Kuala Lumpur, Mr Lee pointed out a photograph on the wall and described the picture to her: 'This is a picture of you doing the joget.' Her swift retort: 'Put it in the furnace.'

She suffered another two strokes in 2008 which left her unable to walk or speak. Nurses cared for her at the Lees' Oxley Road home.

In the last two years, Mr Lee has spent many hours by her bedside, reading from her well-thumbed copies of English poetry and novels and telling her about his day.

In an upcoming book to be published by The Straits Times in January, Mr Lee revealed that in her last days, 'I'm the one she recognises the most. When she hears my voice she knows it's me.'

Theirs was a lifelong love story.

Mrs Lee, a brilliant student who came out top in her Senior Cambridge year, and who went on to build a successful law practice at Lee & Lee, was the intellectual equal of Mr Lee, but she saw herself first and foremost as a wife and mother, in keeping with her upbringing in a conservative Straits-Chinese home.

In public, she was a traditional Asian wife who metaphorically walked two steps behind her husband, as she once quipped.

In private, she was a devoted mother, a caring, gentle woman, and a quick-witted conversationalist who loved literature, classical music and botany. She was a 'tower of strength' to her husband and family, emotionally and intellectually. She believed in the same causes as Mr Lee did - independence from colonial rule in the early years, and later, a multiracial, meritocratic Singapore.

She saw Mr Lee through the nation's toughest moments in 51 years in office, 31 as Prime Minister, girding him for battle the way only a wife can. She helped him through the anguish of separation. She shared with him her instinctive grasp of character among the people they met. She helped him draft and polish his speeches, memoirs and even legal documents.

She engaged him in heated debate on policy matters like the rights of women and was wont to chide him if she thought him too demanding of others.

An intensely private woman who shunned the limelight, Mrs Lee trod softly through Singapore's history. She was a pioneer in her own right, but she chose to remain on the sidelines in public, content to play a supporting role.

But her imprint on Singapore was no less significant for being so gentle. Her quiet dignity and self-discipline, her selflessness and modesty, were unique. The nation will not see the likes of Madam Kwa Geok Choo again.

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WAKE FOR MRS LEE

The wake for Mrs Lee Kuan Yew will be held at Sri Temasek, official residence of the Prime Minister and located within the Istana grounds, tomorrow and on Tuesday.

Visitors who wish to pay their last respects may do so on these two days from 10am to 5pm. Members of the public may call 6835-6614 if they have any queries.

A private funeral will take place on Wednesday at Mandai Crematorium.

The family requests that no obituaries and wreaths or flowers be sent. All donations will go to the National Neuroscience Institute Health Research Endowment Fund.

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FLYING HOME: Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong leaving his hotel in Antwerp, Belgium, for home yesterday evening. He was in Belgium for an official visit and to attend the Asia-Europe Meeting in Brussels due to begin tomorrow. He will arrive in Singapore later today.

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Oct 3, 2010

Confidante, counsel and companion of 63 years

Brilliant and intensely private, the late Madam Kwa Geok Choo is best remembered as Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew's loyal partner, whose strength of character supported him as he built a new nation

By Lee Siew Hua, Senior Writer

Mr Lee Kuan Yew and Madam Kwa Goek Choo at their wedding reception at the Raffles Hotal in 1950. They were married secretly in Britain in 1947. -- PHOTO: ST FILE PHOTO

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She was the supremely capable wife who signed the cheques and kept the family strong, prompting her husband, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, to suggest, only half in jest, that he was a 'kept man'.

Many men will cringe at that status, believing that being kept is a contemptible station in life. Not so Mr Lee, who sometimes made counter-intuitive remarks about his wife that hinted at how equal their marriage was.

Married in 1947, their union spanned the decades from Singapore's vulnerable infancy to its arrival as a First World country. Telling the nation that he was a kept man was Mr Lee's way of acknowledging how central his wife, Madam Kwa Geok Choo, a brilliant cheongsam-clad lawyer, was in his career.

Because he had a resolute, able and successful wife at his side during the riotous 1950s, he had the freedom of mind to take arms against colonialism and communism, without worrying that their three young children might suffer if anything were to happen to him.

It was years later, in 1985, that he would say in Parliament: 'Over the years I've been a kept man. My wife keeps the family.'

That was a rare moment when the role in his life played by his intensely shy and private spouse surfaced.

For she had chosen all her life to support him from behind the front line. It was not her place to offer political advice, both appeared to agree, or advance her own agenda or take a direct part in politics.

When senior Straits Times journalists, interviewing him in the late 1990s for their book Lee Kuan Yew: The Man And His Ideas, wanted to know what 'influence' Mrs Lee had on him, he responded:

'Not in political matters. In political matters, she would not know enough to tell me whether this is right or wrong.'

Tellingly, though, he indicated that she was a discerning judge of character.

Other times, he valued her frugality and staid quality. 'She's a very caring person, very staid, very caring; she's not frivolous and does not like to socialise, which saves a lot of time,' he said.

Trusted intermediary

Mr and Mrs Lee, together with Mr Lee's brother Kim Yew, set up the Lee & Lee law firm in a shabby Malacca Street shophouse in 1955.

It was there that Mrs Lee, or Choo as her husband called her, 'first personified the whole hazardous balancing act that was to decide the fate of Singapore', according to the late British journalist Dennis Bloodworth, who authored The Tiger And The Trojan Horse.

There, under the radar, she played the unlikely role of 'cut-out' or trusted intermediary between Mr Lee and two irreconcilable enemies - the British Governor and the 'Plenipotentiary' of the Malayan Communist Party.

Governor William Goode would make contact with Mr Lee, leader of the radical People's Action Party (PAP), through his confidential secretary Pamela Hickley, who would phone Mrs Lee and communicate in hushed tones.

As for 'The Plen', Mr Fang Chuang Pi, he did not trust telephones. But Lee & Lee's clients then included petty gangsters, unlicensed hawkers and a whole host of other humble people, so it was easy for The Plen's courier to slip upstairs to her office.

As Mrs Lee drily pointed out to Mr Bloodworth: 'A four-digit lottery runner would look much the same as a communist agent.'

Mr Bloodworth was able to consult her in the early 1980s for his rich account of the duel between the non-communist PAP and communists. Her voice as it emerged in brief quotes in the book sounded coolly cogent and eloquent, hinting at a precise, lawyerly wit.

The same voice was also evident in the odd e-mail interviews she gave the media in her later years.

For example, when asked if she and Mr Lee had disagreements, she responded: 'Would you believe me if I say we never disagree or quarrel?

'Fortunately, these are over little matters. Kuan Yew leaves household decisions to me. Family matters have not been a problem.'

Another time, in a light-hearted sequence when Radio Television Hong Kong quizzed the couple in 2002, she teased Mr Lee. The interviewer, who started by asking them if they held hands, wondered about changes since their romantic Cambridge years.

Mrs Lee gave a deliberately plain reply: 'The only change is that we've grown older.'

Cheekily, the interviewer said: 'Black hair to white hair.'

Mrs Lee, who often banters with her husband, looked at him and quipped: 'Black hair to no hair.'

Nixon's compliment

In 1973, then United States President Richard Nixon paid artful homage to her at the White House:

'Tonight, when you saw me turning to Mrs Lee, I said, 'Mrs Lee, tell me, is it true that you were No. 1 in the class at Cambridge Law School and your husband was No. 2?' And she said, 'Mr President, do you think he would have married me if that were the case?'

'But I probed further, and I found that, as a matter of fact, Mrs Lee... did receive a first at Cambridge Law School.

'Her husband did also, but like a very loyal wife, she said, 'He had a first with a star after his name, and that is something very special'.'

Mrs Lee was being modest, for she had outshone her husband academically - not at Cambridge but earlier, at Raffles College.

As Mr Lee related in his memoirs, The Singapore Story, he was the best student in mathematics, scoring over 90 marks.

'But to my horror, I discovered I was not the best in either English or economics. I was in second place, way behind a certain Miss Kwa Geok Choo.'

He sat up. 'I knew I would face stiff competition for the Queen's Scholarship,' he wrote.

They had first met at Raffles Institution. As the only girl in a boys' school, the principal had asked her to present the prizes in 1939, and he collected three books from her.

Their intellectual rivalry turned into friendship - and then love.

Her Prince Charming

The war from 1943 to 1946 disrupted their education. Together with Mr Yong Nyuk Lin, later a minister, whose wife was Miss Kwa's sister, Mr Lee started a small business making gum, which was then in short supply. The young Kuan Yew reconnected with Geok Choo in that context.

Later, he recalled: 'She told me... she was looking for her Prince Charming. I turned up, not on a white horse but a bicycle with solid tyres!'

It was often in his happy recollection of their love story - from his moonlight proposal to their secret wedding in 1947 while they were law students in Cambridge - that Mr Lee's forceful personality seemed to soften, even sparkle, most.

But then Mrs Lee regularly revealed a different side of the leader simply by her presence, or her well-timed words in a light British accent.

One day, for a Straits Times report to highlight healthy living, he hopped onto a bicycle on the Istana grounds.

The photographer and journalist found it awkward to instruct the leader of the land to keep cycling. Mrs Lee stepped to the fore, urging her husband to continue riding in circles until the photo shoot was complete.

In the public mind, however, she was very much the silent partner. 'I walk two steps behind my husband like a good Asian wife,' she said in 1976 on a visit to Kuala Lumpur. 'I am not used to interviews. I suppose I am interview-shy.'

In 1971, the Manila Times marvelled at the way the Lees kept out of the public eye. Mr Lee made sure there was 'no Lee Kuan Yew family with a capital F' and 'no Lee Kuan Yew cult', the paper said in a front-page story. And Mrs Lee was 'almost an invisible entity', the paper observed - in marked contrast to some first ladies elsewhere, including in the Philippines itself.

In this respect, she personified - and in many ways, set the model for - the Singapore-style political spouse: in the background, not a newsmaker, not flashy. She was always very quiet by Mr Lee's side in public. And by her manner and deportment, she set the moral tone for all the other political wives. Which was not to say she wasn't always observant - of situations as well as of people.

Mr Lee paid a glowing tribute to his wife in the preface to the first volume of his memoirs, The Singapore Story, which was dedicated to 'Choo':

'Choo was a tower of strength, giving me constant emotional and intellectual support,' he wrote. She would stay up with him till 4am while he laboured over his tome. 'A powerful critic and helper', she went over every word. 'We had endless arguments,' he wrote.

This was an echo of his early political life, when she used to polish his speeches because he had no time.

More significantly, she also had a hand in the 1965 Separation Agreement with Malaysia drafted by then Law Minister Eddie Barker.

Mr Lee had wanted the critical water agreements with Johor to be included in the Separation Agreement. He recounted in his memoirs: 'I was too hard-pressed, and told Choo, who was a good conveyancing lawyer, to find a neat way to achieve this.'

The paragraphs she drafted later became part of the Malaysian Constitution, guaranteeing Singapore's water supply from Johor.

The couple were inseparable. One evocative photograph that has appeared in this paper shows Mrs Lee watching and listening to her husband from a private coign on a rooftop, as he spoke at Fullerton Square rally during the 1984 General Election.

Even after her first stroke in 2003, which occurred while she and her husband were in London, she would still accompany him on trips - whether it was to Chinese New Year dinners in his Tanjong Pagar constituency or on long visits to the Middle East.

At every turn of their marriage of 63 years and in the nation's life of over 45 years, Mrs Lee's love for the father of modern Singapore ran like a leitmotif in his and the nation's life.

In the end, her life, so quiet and yet so entwined with his, made her a vital partner in the Singapore story.

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ABOUT MRS LEE

Madam Kwa Geok Choo was born in Singapore on Dec 21, 1920. Her parents were Mr and Mrs Kwa Siew Tee. Her father was the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation's (OCBC Bank) general manager from 1935 to 1945.

1936: Completes secondary education at Methodist Girls' School. First in the Senior Cambridge Examination for the whole of Malaya.

1937-39: Joins Raffles Institution Special Class, where she meets Mr Lee Kuan Yew.

1940-46: Enrols in Raffles College in 1940 and returns in 1946 after end of World War II.

1947: Graduates from Raffles College with First Class Diploma in Arts, winning the Queen's Scholarship.

1947-49: Reads law as a second-year student in Girton College, Cambridge University.

Places first in Part II of the Law Tripos - the first woman in Malaya to win this distinction.

1947: Secretly marries Mr Lee in December.

1950: Passes Bar final in May. Both she and Mr Lee are called to the Bar at the Middle Temple on June 21. Returns to Singapore. Marries Mr Lee again on Sept 30.

1951: Is admitted to the Bar in Singapore on Aug 7. Joins and becomes senior partner of a local law firm.

1952: Gives birth to son Lee Hsien Loong.

1955: The Lee & Lee law firm is established by Mr Lee, his brother Kim Yew and Madam Kwa.

1955: Gives birth to daughter Lee Wei Ling.

1957: Gives birth to second son Lee Hsien Yang.

1959: Mr Lee Kuan Yew is elected Prime Minister of Singapore. His brother and Madam Kwa take over the reins of Lee & Lee. They remain as consultants even after retirement from active practice.

1965: Helps in drafting parts of the Separation Agreement when Singapore leaves Malaysia.

2003: Suffers a stroke in October while on a visit to London. Recovers soon after and continues to accompany her husband on official trips.

2008: Suffers two strokes in May and in June, which leave her unable to get out of bed, move or speak.

2010: Dies at age 89, 11 weeks before her 90th birthday.

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Oct 3, 2010

Model political wife

Mrs Lee's modest and unassuming personal style set the standard for other political spouses

By Rachel Lin

Mrs Lee keeping a watchful eye at a press conference chaired by then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew in December 1981. Behind her is the late former president Ong Teng Cheong, then a Cabinet minister. On Mr Ong's left are the late former head of the civil service Sim Kee Boon and Dr Yeo Ning Hong, who was to become a Cabinet minister later. -- PHOTO: ST FILE PHOTO

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At first glance, Mrs Lee Kuan Yew's role as a political wife seems subdued.

She did not hold court decked in jewels, lending her influence to this or that political faction. An intensely private person who shunned the limelight, she was a silent partner to her more illustrious husband, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew.

But her political legacy runs deep. Her discretion, simplicity and honesty set an example that has permeated Singapore's political culture. She became the model for all political spouses.

Without her, Mr Lee might have been a very different politician. She polished his speeches. She vetted the drafts of his memoirs, staying up with him till 4am, making corrections.

'I have been proof-reading and sometimes correcting his speeches from his earliest 1950 speech to the Malayan Forum in London,' she told The Straits Times in 1998.

The early history of the People's Action Party (PAP) also bears the stamp of her involvement. She might have had a hand, she told the writers of the book Men In White, in the drafting of the PAP Constitution in 1954.

'Who else would have drafted that Constitution for them?' she said. 'My husband doesn't draft things. He was an advocate; he was a court lawyer.'

Drafting the rules of a society, by contrast, was her speciality.

Mrs Lee was also credited with registering the PAP with the Registry of Societies. She was one of the first women to join the party and objected when she was barred from party meetings.

'I felt it was unfair that I should be dropped. I thought I could have made a contribution. But I did not take a strong stand about it,' she told the authors of Men In White.

She also acted as a go-between for her husband in his dealings with the British governor and a plenipotentiary from the Malayan Communist Party.

In 1959, she delivered her first and only party political broadcast during the general election that year, urging women to vote for the PAP. She was the only English-speaking woman in the party who had the requisite firmness and conviction for the broadcast.

She attended PAP rallies and other official events, standing steadfastly by her husband. She accompanied him on countless official trips.

Many times, Mr Lee leaned on her sound judgment of people. Ms Deborah Barker, the daughter of former law minister Eddie Barker, said that it was Mrs Lee who told Mr Lee to bring her father into politics. Mr Barker became law minister in 1964.

'My father felt that she had very good judgment, and he would go to her for advice on important personal matters,' Ms Barker recalled.

Mr Lee was forthright about Mrs Lee's influence on him in an interview with the writers of Lee Kuan Yew: The Man And His Ideas.

'She would tell me whether she would trust that man or not,' he said. 'And often she is right, because she has an intuitive sense of whether the chap is trustworthy and friendly or unfriendly.'

Her political instincts did not fail when it came to the question of merger with Malaysia.

'She did tell me that she didn't think Malaysia would work,' Mr Lee said. 'She didn't think it would work because, she said, 'You know the way they do things and we'll never change them'.'

Singapore left Malaysia after just two years of merger.

She had also expressed reservations over the PAP's decision to make Mr Ong Eng Guan the party's treasurer. Mr Ong became mayor of Singapore and later national development minister, but became disenchanted with Mr Lee and eventually left to form his own party.

But Mrs Lee's most far-reaching impact, perhaps, has been on Singapore's political culture.

Her personal style - plain, simple, unassuming, modest - has set the standard for other political spouses.

Following her lead, they stay out of the public eye and do not use their position to flex political muscle.

The tone of government in the early years of independence might have been very different if the wife of the prime minister had been a socialite or a conspicuous consumer of finery or a power broker. By her example and demeanour, Mrs Lee helped shape a modest and sober political culture.

'To me, Mrs Lee was a humble and courteous person, straightforward with no airs or pretences,' said the wife of former Old Guard minister Jek Yeun Thong.

Mrs Elisa Chew, who tailored dresses for Mrs Lee, remembered her as an 'amiable' person, with 'no pretences'.

'She would always greet me when she came into the store, and was even willing to take a photograph with me,' Mrs Chew said.

Mrs Lee was no political wallflower, though. Silent partner she may have been, but she made her mark on the PAP's history, most especially as a political confidante to Mr Lee.

And, crucially, her example has inspired generations of political wives who aim for the same combination of simplicity and sense that she made her own.

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A kind, warm and caring woman

'My wife and I are very sad to learn of the passing of Mrs Lee. We express our deepest condolences to MM Lee, PM and their family. We had known her since I joined politics in 1984. She was a very kind, warm and caring woman. Although she did not hold any political office, her contribution to Singapore is immeasurable. Her care and love for her family enabled MM to devote his time and energy to develop Singapore from the Third World to the First in one generation. We will all miss Mrs Lee.'

DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER WONG KAN SENG

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KWA GEOK CHOO'S RADIO BROADCAST

Madam Kwa Geok Choo was one of the founding members of the People's Action Party. In this edited excerpt from his memoirs, Mr Lee Kuan Yew tells the story of how she came to make her first - and only - political speech, which was broadcast on radio. The speech was on the PAP's position on women.

We shared the view of the communists that one reason for the backwardness of China and the rest of Asia, except Japan, was that women had not been emancipated.

They had to be put on a par with the men, given the same education, and enabled to make their full contribution to society...

During the election campaign... we could not find a PAP woman member who was a good enough speaker to take on the programme in English.

After Choo had auditioned the wives of two candidates in Lee & Lee's office, she came into my room, where I was in discussion with (Goh) Keng Swee and (S.) Raja(ratnam), to tell me that they sounded too soft, not tough enough.

When she left us, my two friends suggested that she should do it.

I asked her, and after a moment's hesitation, she agreed. Raja wrote the first draft, which she amended so that it would sound like her.

It was cleared by the central executive committee and translated into the other languages, and she delivered it in English over Radio Malaya. One paragraph was crucial:

'Our society is still built on the assumption that women are the social, political and economic inferiors of men. This myth has been made the excuse for the exploitation of female labour. Many women do the same kind of work as men but do not get the same pay... We are fielding five women candidates in the election... Let us show them (the other parties) that Singapore women are tired of their pantomime and buffoonery. I appeal to women to vote for PAP. It is the only party with the idealism, the honesty and ability to carry out its election programme.'

This was a serious commitment, or I would not have agreed to my wife making it in a broadcast. I wanted to implement it early, although it meant urgent work for the legal draftsmen in the Attorney-General's Chambers.

They searched for precedents in the legislation of other countries, and drew up the Women's Charter, which we passed into law within a year.

It established monogamy as the only legal marital condition and made polygamy, hitherto an accepted practice, a crime - except among Muslims, whose religion allowed a man to have four wives.

The charter was comprehensive and altered the status of women. But it did not change the cultural bias of parents against daughters in favour of sons. That has still not been achieved.

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Oct 3, 2010

Devoted mother

Mrs Lee raised her children to be well-mannered and disciplined, and took pride in their achievements

By Li Xueying

Mrs Lee and her three children at the opening of the Coronation Road Community Centre in 1962. When they grew up, she was a confidante and companion to them. -- PHOTO: ST FILE PHOTO

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To the country, she was Mrs Lee. To her husband, she was Choo.

To her three children, she was Mama - who corrected their English, took time off from work to lunch with them every day, occasionally wielded a cane, and continued to look out for them when they were adults, down to replacing her daughter's toothbrush when it was worn out.

She took Hsien Yang, now 53 and chairman of Fraser & Neave, out to the beach, watching over him like a hawk as he built sandcastles.

She bought clothes for Wei Ling, now 55 and director of the National Neuroscience Institute, as the latter was a 'reluctant dresser'.

And when her eldest son, Hsien Loong, now 58 and the Prime Minister of Singapore, was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1992, she agonised as only a mother could.

With a mother's telepathy, she knew instinctively when her children were in trouble.

Dr Lee Wei Ling, in a column for The Sunday Times, wrote of how in 1995 she had called home after a brush with death on a hiking holiday in New Zealand, but without intending to tell her parents what had happened.

Her mother nevertheless sensed instinctively that something had happened - 'but I'd rather not know what', she told a relative.

Wrote Dr Lee: 'My mother knew me better than I knew myself.'

By accounts, Mrs Lee practised tough love when the children were growing up, making sure that they never threw their weight around although they were the offspring of the prime minister.

When the need called for it, she did not spare the rod 'when the children were particularly naughty or disobedient', recounted Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew in his memoirs.

'She brought them up well-mannered and self-disciplined,' he wrote.

As the family's main breadwinner during the early days of MM Lee's foray into politics, she worked long hours at the law firm she had co-founded with MM Lee and his brother, but would forego business lunches so as to be with the children.

In the evenings, she would take them to 'run around the Istana grounds while Kuan Yew played golf or practised on the practice tee and the putting green', she recalled in an interview with The Straits Times. 'And I remember taking them along to PAP picnics, and to Pulau Ubin to visit the Outward Bound School.'

For holidays, the family would visit the Cameron Highlands or Fraser's Hill in Malaysia at least once or twice a year - up to 1965. After that, they would vacation in Changi.

She took quiet pride in the children's achievements.

For instance, when Dr Lee had essays published in the Chinese newspapers, she would cut them out and paste them neatly in an exercise book.

Educated in Chinese-medium schools, their command of English is her achievement. A voracious reader with a passion for literature, she corrected their grammatical errors.

But the couple left it to the children to decide their careers, although she did dissuade Dr Lee, who was fond of dogs, against a career as a vet.

After the trio grew up, Mrs Lee's role evolved from a disciplinarian to that of confidante and companion.

In cahoots with her daughter, she persuaded Mr Lee on his 75th birthday to donate the proceeds from his book sales to polytechnic and Institute of Technical Education students instead of academically gifted students.

Her advice was often laced with her trademark humour.

Dr Lee recounted how as a by-product of being MM Lee's daughter, various people would ask to meet her though they had nothing specific to say to her.

'My mother used to say wryly of such people: 'If they cannot see the panda, the panda's daughter may be an acceptable substitute.'

She was a brilliant student and a sharp conveyancing lawyer. But it was clear that being a wife and mother were the most important roles to Mrs Lee.

In 2003, when the family auctioned for charity various personal possessions, she kept one thing: a pair of small ivory seals which she and Mr Lee had used to stamp the report cards of their three children. Another of her prized possessions was a gold pendant that Mr Lee had commissioned for her, with the engraved Chinese characters 'xian qi liang mu' (virtuous wife and caring mother) and 'nei xian wai de' (wise in looking after the family, virtuous in behaviour towards the outside world).

Dr Lee has written of how she had once e-mailed her mother when her toothbrush needed replacing. Mrs Lee e-mailed back:

'I am telepathic. I just got a toothbrush for you.

'But one day, the commissariat will not be around.'

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Labour movement supporter who cared for workers

'We in the labour movement are saddened by the passing of Mrs Lee. Together with MM Lee, Mrs Lee helped unions fight unscrupulous employers in the 1950s and 1960s for better wages and working conditions. The legal assistance given by Lee & Lee then helped to lay the foundation for the labour movement to progress to where we are today. For this, we are deeply indebted to Mrs Lee, an outstanding person who cared a lot for our workers. She will be missed.'

MR LIM SWEE SAY, secretary-general of the National Trades Union Congress

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Oct 3, 2010

Warm boss who set very high standards

By Rachel Chang

 

She was a brilliant property lawyer and a pioneer in the legal world.

During a time when most women were absent from the corporate world, Madam Kwa Geok Choo built a law firm from scratch and became the only woman among that first generation of larger-than-life lawyers whose names are now mastheads.

Mr and Mrs Lee, together with Mr Lee's brother, the late Dennis Lee Kim Yew, first set up the law firm Lee & Lee in a small office in Malacca Street in 1955. It was furnished with second-hand furniture.

In 1959, Mr Lee left the firm to become prime minister of Singapore, and his brother and wife took the reins, building Lee & Lee into one of Singapore's leading law firms.

Mrs Lee was remembered by colleagues yesterday as a warm but exacting boss.

She always had time for her subordinates: Lawyers did not need to make appointments and were told to just pop into her office any time.

At the same time, her high standards of professionalism were legendary.

Before the age of e-mail, lawyers communicated with handwritten notes. 'If she found any lawyer's handwriting difficult to read, she would buy a Ladybird handwriting book,' recalled former Lee & Lee partner Tan Kok Quan. 'She would give it to the lawyer with the advice to try and follow how the characters are written in the book.'

She was also keenly aware of her status as the prime minister's wife, and took great pains to avoid clients she thought might be attempting to make use of the fact.

Mr Tan recalls a client whose house had been raided by the authorities for illegal gambling. The client pleaded his innocence and asked for a letter to be written to the police. The police soon informed Mr Tan that his client was actually not so innocent.

'She said to me that people will always want to make use of the name of 'Lee & Lee' to threaten the authorities,' he said of Mrs Lee's reaction to the matter. 'Always be careful not to let the firm's name be misused.'

In a documentary screened in 2001, Mr Dennis Lee, who died in 2003 at the age of 77, recalled that if his sister-in-law had to make an application to the Government for a client, she would not use her initials on the letterhead because she did not want government servants to see that the letter was from her.

'She doesn't want the civil servants to even have a chance to practise favouritism,' he said.

In fact, Mrs Lee was so careful to avoid the appearance of impropriety that she never socialised with clients outside of office hours, leaving that responsibility to him.

She was the firm's 'intellectual mind', while Mr Dennis Lee took care of the business side of things.

She kept an eye on matters through a formidable work ethic: She read every piece of mail the firms' lawyers received.

Colleagues recalled that she would take home with her three bags of mail and documents. They would receive their mail the next day with her notes and instructions attached.

Mrs Lee's personality, according to one prominent lawyer who declined to be named, is best summed up in the way she always dressed impeccably in a cheongsam to work, but would change into rubber flip-flops once there.

'When we heard her walk around in the flip-flops, I would joke that that is power,' he said. 'Power in rubber flip-flops.'

Mrs Lee began to slow down in the 1990s, semi-retiring into a consultant's position. But even then, she had a special status in the office as founding senior partner, said lawyer Andrew Mak, who worked for Lee & Lee in the mid-1990s.

'The first working day back after the Chinese New Year, every lawyer would visit her in her office with two oranges,' he recalls. 'It was a firm tradition.'

Despite her health problems, which began in 2003 when she suffered her first stroke, Mrs Lee always held the law firm she had built close to her heart - literally.

For the 25th anniversary of Lee & Lee in 1980, the firm's partners had two gold coins specially made for the two senior partners, Mrs Lee and Mr Dennis Lee.

Unbeknownst to them, Mrs Lee had a chain made for the coin, and would wear it as a necklace on special occasions and at formal functions.

Long after she left the firm, partners would glimpse the gold coin around her neck when her image appeared on TV or in newspaper pictures.

She was appearing at those formal functions as the wife of Singapore's founding father. But the gold coin around her neck was a reminder that she was also a trailblazing legal luminary in her own right.

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Oct 3, 2010

Remembering a kind Mrs Lee

Former students, ministers and MPs recall her caring nature

By Cai Haoxiang

In November 1989, Mr and Mrs Lee made a visit to the park on Telok Blangah Hill, where they scanned Telok Blangah new town and the coastline in the south. -- PHOTO: COURTESY OF LEE FAMILY

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After completing her secondary school education at Methodist Girls' School, Mrs Lee Kuan Yew returned to her alma mater to do a spot of relief teaching.

It was a short stint but she left a long-lasting impression on her students.

One of them, Ms Lau Biau Chin from the class of 1946, said: 'We had a very good relief teacher by the name of Miss Kwa Geok Choo. Most of us cried bitterly when she left after a term.

'The next relief teacher loved to make us write lines...'

Ms Lau wrote of her memorable experience in a 1998 book, Treasured Memories, which gathered the recollections of former students of MGS.

Mrs Lee was one of its most illustrious old girls, having topped her class of 1936. She, too, contributed a treasured memory of her role as a coolie in a school play: 'My mother and I went down to Sungei Road and bought what the coolies would have bought. Pure cotton, dyed with indigo. When I had it washed, I would not wear it unwashed, the blue colour ran - real indigo.'

A picture of her in the play now hangs in MGS in its Heritage Room, said the school, its board of management and alumnae association, in a condolence statement last night.

Senior Minister of State Grace Fu, speaking on the sidelines of a grassroots event, remembers the late Mrs Lee as an amiable, genuinely caring woman.

Ms Fu, whose father James Fu was a former press secretary to Minister Mentor Lee, said: 'MM Lee has in the past a very stern and fearsome look, but Mrs Lee has always been able to be the balancing factor around him.'

She added: 'MM Lee loves to have a conversation and sometimes when we have a dinner or discussion that gets on too late into the night, she'll be the one that says, 'You know, Harry, let them go and take a rest.'

'She always had our interests at heart; we appreciate her for that.'

Mrs Jek Yeun Thong, 76, met Mrs Lee in the late 1950s, when her husband was political secretary at the Prime Minister's Office.

Mrs Jek last night recalled her generosity: 'When my father passed away in 1960, we went to see her for help with our legal paperwork like his will, and she said she wouldn't charge me.

'This I remember because she was very generous towards friends.'

Cabinet ministers yesterday hailed Mrs Lee's unstinting support for her husband, saying it contributed to the development of Singapore.

Said Deputy Prime Minister Wong Kan Seng: 'Although she did not hold any political office, her contribution to Singapore is immeasurable.

'Her care and love for her family enabled MM to devote his time and energy to developing Singapore from the Third World to the First in one generation.'

Labour chief Lim Swee Say, who is also Minister in the Prime Minister's Office, said the legal help Mrs Lee, with her husband, gave unions laid the foundation for the labour movement. Using her expertise, she helped fight unscrupulous employers in the 1950s and 1960s for better wages and working conditions.

'For this, we are deeply indebted to Mrs Lee, an outstanding person who cared a lot for our workers.'

Manpower Minister Gan Kim Yong, who entered politics in 2001, said Mrs Lee struck him as 'a very simple person, warm and friendly, putting all of us at ease' at a dinner with other MPs.

Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam admired Mrs Lee for her 'grace and penetrating wit'. He added: 'Mrs Lee's courtship and getting married to MM Lee was a beautiful love story, and how different Singapore is because of it.'

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A motherly teacher

'I remember Mrs Lee as a very motherly type. My sister Carla worked and trained under her for three years. She was a caring boss and a great teacher. When my sister took her first holiday as a lawyer to Europe, Mrs Lee arranged for travellers' cheques for her. In those days, we didn't carry cash and she felt it was important to take precautions. So she went out to get them and made my sister sign them in her presence.'

MS DEBORAH BARKER, daughter of former minister Eddie Barker. Ms Carla Barker worked in Lee & Lee between 1976 and 1978.

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Oct 3, 2010

A stoic presence amid turbulence

Tribute from President S R Nathan

 

My wife and I are deeply saddened to learn of the passing away of Mrs Lee Kuan Yew, wife and life-long companion of Minister Mentor. We send our deepest condolences to Minister Mentor, whose grief over her passing away must be heavy and immeasurable.

To know Mrs Lee's greatness, one has to listen to what has not been said of her until now. Mrs Lee was great in many ways - as a legal luminary, as a mother of an illustrious family, and more than that, for her stoic presence next to Mr Lee Kuan Yew during times of turbulence and tension in the many years of his political struggle. Many would not know of her quiet but important contributions to the State, as she walked that long road with him. She followed him faithfully - always by his side - throughout all changes that befell him in his political career. By his side she helped him pursue his chosen path in politics, preoccupied always with the good of Singapore before anything else, which she shared. She was his companion, confidante and counsel, and we may never fully appreciate the impact and influence she had in shaping Minister Mentor's thinking and life.

There was not a single important event or development that she was not an intimate witness of. Indeed, she lived a life that had its fair share of pain and uncertainty, which was not evident in public.

To her family and close friends she has left a treasure trove of memories, experiences, knowledge and personal bonds. There can be no substitute for the place she had in their life, nor consolation for her family. The sorrow and pain must be great for them as well. As it is for us Singaporeans who had been touched by her in one way or another.

FT: Tea with the FT - Michael Caine

Tea with the FT: Michael Caine

By Peter Aspden

Published: October 1 2010 21:54 | Last updated: October 1 2010 21:54

Disappointingly, Sir Michael Caine does not, when we are introduced, look me firmly in the eye and declare: “My name’s Michael Caine.” Nor, during the course of our tea together, does he at any stage say, “Not a lot of people know that”, or – and this admittedly asked too much – “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off”. Is there a greater deliverer of catchphrases in the history of cinema than Michael Caine?

He is, at 77, still an impressive figure, standing tall and possessing of a rich baritone with which he fires jokes with deft and natural comic timing. The accent is much-imitated and inimitable. “They’ve got scones and clotted cream here,” he offers, and somehow makes it sound funny. I am not sure about the word “clotted”, I say. It doesn’t have good connotations. “That’s just what I thought,” he replies. “If it had just said ‘cream’ I’d have had it.”

A shared concern for cholesterol levels established, we settle on smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwiches and cups of tea, English breakfast for him and Earl Grey for me. We are in a suite at the slightly soulless Wyndham hotel in Chelsea Harbour and there is a barrage of helicopter noise outside, as if there is a nationwide search for a runaway spy going on. It is because we are next to the Thames, says Caine knowledgeably (he has a flat just round the corner), the kind of thing Harry Palmer might say to put me off the scent.

Now that dates both of us. Harry Palmer – star of The Ipcress File, Caine’s breakthrough role – hit the screens 45 years ago. The longevity of Caine’s career is not the least remarkable thing about him. In his new autobiography, The Elephant to Hollywood, there are poignant personal recollections of two movie stars who were brought down by the pressures of stardom: one is Heath Ledger, the other Rita Hayworth. That is some chronological range. But Caine is still going strong.

Next year he once more reprises his role as Alfred the butler in Christopher Nolan’s third Batman movie. He won critical acclaim for last year’s Harry Brown, a hard-nosed vigilante movie shot in his native Elephant and Castle – a tough inner-London district (hence the title of his book). These are high-profile roles, in challenging and/or lucrative films. That is a rare feat for any actor, let alone one in the latter part of his eighth decade. How do you keep getting such great parts, I ask him? “I dunno,” he deadpans. “I sit back and wait for my agent to ring.”

But it wasn’t always like that. The autobiography starts at an awkward moment for Caine. It is the early 1990s, and he is shooting a belated sequel to the Harry Palmer films, Midnight in St Petersburg, in the Russian city. He goes to the toilet. It is, he recalls, “the filthiest toilet I have ever seen in my life. No one had cleaned it out. And I suddenly thought: ‘What am I doing here?’” He makes the existential crisis sound as desolate as Beckett. It sounds like a forlorn experience, I say. “It was just after the communists had gone. When we had lunch on location they gave us Geiger counters, to test the food for radiation. And of course the first thing we did was test the batteries!” He laughs loudly. “You don’t want a duff battery!”

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Can Hollywood stars bring Michelin stars? - Oct-01

Lunch with the FT: Fernando Henrique Cardoso - Sep-24

Jim O’Neill: An economist’s view - Sep-24

Lunch with the FT: Jerry Hall - Sep-17

Lunch with the FT: Tony Blair - Sep-10

Lunch with the FT: Gary Shteyngart - Sep-03

“It was a low moment,” he confesses, turning serious again. “But I was quite philosophical about it.” He saw the incident as a turning point. He was preparing to wind his career down, getting increasingly involved with his restaurant businesses and enjoying the easy life in his new apartment in Miami’s South Beach. And then, wouldn’t you know it, Jack Nicholson called. “He was the catalyst,” says Caine. “I had got to that stage in life when you wouldn’t even send me a good script. I had done a couple of duff ones. And then Jack was doing a movie with Bob Rafelson in Miami, and asked me to come. He said, ‘Get off your ass and just do it.’ And that changed everything. Jack is the nicest and kindest person, it was such a joy working with him.”

The resulting film – the noir thriller Blood and Wine – didn’t change the landscape of motion pictures, but Caine’s appetite was refreshed, his career revivified. Along came Little Voice, The Cider House Rules, The Quiet American, Baftas, Golden Globes and an Oscar. He says one of the aims in writing the book is to inspire readers of a certain age. “As they get older, people think, ‘It’s over.’ But it isn’t. It doesn’t have to be.”

The food arrives. The sandwiches are triple-deckers. “Blimey! They give you a lot don’t they? We will weigh 400lb by the end of this!” He offers to serve the tea but is flummoxed by a designer teapot. “I can never pour these bleedin’ things. Either nothing comes out or it all goes all over the table.” Between us, we crack it. Caine dutifully removes one of the slices of his sandwich and tucks in with relish.

Caine has a habit of saying nice things about everyone. He makes Hollywood parties sound like village green fetes. He doesn’t even have a bad word for Frank Sinatra, for goodness sake. I am suspicious of this. When he first travelled there in the 1960s, was Hollywood not full of predators trying to shaft this presumptuous Limey?

“No, truly not. And you know why? Because I wasn’t their idea of a Limey. I wasn’t posh. I didn’t have this superior English attitude. And I was all for them.” His love affair with things American started during the war. “There were American soldiers parked in the local recreation ground and we used to make their beds in exchange for chewing gum and Coca-Cola. I didn’t actually go there until Alfie.” His maiden voyage happily coincided with an Oscar nomination. “But then I saw Paul Scofield in A Man for All Seasons and thought, there’s no point in turning up.” (Scofield duly won the award).

Was he an innocent when he went to Hollywood? “I was an innocent by Hollywood standards. What surprised me was the hospitality, how kind people were. Even the lawyers and agents were the nicest people.” I raise an eyebrow. “Remember, I wasn’t really competing with anyone. You weren’t going to lose a part to me if you were Jack Nicholson.” And then, in 2000, there was the knighthood, which helped. “They like a bit of King Arthur.”

Never mind that, this was a town that famously spat people out for its own entertainment, I say. “It can do. But I wasn’t successful until I was 30. And I was a very tough 30, not some giddy little girl.”

The toughening of Michael Caine is the most sobering part of the book. Born Maurice Micklewhite to a working-class family in south-east London “with funny eyes, sticking-out ears and, just to round it all off, rickets”, he was evacuated during the war to a couple who would lock him in the cupboard for the weekend while they went socialising. That’s the kind of thing you read about in the Sunday papers, I say.

He shrugs it off. “A lot of children had a very bad time.” But to be locked in a cupboard for a whole weekend? “They weren’t wicked people. They took in the children for the money, and then didn’t want to look after them. They wanted to go away for the weekend and didn’t want to cart these dirty tykes from London around with them. Of course, when my mother came, she nearly went to prison for assaulting the woman. She beat her up.”

He is unsentimental about the war. “I benefited from it. For a start I ate nothing but organic food for six years. We had no sugar, no biscuits, no fizzy drinks.” He went on to serve in Korea. “It was a nightmare at the time. But I saw the world, and mixed with people from all classes and societies.”

He speaks movingly of his parents, particularly his father, whom he describes as a “hero”, a market porter at Billingsgate, who read voraciously and had an aptitude for technology, building his own radio from scratch. “He was a symptom of this country losing out on talent because of class,” he says. “They never knew they had it, they never knew they lost it. But today computers will compensate for any bad education there is.” He pauses for a second, and free-associates. “I’m a Google freak.”

What do you Google, I ask?

“Everything. It’s a wonderful thing. I had a gardener who didn’t know much about gardening.” (Read this out loud in a Caine voice and it is somehow hilarious.) “Every time I bought a plant I Googled it to find out how to look after it, and gave it to him and said, ‘There you go’.”

It can be a terrible distraction, I add. He evidently agrees. “I was looking for a penthouse once. And so I put in ‘Penthouse’. Oh my God.” I quickly wonder to myself how many people who hit the Penthouse website are actually after a penthouse. “And it’s a funny thing – you can’t switch it off. I had to take it out of the wall. I had to take the battery out.” There is something endearing about this techno-porno nightmare. Perhaps Jack Nicholson should have been around, I almost say.

He says in the book that 1967’s Billion Dollar Brain, the third Harry Palmer film, featured an early version of the internet. “I read that in the paper,” he says. He remembers an adviser on the set trying to explain it to him. “I said, ‘What a load of bollocks. Just tell me which knob to turn.’ I thought it was the most preposterous thing I had ever heard.”

Like many people, I say, I became fully converted to Caine’s acting talents by his performance in Educating Rita, for which he gained weight, looked permanently drunk, and gave a startling portrayal of vulnerability. “I had never been offered parts like that. But it is the proudest piece of acting I have ever done. An English professor in a college – it was the furthest thing from me that you could get. It was the first time I completely disappeared.” Was it hard to let his ego go like that? “I realised that I didn’t have that kind of ego, worrying about looking great. I didn’t care about that.” He reminds me that he was in repertory theatre for nine years before his big movie break. “A different role every week. I love being an actor. And I love not being me.”

Caine spends his time today between his Chelsea flat and his 200-year-old converted barn in Box Hill, Surrey, spending part of the winter in Miami. His days in Hollywood are over (he lived there for eight years, as a vociferous critic of Britain’s tax regime). There is a touching account of a mournful farewell to his press agent on Rodeo Drive. “I went straight to Ermenegildo Zegna [he mangles the name magnificently] and bought a shirt.” Did the retail therapy have the required effect? “I was all right. I got on a plane and went home.”

Home is where his heart is. He is “besotted” with his three grandchildren, a strength of reaction that surprised him, and reveres family life. Both in the book and our conversation, he repeatedly pays tribute to his wife of 37 years Shakira, “the nicest person in the world”, with whom he has a daughter (he also has a daughter with his first wife, the actress Patricia Haines). It is because of his family, he says, that his book is studiedly discreet about all those Hollywood parties. “When you fall in love, that becomes part of your past. Like mumps and measles. I didn’t want to go into all that. Not like Kirk Douglas – he named them all, Marlene Dietrich, bleedin’ Marilyn Monroe, everybody!”

As for the films, he says, touching every piece of wood in the vicinity, they keep rolling in. As well as the next Batman, he is preparing for a part in a version of Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, about which he is unexpectedly rapturous. “I have grandchildren now. And I get to fly off on a giant bumblebee. I want them to see that.”

..................................................

The Wyndham Grand

Chelsea Harbour, London

Traditional Afternoon Tea (all inc.) x 2 £30

Scottish Smoked Salmon w/ Herbed Cream Cheese x 2

Royal English Breakfast Tea

Earl Grey Tea

Total £30

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

ST: Thinker Mover Shaker - Dr Goh Keng Swee

Insight

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Sep 25, 2010

Thinker Mover Shaker

Dr Goh's brilliance and practical mindset could be detected in a rally speech he gave two months before the 1959 elections. That contained his basic ideas about Singapore's economic situation, and in it, he gave a listing of the island's disadvantages. -- ST FILE PHOTOS

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Dr Goh Keng Swee's life spanned 92 years, four ministries and countless policies that undergird the Singapore of today. The late deputy prime minister, who died on May 14 this year, was the quintessential thinker among the country's founding leaders. From his entry in a limerick competition at age 13, to his thoughts on the emergence of China at age 76, his writings are gathered and analysed in a book by Dr Ooi Kee Beng, a senior fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. In Lieu Of Ideology: An Intellectual Biography Of Goh Keng Swee will be launched on Oct 4. Here are edited excerpts from the book.

'My Ambitions'

GOH demonstrated early in life a talent, if not a need, for writing.

At the age of 13, he won a consolation prize of five Straits dollars in a newspaper competition. The paper had published a limerick without its punch line, requesting that competitors provide it.

It read:

'A planter cried out in affliction,

If only they'd give me restriction,

It might end all my woes.

But as everyone knows,

...........'

Restriction here referred to curbs on the planting of new rubber trees. Goh's concluding submission was: 'It's only a planter's conviction.'

Goh later published a couple of noteworthy short pieces in the school magazine, the first of which was written before he had turned 13 years of age.

'My Ambitions (1931)

Anybody who wants to prosper in this world must have an ambition. Ambition comes from a thought or when we get enthusiastic, we determine to carry out our thought. He who has an ambition will do his best to satisfy himself. He will stick to his work and see that he is the best man that ever has done that work. Our ambition must be to make ourselves useful to our country, our people and ourselves.'

This early document is fascinating for a variety of reasons.

First, we see a boy who is certainly more philosophical than his age would coax us to expect. Not only does he show conviction that ambition is critical to success, but he wishes to persuade others of that as well.

Second, this ambition goes beyond itself and has ethical goals, namely serve 'our country, our people and ourselves'.

Singapore's disadvantages

TWO months before the 1959 elections, Goh spoke at a rally at Dhoby Ghaut. That speech contained his basic ideas about Singapore's economic situation.

It was in his symmetric listing that day of the island's disadvantages that we detect his brilliance and his practical mindset.

Despite Singapore's fortunate location, he said, the free entry of foreign goods made it extremely risky for local capital to go into manufacturing. Second, as long as import duties had to be paid on goods going into the Federation, investors would prefer to establish factories in Johor than in Singapore. He also realised that not only was the general technological skill level among Singaporeans not up to standard, but training facilities too were 'grossly inadequate'. All these had to change.

To achieve that, Goh contended, a common market comprising the Federation of Malaya and Singapore was necessary. Goh would remain strongly convinced of the correctness of this analysis, and the subsequent failure to reach agreement on a common market with his counterpart in Kuala Lumpur, his second cousin Tan Siew Sin, was a pivotal reason for the separation of Singapore from Malaysia in August 1965.

Fear of PAP leaders being 'butchered'

WHEN relations between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore began sliding from dreadful to dangerous, Goh took it upon himself to work for a separation, and kept it secret from the British as well as certain members of the Singapore Cabinet who were deeply involved in PAP ventures on the peninsular mainland. 'Rajaratnam's histrionics' was also upsetting Goh.

Apparently playing his role as Minister of Finance to the hilt, Goh mentioned to Australia's representative in Singapore William Beale Pritchard just five days before the separation that 'Singapore might just as well be out of Malaysia if KL was not going to cooperate economically'.

He feared that the PAP leaders would all be 'butchered', and after Lee Kuan Yew's 'moment of anguish' in signing the document for separation on Monday, Aug 9, 1965, Goh confided in Pritchard about 'the long haul ahead and the need for hard work' with 'none of the nonsense of the last six months'.

As a further sign of how frenzied and insecure the political situation had become by July of that year, Goh, being perhaps the Singaporean leader least emotional about Malaysia, remarked further to Pritchard that 'Lee would be kept under control'.

On the day of separation, the Finance portfolio was handed over to Lim Kim San while he took over the Ministry of Interior and Defence, apparently feeling that priority had to be given to Singapore's physical safety.

The PAP leadership managed nevertheless to stay sufficiently united during these critical times. Over the next two years, Goh rushed through the establishment of the Singapore Armed Forces, national service and the Singapore Air Force. By August 1967, he was back at his Finance post.

The policy that doesn't work

ON JAN 13, 1971, Goh was asked to officiate at the opening of the Seminar on Modernisation in South-east Asia organised by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

In the post-colonial world, import substitution became the common path towards development. It appeased national demands for genuine independence and made economic sense to the national economists. And yet, in almost all cases, it failed to work.

Goh advocated that the logic was flawed in the first place. While the rationale aspired to cut foreign interests down to size, it actually could not.

First, import substitution required heavy investments in machinery and equipment that had to be imported from overseas. Second, local demand for import-substituting goods was usually low. In order to right this weakness, governments began either protecting certain firms through high tariffs and encouraging monopolies or providing subsidies. Success in business in such a milieu would depend on 'obtaining official permits and licences more than on efficient production and management', paving the way for corruption.

What was more harmful, Goh claimed, were the non-economic effects. The original goal was after all to spread new technologies and 'new social attitudes appropriate to modern societies' - 'respect for hard work, innovation, a meritocratic system of personnel selection and advancement, continuous striving for greater efficiency, in short, achievement-orientation'.

Need for elite to serve NS

GOH moved for the second reading in Parliament of the National Service (Amendments) Bill on March 13, 1967.

He presented the reasons for the special kind of defence that Singapore needed, the foremost of which was that the absence of a viable defence would mean that the island 'must revert to a colony or satellite of whoever wishes to afford it protection'. Furthermore, small states that failed to look after themselves invited civil war and disorder, tempting larger states to intervene.

Another important reason was the contribution it would make to the nation-building process.

One of Goh's strongest arguments was that 'many of our monied and intellectual elite' had failed to realise that 'their status and position (could) be justified and maintained only if they (undertook) a responsibility in the defence of the nation consistent with their position'.

Another line of thought entertained by Goh where defence was concerned involved Singapore being a 'rootless, migrant parvenu society'.

'(In a society without deep roots), minor success brings about overconfidence and the belief the good times last forever; minor setbacks send people into a state of nervousness. In this situation, the Singaporean lends his ears to rumours of all kinds. Nothing is too absurd for him to listen to and pass on to others.'

The rumours he referred to were about him leading a Cabinet faction against Lee Kuan Yew in order to seek the latter's resignation and a re-merger with Malaysia. The 'gullibility' of Singaporeans on this point which he considered 'bizarre' and a 'patent absurdity' was what worried him.

Singapore's 'brainless young'

THROUGHOUT his life, he held strong views that he voiced publicly about what can only be called 'The Human Element', and how this impinged on the best-laid plans of mice and men, including Goh.

Where defence was concerned, human weaknesses such as self-deception, complacency, laziness and cowardice, or the propensity of commanders to put show before substance, could easily lead to disaster. Partly for this reason, he sought to raise the technological know-how of the army and the country, just as his handling of Singapore's economy had led to enormous and effective institutions being generated to lead growth and avoid disaster.

Economic development for non-advanced countries required a social revolution of a certain type. First, an educated citizenry was needed. With literacy came an awareness of the 'benefits of economic development' as well as a social discipline that would guide citizens away from 'frivolous pursuits' towards 'a fuller and more cultured life'.

The second important factor for growth was 'the opportunity which a society afforded to those with talent, ability and skills to rise to the position for which they were best fitted'. For this to happen, an able leadership free from corruption was needed.

Later in 1967, he gave a reply in Parliament on the possible opening of a casino in Singapore to boost tourism. He was opposed to it unless two conditions were fulfilled: it would bring 'substantial benefits to Singapore' and 'firm safeguards against Singaporeans using it' were put in place. The human element, especially in fellow Singaporeans, was evidently a source of worry to him.

On Dec 10, 1972, Goh famously warned that the practice among young Singaporeans of copying Western fashions would turn the country into a nation of 'Wogs'.

'Wogs' - short for Westernised Oriental Gentlemen - was a term of contempt originally used by British civil servants for English-educated Indians. 'The brainless young, who follow Western fashions and wear long hair are part of the Wog culture of Singapore. Wog women wear mini-skirts and nylon stockings and think they look smashing.'

However, what he seemed to think was the problem was what he saw to be evidence of a lack of 'a set of sound basic values'. 'An understanding of one's own cultural heritage and a knowledge of the history of one's own people would help to give a man some cultural ballast.'

Goh's concern grew about the negative moral and psychological problems that Singapore's speed of advancement and its need to adapt to global dynamics had generated. Causing worry were two things: 'the wholesale adoption of a foreign language and the chase after money'.

PAP Govt welcomes controversy

IN AUGUST 1978, Goh was tasked by Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew to 'look into the problems of the Ministry of Education with a team of your own choice'.

But in 1967, he had already publicly presented views on the subject.

To start with, there had been 'far too much emphasis on academic performance'. Good performance in exams... did not say much else about the person's integrity and character, which were 'just as important as intelligence and more important than the mastering of examination technique'.

Apart from participation in physical activities, Goh identified three other aspects of education which had been neglected in Singapore: creative imagination, character and moral values.

Later that year, he attacked 'a curious view' held by some and that had been communicated to foreign diplomats and journalists that the Singapore Government disapproved of dissenting opinions, 'even to the extent of dispatching Special Branch agents to search for the heretics and persecute them in one way or another'.

The PAP Government, he said, actually welcomed controversy. The absence of open debate - apart from 'Barisan mid-summer madness' - in Singapore, except on trivial matters, was serious and had to stop. The unfounded fear of the Government, he ventured, was one reason. If that were the only reason, then the intelligentsia in Singapore would count as 'the most cowardly and spineless intelligentsia in the world'. If they really believed that they were ruled by tyranny, then it should be their duty to rebel, 'even to the point of taking up arms against the Government'.

He did, however think that there was a second and more acceptable reason for this 'deplorable absence of articulation', which was that the 'English-educated intelligentsia were uncertain of their position in society and in fact did not understand in all its complexities, the society in which they lived'.

Not pulling any punches, Goh assumed snobbishness to be a reason why the intelligentsia distanced themselves not only from the common man but also from the reality of society itself and from the ability to understand its workings.

His apparent aversion to the intelligentsia may seem odd, given that he was one of the most, if not the most, educated minister in the PAP. But the basis for this sentiment seemed to be the intelligentsia's tendency to find refuge behind a wall of privileges and abstractions. This timidity was what irritated him.

'There is a regrettable habit here to equate political views and action and even nation-building activities with passionate declamation of lofty ideals... or the striking of heroic postures and attitudes. Frankly, I find all this repellent. I am more interested in what people do, not what they say. The important thing is to tackle concrete problems as they exist, not to lay down woolly abstract principles. There are no crusades to mount, only a lot of work and a myriad of problems at all levels of society.'

When Education Ministry is more authoritarian than the army

IN PARLIAMENT on March 27, 1979, Goh claimed that his committee had identified 'real causes of trouble' in Singapore's education system. These were:

The languages of instruction in our bilingual system are not spoken at home for the great majority of schoolchildren.

The rapid switch from the Chinese stream to the English stream made necessary the mass production of teachers for the English stream schools, to the detriment of the quality of teaching.

One system of education, lasting 12 years, has been tailored to suit the brightest 12 per cent.

Basically, the motion was meant to revise the educational structure to 'allow each pupil to study at a pace suited to learning capacity', and which would make him as bilingual as possible. The ultimate goal concerned Singapore's economic future, as well as the relative importance of English vis-a-vis Chinese and other languages used in the country.

But after that came the stage of implementation.

On taking over the ministry, Goh found that although the staff had integrity and were devoted, 'the management was dreadful'. He boiled down the problem to two factors: the cult of obedience and the cult of secrecy. Strangely, the army was less authoritarian than the Education Ministry was. The army had an evidently healthier work culture than in schools where he found 'the bowing and scraping' and the 'desire to impress' too much to bear. He had actually stopped visiting them.

---

'(In a society without deep roots), minor success brings about overconfidence and the belief the good times last forever; minor setbacks send people into a state of nervousness. In this situation, the Singaporean lends his ears to rumours of all kinds. Nothing is too absurd for him to listen to and pass on to others.'

Dr Goh Keng Swee

'There is a regrettable habit here to equate political views and action and even nation-building activities with passionate declamation of lofty ideals... or the striking of heroic postures and attitudes.

Frankly, I find all this repellent... The important thing is to tackle concrete problems as they exist, not to lay down woolly abstract principles. There are no crusades to mount, only a lot of work and a myriad of problems at all levels of society.'

Dr Goh Keng Swee

ST: If I rest, I'll slide downhill fast - MM

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Sep 12, 2010

If I rest, I'll slide downhill fast: MM

Nearing 87, he reflects on ageing, his legacy - and life with his wife

By Seth Mydans

MM Lee speaking at an open conversation to commemorate Singapore Botanic Gardens' 150th Anniversary last year. Always physically vigorous, he combats the decline of age with a regimen of exercises and an hour-by-hour daily schedule of meetings, speeches and conferences both in Singapore and overseas. -- ST FILE PHOTO

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'So, when is the last leaf falling?' asked Lee Kuan Yew, the man who made Singapore in his own stern and unsentimental image, nearing his 87th birthday and contemplating age, infirmity and loss.

'I can feel the gradual decline of energy and vitality,' said Mr Lee, whose 'Singapore model' of economic growth and tight social control made him one of the most influential political figures of Asia. 'And I mean generally, every year, when you know you are not on the same level as last year. But that's life.'

In a long, unusually reflective interview last week, he talked about the aches and pains of age and the solace of meditation, about his struggle to build a thriving nation on this resource-poor island, and his concern that the next generation might take his achievements for granted and let them slip away.

He was dressed informally in a windbreaker and running shoes in his big, bright office, still sharp of mind but visibly older and a little stooped, no longer in day-to-day control but, for as long as he lives, the dominant figure of the nation he created.

But in these final years, he said, his life has been darkened by the illness of his wife and companion of 61 years, bedridden and mute after a series of strokes.

'I try to busy myself,' he said, 'but from time to time in idle moments, my mind goes back to the happy days we were up and about together.'

Agnostic and pragmatic in his approach to life, he spoke with something like envy of people who find strength and solace in religion. 'How do I comfort myself?' he asked. 'Well, I say, 'Life is just like that.''

'What is next, I do not know,' he said. 'Nobody has ever come back.'

The prime minister of Singapore from its founding in 1965 until he stepped aside in 1990, Mr Lee built what he called 'a First World oasis in a Third World region' - praised for the efficiency and incorruptibility of his rule but accused by human rights groups of limiting political freedoms and intimidating opponents through libel suits.

His title now is Minister Mentor, a powerful presence within the current government led by his son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. The question that hovers over Singapore today is how long and in what form his model may endure once he is gone.

Always physically vigorous, Mr Lee combats the decline of age with a regimen of swimming, cycling and massage and, perhaps more important, an hour-by-hour daily schedule of meetings, speeches and conferences both in Singapore and overseas.

'I know if I rest, I'll slide downhill fast,' he said.

When, after an hour, talk shifted from introspection to geopolitics, the years seemed to slip away and he grew vigorous and forceful, his worldview still wide ranging, detailed and commanding.

And yet, he said, he sometimes takes an oblique look at these struggles against age and sees what he calls 'the absurdity of it'.

'I'm reaching 87, trying to keep fit, presenting a vigorous figure, and it's an effort, and is it worth the effort?' he said. 'I laugh at myself trying to keep a bold front. It's become my habit. I just carry on.'

His most difficult moments come at the end of each day, he said, as he sits by the bedside of his wife, Kwa Geok Choo, 89, who has been unable to move or speak for more than two years. She had been by his side, a confidante and counsellor, since they were law students in London.

'She understands when I talk to her, which I do every night,' he said. 'She keeps awake for me; I tell her about my day's work, read her favourite poems.'

He opened a big spreadsheet to show his reading list, books by Jane Austen, Rudyard Kipling and Lewis Carroll as well as the sonnets of Shakespeare.

Lately, he said, he had been looking at Christian marriage vows and was drawn to the words: 'To love, to hold and to cherish, in sickness and in health, for better or for worse, till death do us part.'

'I told her, 'I would try and keep you company for as long as I can.' That's life. She understood.' But he also said: 'I'm not sure who's going first, whether she or me.'

At night, hearing the sounds of his wife's discomfort in the next room, he calms himself with 20 minutes of meditation, reciting a mantra he was taught by a Christian friend: 'Ma-Ra-Na-Tha.'

The phrase, which is Aramaic, comes at the end of St Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians, and can be translated in several ways. Mr Lee said that he was told it means 'Come to me, O Lord Jesus,' and that although he is not a believer, he finds the sounds soothing.

'The problem is to keep the monkey mind from running off into all kinds of thoughts,' he said. 'A certain tranquillity settles over you. The day's pressures and worries are pushed out. Then there's less problem sleeping.'

He brushed aside the words of a prominent Singaporean writer and social critic, Catherine Lim, who described him as having 'an authoritarian, no-nonsense manner that has little use for sentiment'.

'She's a novelist!' he cried. 'Therefore, she simplifies a person's character', making what he called a 'graphic caricature of me'. 'But is anybody that simple or simplistic?'

The stress of his wife's illness is constant, he said, harder on him than stresses he faced for years in the political arena. But repeatedly, in looking back over his life, he returns to his moment of greatest anguish, the expulsion of Singapore from Malaysia in 1965, when he wept in public.

That trauma presented him with the challenge that has defined his life, the creation and development of a stable and prosperous nation, always on guard against conflict within its mixed population of Chinese, Malays and Indians.

'We don't have the ingredients of a nation, the elementary factors,' he said three years ago in an interview with the International Herald Tribune, 'a homogeneous population, common language, common culture and common destiny.'

Younger people worry him, with their demands for more political openness and a free exchange of ideas, secure in their well-being in modern Singapore.

'They have come to believe that this is a natural state of affairs, and they can take liberties with it,' he said. 'They think you can put it on auto-pilot. I know that is never so.'

The kind of open political combat they demand would inevitably open the door to race-based politics, he said, and 'our society will be ripped apart'.

A political street fighter, by his own account, he has often taken on his opponents through ruinous libel suits.

He defended the suits as necessary to protect his good name, and he dismissed criticisms by Western reporters who 'hop in and hop out' of Singapore as 'absolute rubbish'.

In any case, it is not these reporters or the obituaries they may write that will offer the final verdict on his actions, he said, but future scholars who will study them in the context of their day.

'I'm not saying that everything I did was right,' he said, 'but everything I did was for an honourable purpose. I had to do some nasty things, locking fellows up without trial.'

And although the leaves are already falling from the tree, he said, the Lee Kuan Yew story may not be over yet.

He quoted a Chinese proverb: Do not judge a man until his coffin is closed.

'Close the coffin, then decide,' he said. 'Then you assess him. I may still do something foolish before the lid is closed on me.'

New York Times

---

Facing the effects of ageing

'I can feel the gradual decline of energy and vitality. And I mean generally, every year, when you know you are not on the same level as last year. But that's life.'

MINISTER MENTOR LEE KUAN YEW

Assessing the political attitude of the young

'They have come to believe that this is a natural state of affairs, and they can take liberties with it. They think you can put it on auto-pilot. I know that is never so.'

On how younger people worry him with demands for more political openness and a free exchange of ideas, secure in their well-being in modern Singapore

Handling those difficult moments

'She understands when I talk to her, which I do every night. She keeps awake for me; I tell her about my day's work, read her favourite poems.'

On his wife Kwa Geok Choo, 89, who has been unable to move or speak for more than two years. He says his most difficult moments come at the end of each day as he sits by her bedside.

Washington Post: Still Striving for Martin Luther King's dream in the 21'st centre

Still striving for MLK's dream in the 21st century

By Martin Luther King III
Wednesday, August 25, 2010; A19

Forty-seven years ago this weekend, on a sweltering August day often remembered simply as the March on Washington, my father delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial. A memorial to him is being erected at the Tidal Basin, not far from where he shared his vision of a nation united in justice, equality and brotherhood.

This weekend Glenn Beck is to host a "Restoring Honor" rally at the Lincoln Memorial. While it is commendable that this rally will honor the brave men and women of our armed forces, who serve our country with phenomenal dedication, it is clear from the timing and location that the rally's organizers present this event as also honoring the ideals and contributions of Martin Luther King Jr.

I would like to be clear about what those ideals are.

Vast numbers of Americans know of my father's leadership in opposing segregation. Yet too many believe that his dream was limited to achieving racial equality. Certainly he sought that objective, but his vision was about more than expanding rights for a single race. He hoped that even in the direst circumstances, we could overcome our differences and replace bitter conflicts with greater understanding, reconciliation and cooperation.

My father championed free speech. He would be the first to say that those participating in Beck's rally have the right to express their views. But his dream rejected hateful rhetoric and all forms of bigotry or discrimination, whether directed at race, faith, nationality, sexual orientation or political beliefs. He envisioned a world where all people would recognize one another as sisters and brothers in the human family. Throughout his life he advocated compassion for the poor, nonviolence, respect for the dignity of all people and peace for humanity.

Although he was a profoundly religious man, my father did not claim to have an exclusionary "plan" that laid out God's word for only one group or ideology. He marched side by side with members of every religious faith. Like Abraham Lincoln, my father did not claim that God was on his side; he prayed humbly that he was on God's side.

He did, however, wholeheartedly embrace the "social gospel." His spiritual and intellectual mentors included the great theologians of the social gospel Walter Rauschenbush and Howard Thurman. He said that any religion that is not concerned about the poor and disadvantaged, "the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them[,] is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial." In his "Dream" speech, my father paraphrased the prophet Amos, saying, "We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."

The title of the 1963 demonstration, "The Great March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom," reflected his belief that the right to sit at a lunch counter would be hollow if African Americans could not afford the meal. The need for jobs and shared economic prosperity remains as urgent and compelling as it was 47 years ago. My father's vision would include putting millions of unemployed Americans to work, rebuilding our tattered infrastructure and reforms to reduce pollution and better care for the environment.

In my efforts to help realize my father's dream, supporting justice, freedom and human rights for all people, I have conducted nonviolence workshops and outreach in communities across this country and numerous other nations. My experiences affirm the enduring truth of my father's words: that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere" and that "we are all bound together in a single garment of destiny."

I pray that all Americans will embrace the challenge of social justice and the unifying spirit that my father shared with his compatriots. With this commitment, we can begin to find new ways to reach out to one another, to heal our divisions, and build bridges of hope and opportunity benefiting all people. In so doing, we will not merely be seeking the dream; we will at long last be living it.

Martin Luther King III is president and chief executive of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

© 2010 The Washington Post Company

FT: Lunch with the FT - Alan Greenspan

Lunch with the FT: Alan Greenspan

By Alan Beattie

Published: July 30 2010 17:12 | Last updated: July 30 2010 17:12

Escaping the latest of a string of steaming hot summer days, I duck gratefully into the cool interior of Tosca, an Italian restaurant in the lobbyist quarter of Washington DC. From the pavement it is not prepossessing, curtains entirely screening off the interior and presenting a blank face to the world. But the busy, clubby interior hums with power. Situated conveniently between Capitol Hill and the White House, and in the neighbourhood of some of Washington’s most powerful political consultancies, it has a reputation as a location for political deals and power-broking at the highest levels. It was here, legend has it, that Tom Daschle spent a five-hour dinner persuading Barack Obama to run for the US presidency. It is very DC.

Entering a second after me is Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve. For nearly two decades he was one of the most powerful people in Washington, and indeed the world, and for many he became a symbol of the global economy in the days before it all went wrong. Greenspan is welcomed at the desk with a smooth greeting of “Hello, Mr Chairman,” the restaurant adhering to the reflexive Washington habit of addressing people by the titles of their offices even years after they have left them.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Editorial Comment: The phoney deficits war - Jul-30

Greenspan mauled over role in meltdown - Apr-07

Analysis: America: Optimism on hold - Jul-09

Opinion: Bernanke must end the era of ultra-low rates - Jul-28

We are ushered through the buzzy dining room to a relatively secluded table in the corner. The 84-year-old Greenspan, neatly and soberly dressed, speaks softly but rapidly. He chooses a Diet Coke, the default beverage of official Washington. Suppressing a mad urge to call for a large Scotch just to be different, I ask for sparkling water.

I remark on the fame of the restaurant and he looks amused. “My wife suggested it.” He is married to Andrea Mitchell, chief foreign affairs correspondent for NBC television, who by his account is outgoing and sociable and a good foil to his more reserved character. You get the impression that he is very happy to outsource a lot of such decisions to her. He asks if he can pay. I explain that part of the game is for the FT to pick up the bill. He grins. “So there is such a thing as a free lunch.”

It’s not a view you often hear from central bankers. But for much of Greenspan’s tenure at the Fed – he was chairman from just before the 1987 stock market crash until 2006 – it looked as if it were true. The economy grew, the stock market surged, house prices rose and Wall Street kept getting richer. Then, just a year after Greenspan handed over the Fed joystick to Ben Bernanke, a credit crunch began that turned into a global financial crisis, and the entire system of finance capitalism, of which Greenspan had been such a powerful advocate, threatened to eat itself.

Critics who long thought that Greenspan was too enthralled by free enterprise and financial markets have claimed vindication. Typically, he has been ruminating deeply about the implications of what has happened, and synthesising his thoughts into an argument. It is a long habit: before arriving at the Fed he spent three decades running an economic consulting firm in New York, interrupted by a stint as chairman of President Gerald Ford’s council of economic advisers. In preparation for our meeting he sends me a 46-page treatise he has written about the crisis.

. . .

“Do you want to get started?” he says. He means the interview, not lunch. Before we get round to ordering, we’ve gone through the near-impossibility of being able to predict the global financial crisis (which he illustrates by tracing a probability distribution in the air with his finger), the assumptions underlying financial regulation, the parallels with the financial panic of 1907 and the impact of the end of the cold war on global saving rates. I reported on the Federal Reserve early in the 2000s when Greenspan was chairman, and memories of long conversations with him in this professorial style are rapidly coming back to me. He does his research – at one point quoting from a story of mine that appeared in the FT the morning of our lunch – and marshals his arguments.

Though he professes not to speak in complete sentences – unlike his wife, he says, who can talk in perfect paragraphs on any occasion – and enjoins me to clean up the syntax of whatever I quote him saying, it turns out to be unnecessary. His manner is measured, precise and academic, though he makes his points forcefully, gripping the table as he argues. “Remember my premise,” he says, more than once, while going through a logical progression.

He has admitted to having been “30 per cent wrong” in his time as Fed chairman, particularly in assuming that banks and financial institutions would closely monitor the creditworthiness of the people with whom they were doing business. But his present plan for preventing a recurrence of the global financial crisis still shows a predilection for the light touch: make banks hold more capital to back their lending, demand higher collateral that can be seized if financial transactions go wrong, and keep more cash on hand in case of emergencies.

In extremis, he says, banks might have to be broken up by law if they become too big to fail without bringing down the whole financial system. But he makes clear that he regards such an intervention as a last resort. He retains faith in markets and doesn’t even think that US-style finance capitalism will lose ground to the softer, more regulated model of European social democracy, let alone the appeal of a centrally planned economy such as the former Soviet Union. It is a question of making precise technocratic adjustments.

I wonder whether this limited solution is a proportionate response to such an economic cataclysm. Many, including Paul Volcker, his predecessor at the Fed, have urged much tougher constraints on banks. “If you mean is it a proportionate emotional response to the people who have really lost a great deal through no fault of their own, the answer is no,” he says. But in terms of what needs to be done, the solutions can be narrowly focused: revise the likely probability of financial catastrophe in the light of new evidence and make banks behave accordingly. “A necessary condition for my position is that this is a very rare event,” he says. The implosion of the debt bubble that had built up, and the extent to which it almost caused the entire financial system to stop working, was not anticipated by financial regulators.

After 15 minutes we look to our menus. Eschewing elaborate formulations such as black ink tagliatelle with crabmeat ragu, Greenspan opts for a more ascetic dish: grilled swordfish with roasted organic vegetables. Mindful of the difficulties of conducting an interview while slurping pasta, I reluctantly pass up the carrot pappardelle with rabbit and also go for a simple dish: grilled baby octopus with a green salad. The food arrives swiftly and we start eating, Greenspan taking small forkfuls of swordfish dipped in Dijon mustard.

. . .

The other part of his record seized on by critics, especially Democrats, is his support for two rounds of tax cuts. One came in 2001 at the beginning of the administration of President George W Bush and one two years later. The week before we met, with an eye to the US’s huge fiscal deficit, he told an interviewer that he supported reversing those tax cuts, a remark seized on by his detractors to argue that he was irresponsible to have backed them in the first place. Here, too, he has a carefully worked-out response. One, both administration and congressional forecasts back then predicted huge fiscal surpluses, so a tax cut was quite sensible. Two, he argued at the time that a second round of cuts should be made conditional on how the economy and the public finances developed, which they were not. Three, he underestimated how his words would be seized on to justify reducing taxes willy-nilly, and he has already admitted that mistake in his 2007 memoirs, The Age of Turbulence. “Criticisms are wholly deserved when you’ve done something wrong, I grant you,” he says. “But I still prefer when I’m criticised that it be accurate.”

The plates are cleared and we move on to coffee. He orders a cappuccino, I an Americano. The formal business of the symposium having been concluded, I move on to more personal matters. When he was Fed chairman, he had dozens of the smartest economists in the world as a resource and endless conversations with brilliant colleagues and counterparts around the world. For him, personally, how much of a wrench was it to leave it all?

The answer, it turns out, is not a huge one. He does hanker for the regular free-form meetings he used to have with Fed officials, sitting round for hours and talking about whatever interested him that day. Rather wistfully, he says he also misses the regular breakfasts he had with Larry Summers, then in the Treasury under the Clinton administration and now President Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser. Many colleagues regard Summers as abrasive, but Greenspan sounds affectionate. “We had a wonderful time,” he says. “I know the guy has a lot of people thinking he’s a little rough sometimes, but he is smart. Larry is really smart.”

But aside from the odd vacation playing golf or tennis in Aspen or Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he stays on a ranch owned by longstanding friend and former World Bank president James Wolfensohn, Greenspan has plenty of work to keep him busy. Before joining the Fed, he ran his own economic consultancy and developed a phenomenal knowledge of abstruse data series and statistics. Even when he was Fed chairman, he still spent at least half his day in personal study. Now, with his central banking career over, he has gone straight back to what he did before, running a research operation with a handful of employees. This time he is aided by the power of modern computing and video conferencing, technologies of which he speaks almost reverently.

“People think, ‘How can you go from being a leading figure in an international financial system back to your desk?’” he says. “My answer is, ‘I love it.’ I’m going back to my roots.” His work involves data-mining of the most precise kind.

He speaks excitedly of constructing a data series that will allow him to monitor the month-to-month profitability of US non-financial corporations. “That’s the type of thing I’ve been doing for generations,” he says, and the reference to time served is not hyperbole.

. . .

Recently, for another piece of research, Greenspan was searching for the definition of what constitutes an aircraft wing in the US. He looked out some work he himself had done in his twenties on the aircraft requirements for the Korean war, which was going on at the time. And, he says proudly, the research showed that his style of thinking was the same back then. “It’s the conceptualisation, the statistical detail, the syllogisms, the algebra”.

When he gets on the theme of statistics and research, Greenspan relaxes and becomes almost expansive. I get the sense that, though he loved the Fed job, a more private and introspective life fits his personality rather better. “I’m still introverted,” he says. “By psychology I’m more an aide than a policymaker.” During his short early career as a professional jazz musician, for example, he says: “I was a good sideman, as they call it, but I didn’t like to be a soloist.” Indeed, much though I try, I find it hard to envisage him playing clarinet in the smoky jazz clubs of his native New York in the 1940s. It’s easier to imagine him junking the jazz to go to college and become an economist.

And while he clearly does care about his legacy, there does seem some truth to his protestations that other people spend a lot more time concerning themselves about his record than he does. “I’m so obsessed doing what I’m doing, I don’t think I have time to worry about it,” he says. “Let others worry about it. I’m busy.”

As the restaurant empties, we move on to current events, talking at length about China and his faith that the market economy will prevail there, however weakened its appeal might look right now and however slowly economic reform might be progressing. He worries that the current leadership, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, are less keen on liberalisation than their predecessors Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji. But he does not seriously fear the country going into reverse and heading back towards central planning. “When I go to China, I haven’t heard anybody argue in favour of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and the conceptual framework that it is about in years.”

His approach to everything is the same. Look at the data; calculate the probabilities; make a dispassionate calibrated decision. Just before we leave, he bemoans the calls on “poor Obama” to be seen to be caring more about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. “I complained when people were saying he’s not showing enough empathy,” he says. “I said, ‘That’s not what I want to see.’ I want to see cold, cool, deliberative action. Empathy is not going to solve this problem.”

I settle up and we pick our way back through the dining room, which at 2.30pm is almost deserted. Few people in this town have the time or inclination for leisurely lunches. I decline the polite offer of a ride. Alan Greenspan is driven off through the muggy afternoon, back to descend into the depths of his beloved data mines.

Alan Beattie is the FT’s international economy editor

..................................................

Tosca

Table 50, 1112 F St NW, Washington DC

Insalata mista $8.00

Grilled octopus $24.00

Grilled swordfish $24.00

Diet Coke $2.50

Bottle sparkling water $7.00

Americano coffee $3.50

Cappuccino $4.00

Total (including tax) $80.30

..................................................

Alan Greenspan: the pre-Fed years

By Victoria Maw

1926: Born March 6 in the Washington Heights area of New York, the only child of a stock market analyst father and music-loving mother. His parents divorce when he is five years old.

1935: His father Herbert publishes Recovery Ahead!, a book about President Roosevelt’s New Deal spending plans. Greenspan Sr’s inscription to his son hopes “that at your maturity you may look back and endeavour to interpret the reasoning behind these logical forecasts and begin a like work of your own.’’

1943: Graduates from George Washington High School, excelling in mathematics and music.

1944: An accomplished clarinet and saxophone player, he joins Henry Jerome’s travelling big band. Also keeps the band’s accounts.

1948: Graduates in economics from New York University. In his memoir The Age of Turbulence (2007), he recalls: “I preferred to focus on technical challenges and did not have a macro view.”

1950: Gains a Masters in economics from New York University. Begins postgraduate studies at Columbia but drops out and accepts job at National Industrial Conference Board.

1952: Marries Joan Mitchell but obtains annulment after 10 months. Mitchell had introduced him to the work of writer and philosopher Ayn Rand: “I was intellectually limited until I met her,” he later wrote.

1954: Partners bond trader William Townsend to become chairman and president of Townsend-Greenspan & Co, a consulting business that makes economic forecasts.

1967: Advises Richard Nixon before 1968 presidential election. Turns down permanent position in Nixon administration but, in his memoirs, describes Clinton and Nixon as “by far the smartest presidents I’ve worked with”.

1974: Works for President Gerald Ford as chairman of Council of Economic Advisers.

1976: Guests at his 50th birthday party include Estée Lauder, Brooke Astor, Oscar de la Renta and Henry Kissinger.

1987: Appointed by Ronald Reagan as Federal Reserve chairman. In 1996 he proposes to Andrea Mitchell, an NBC correspondent he had been seeing for 12 years. Delays honeymoon for two months because of work: “I studied my calendar and suggested adding a honeymoon to the tail-end of an international monetary conference in Switzerland.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

Philip Zimbardo on "The Secret Powers of Time"

In this wonderfully animated video, Professor Philip Zimbardo (of the famed Stanford Prison Experiment) "conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world."

NY Times: India's Young and Poor Rally to Another Ghandi

June 4, 2010

India’s Young and Poor Rally to Another Gandhi

By JIM YARDLEY

AHRAURA, India — Rahul Gandhi’s helicopter descends out of the boiling afternoon sky and a restless, sweat-soaked crowd of 100,000 people suddenly surges to life. Men rush forward in the staggering heat. Teenage boys wave a white bedsheet bearing a faintly cheeky request: We Want to Meet the Prince of India.

Mr. Gandhi climbs onto a special viewing stand in this isolated corner of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, and offers a boyish wave. Not yet 40, Mr. Gandhi is the great-grandson of India’s first prime minister, the grandson of India’s fourth prime minister and the son of India’s seventh prime minister. His audience includes some of the poorest people in India.

“I’m standing here with you,” he declared to loud cheers, speaking for about 15 minutes before he left, waving through the window of his helicopter. “I can come with you anywhere and everywhere to fight with you.”

India is Mr. Gandhi’s family inheritance. Seemingly the only uncertainty is when he will collect it. He holds no major post in government, yet rumors persist that the governing Indian National Congress Party — whose president is his mother, Sonia Gandhi — might install him as prime minister before the current government expires in 2014. The job’s current occupant, Manmohan Singh, recently had to bat away retirement questions.

Yet despite his aura of inevitability, Mr. Gandhi largely remains an enigma. India is an emerging power, facing myriad domestic and international issues, but he remains deliberately aloof from daily politics. His thoughts on many major issues — as well as the temperature of the fire in his belly — remain mostly unknown.

For the Congress Party, that may be an advantage. The party has been the top vote getter in the last two national elections by appealing to the poor through welfare schemes while also pursuing pro-growth policies. But it holds power only with the support of fickle coalition partners.

Mr. Gandhi is using his enormous popularity to broaden the party’s political base, steering clear of more contentious policy making. That could help position Congress to win an outright national majority — though it does little to illuminate what he would do with a mandate if he won it.

“What most people still have a hard time figuring out is, ‘What is Rahul Gandhi’s vision?’ ” said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, who has met privately with Mr. Gandhi and speaks highly of him. “It is still not apparent to a lot of people what his own deep political convictions are.”

Mr. Gandhi traverses the country, often on secret trips, to recruit as many as 10 million new youth members. His job is also to try to take back crucial strongholds like Uttar Pradesh, in the north, which his family claims as its home base but which the Congress Party does not control.

Most Indian political parties are internally undemocratic and often dominated by political dynasties, none more famous the Gandhi clan. But Mr. Gandhi has also insisted that the party’s youth organizations hold internal elections for posts and operate as meritocracies.

He also has succeeded far more than other Indian politicians in tapping into the hunger for generational change in India, analysts say, and has positioned himself as a change agent for the future, despite his obvious debts to India’s political past. He is trying to bypass the identity politics of caste and appeal to young people of all backgrounds. “We youth are with Rahul!” said Manonit Garharabari, 23, at the rally. “The whole youth is with Rahul. We seen an internal strength in him.”

Mr. Gandhi is omnipresent in the media, and his face is plastered on untold numbers of billboards and political posters. His public image is as a humble, serious man, if somewhat shy, even as his name invariably tops polls ranking the country’s “hottest” or “most eligible” bachelors. Yet he almost never grants interviews, including for this article, and only occasionally conducts news conferences. Reporters are often tipped to his appearances at one village or another but often all they get is a photograph — which inevitably appears in newspapers around India.

His daily life is cloaked in secrecy, which makes it an irresistible if elusive topic for the Indian media. One news station ran a lengthy report after obtaining a short video clip of Mr. Gandhi riding his bicycle in New Delhi. Mr. Gandhi confirmed in 2004 that he had a Spanish girlfriend, but whether they remained a couple was unclear.

His advisers say his low profile reflects his desire not to overstep the authority of his organizational position while the secrecy is rooted in security concerns. His grandmother, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated, as was his father, Rajiv Gandhi. (The family is not related to Mohandas Gandhi, considered the father of modern India. Rahul Gandhi’s great-grandfather was Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister and another founding father.) His official residence in New Delhi is heavily fortified and he traveled to the rally in Ahraura with a special black-clad security detail.

Yet analysts say his inaccessibility is also a deliberate effort to protect him from taking unpopular public stands and also to burnish his image. Last spring, he turned down an offer to join Mr. Singh’s cabinet. “They want to keep a certain mystique to him,” said Mahesh Rangarajan, a political analyst in New Delhi.

Before he entered politics in 2004, winning a parliamentary seat in his father’s old district in Uttar Pradesh, Mr. Gandhi had appeared ambivalent about the family profession. He attended Harvard for three years before transferring to Rollins College in Florida because of security concerns after his father’s death. He earned a master’s degree in development studies at Cambridge and worked in London as a management consultant before returning to India after his mother took over the Congress Party.

Some veteran politicians initially dismissed him as a pappu, the Hindi word for a nice boy, if one who is not too smart. Inside the Congress Party, some leaders had considered his younger sister, Priyanka, a more dynamic politician, but her focus has been on raising her children rather than running for office.

Mr. Gandhi’s breakthrough came during the 2009 elections, when he campaigned across the country and was later credited for the unexpectedly strong showing by Congress.

Some analysts interpreted the 2009 voting results as evidence that the clout of regional, caste-based parties was waning. Over two decades, these parties splintered national politics and gave rise to leaders like Mayawati, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and India’s most powerful Dalit politician, who uses only one name. Analysts say Congress must regain seats in Uttar Pradesh and neighboring Bihar if it wants to achieve a national majority.

“The real test is Uttar Pradesh,” Mr. Rangarajan said. “Everything rests on it. It is the most populous state. It is the demographic center.”

Uttar Pradesh will hold state elections in 2012, and Mr. Gandhi is pushing to unseat Ms. Mayawati. For months, Mr. Gandhi has periodically turned up at villages to share a meal or even spend the night with Dalit families. He told reporters that he did not see people’s castes, only that they were poor.

“When Rahul Gandhi goes to the home of a Dalit to share a meal, Mayawati’s stomach starts itching!” shouted one speaker at the rally.

His youth drives are conducted state by state, and he has hired a nonprofit group of former election commissioners to oversee the internal elections for posts in the party youth organizations — as opposed to the usual practice of party bosses picking their choices.

Mr. Gandhi’s campaign could eventually threaten entrenched interests within the party, analysts say, which is why, for now, the internal voting is limited to the youth organizations. And his efforts to unseat Ms. Mayawati got off to an inconsistent start. Analysts say the public response to his recruitment efforts in Uttar Pradesh had been tepid before his latest trip.

Ultimately, analysts say, Mr. Gandhi will have to reveal more about himself than his just organizational vision. He has traveled widely and met with business or political leaders. When Bill Gates recently visited India, he joined Mr. Gandhi in a village. In Egypt, Mr. Gandhi has befriended Gamal Mubarak, son and heir apparent of President Hosni Mubarak. In China, he has met Xi Jinping, the man tapped to replace the country’s president and Communist Party leader, Hu Jintao.

It seems he is preparing for the future.

ST: Dr Goh's lessons in life and economics

Think

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May 30, 2010

Dr Goh's lessons in life and economics

By Tan Jee Say

Outside Singapore, China was not the only country that recognised the late deputy prime minister Dr Goh Keng Swee as a brilliant and practical development economist.

There were other countries that sought his expertise well before China did. In 1980, then President J.R. Jayewardene of Sri Lanka appointed Dr Goh to advise him on his country's economic development.

Sri Lanka was then in the initial years of implementing free market economic policies after discarding the previous administration's heavily subsidised social programmes.

Around the same time, there was increasing pressure from developed countries on economically successful developing countries to share the burden of helping poor countries to develop.

Singapore responded and 'adopted' the Maldives, one of the world's 20 poorest countries, consisting of a chain of small islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

As a young officer in the Ministry of Trade and Industry, I was asked to assist Dr Goh in these two projects. Over a period of three months, I worked closely with Dr Goh, doing and discussing detailed research work with him before setting out on our 'field trips' to have formal meetings with leaders of the two governments.

The man and his ideas

Three months of working up close and personal with Dr Goh gave me invaluable insight into the man and his ideas. He was pragmatic, not dogmatic. He did not simply prescribe the formula of Singapore's success through job-creating labour intensive industrialisation to Sri Lanka.

Instead, he saw value in enhancing the agricultural sector through the cultivation of key cash crops to supplement the foreign exchange earnings from tea exports.

When he was told that there was no more land for this, he looked at me and exclaimed 'love's labour lost' for the research work that I had done on rubber planting.

He quickly moved on without any hint of regret.

He urged president Jayewardene to conserve hard-earned foreign exchange earnings by slashing the huge subsidies on basic foodstuffs like rice, flour and sugar, and large wasteful projects that did not generate earnings.

The formal report that was submitted to the president contained several key recommendations but the really crucial ones were found in a personal and confidential covering letter. Dr Goh did not mince his words, warned of the dangers of certain populist policies and cautioned against their promoters.

It made for fascinating reading and revealed the political side of Dr Goh. I wondered if the public would ever get to read it.

Simple ideas

He believed in the power of simple, practical ideas. When I suggested to him that free market policies might not work in simple societies where the folks would not readily respond to economic incentives because of their beliefs and lifestyle, he asked me to take along a radio, play it in front of them, arouse their curiosity and fascinate them.

'Then they will want to own it,' he said, 'and will work to earn money to buy it', or words to that effect.

The wordsmith

Dr Goh was known for his precision in his choice of words. When we were putting the finishing touches to the economic report to the president, he asked me whether the report should be 'from' or 'by' him. I replied that the word 'from' implied an act of delivery.

'Then we use 'by',' was his quick response.

It was a bright Sunday morning when we drove to the president's house to present our report to him. As our motorcade negotiated its way through the coconut estate along narrow pathways that led to the president's residence, I felt very much like a DHL delivery boy and it then dawned on me that 'from' would have been a more appropriate word.

Second nature

I saw the personal side of the man too. President SR Nathan told us that Dr Goh would take along soap flakes to wash his own underwear on overseas trips, so averse was he to spending money. I certainly vouch for it as I personally saw his underwear hanging to dry in the bathroom. And it was no ordinary bathroom, mind you. It was a bathroom in the Presidential Palace, or the Queen's House as it was known when Sri Lanka was still a British colony. A Royal Bathroom, no less. He could have left it to the Royal Housekeeper to do the washing, but he didn't. And it was not money that held him back. Habit of thrift had become second nature.

Fun side

It wasn't all work and no play with Dr Goh. He took delight in simple pleasures. The Maldives were an idyllic respite. He wanted to go fishing. We took a boat far out to sea in the deep Indian Ocean. We were warned that there could be sharks lurking around. But Dr Goh was fearless, like a child. As our boat sped and cut through the waters, he took in the breeze and smiled with his eyes closed. Occasionally they opened up and Dr Goh would chuckle as he saw me struggling with my fishing rod.

I felt a tug on my rod and quickly started to pull it in. It wasn't easy as there was a struggle at the other end. I knew then that I had caught something and it couldn't be small. When I finally pulled it up, it was quite a catch, a large 15kg garoupa! Dr Goh was thrilled; he slapped his thighs with both his hands and laughed heartily. That night, we cooked our catch and ate it.

It was extra-delicious, with the flavour enhanced by the sauce of three months of love's labour.

Dr Goh explained his Machiavellian approach to governance in simple graphic terms: a man works for you either out of fear or out of love; if it is out of fear, you are in charge but if out of love, he is in charge as he can take his love away.

It is better that he works for you out of fear so that you will be in charge. How colourfully put to a young, impressionable mind.

Dr Goh gave himself less credit than he deserved. He underestimated his own charming ability to inspire those around him to give of their best without fear or favour.

As a young rookie not yet wised up to the power structure, I had no fear of him or of any other person in the Government. It was not fear that drove me to work like a slave for him. Rather, it was admiration for the man's superior intellect and a mutual love for the subject of economics.

The writer was with the Singapore Government Administrative Service from 1978 to 1990, when he left to join the financial sector where he worked in investment banking and fund management. He read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University. He is now an independent financial adviser.

ST: His work was his passion - Dr Goh Keng Swee

News

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May 16, 2010

His work was his passion

The late Goh Keng Swee's brilliance showed even when he was a child

By Nur Dianah Suhaimi

A rare family portrait taken just after the Japanese Occupation showing (clockwise from top) Dr Goh's father Goh Leng Inn, Dr Goh, his first wife Alice, son Kian Chee, sister Ida and niece Lillian. --PHOTO: COURTESY OF TAN SIOK SUN

It was clear from the beginning that Dr Goh Keng Swee was destined to be a great man.

The first to notice his potential was his father, the late Mr Goh Leng Inn, an assistant manager at a rubber plantation here.

The younger Goh was only in his teens when his father remarked: 'One day, my son will be the saviour of Singapore.'

He said this to the late Mr Lim Kim San - a childhood friend of Dr Goh's. Indeed, both went on to become first-generation leaders of Singapore.

That was in the 1930s, in the days of the economic depression, when the younger Goh often discussed economics with his father.

Born on Oct 6, 1918, into a middle-income Peranakan family in Malacca, Dr Goh was the fifth of six children. When he was two, the family moved to Singapore, where his maternal grandparents owned several properties.

The family initially lived in one of these - a terrace house in Geylang. According to a book by daughter-in-law Tan Siok Sun titled Goh Keng Swee - A Portrait, Dr Goh's earliest childhood memory of that home was of him savouring a banana while sitting on the five-foot way in front of the house.

Although his mother was not well-educated and spent most of her time cooking, Dr Goh's father - who had an earlier job as a teacher at the Anglo-Chinese School - believed in educating his children.

The Goh siblings attended Anglo-Chinese Primary School in Coleman Street. Two elder sisters, Ida and Dawn, later became English teachers. They instilled a lifelong love for reading in him. They often read to him before bedtime.

As life on the Pasir Panjang rubber plantation, where they moved to, was lonely, he would read and re-read his father's books.

By the time he entered school, the young Goh had no problems coping. He topped his first year at primary school and was allowed to skip an entire grade.

He later attended Anglo-Chinese Secondary School, where he was always in the top class. His favourite subject was mathematics, particularly algebra and geometry.

It was in ACS that he began expressing himself through his writings. As Ms Tan noted in the book:

'By the time the young GKS had begun his journey into young adulthood, he was already armed with a healthy respect for good writing, and had acquired from his father and older sisters, a remarkable vocabulary and a mastery of the English prose.'

He finished second in school in the Senior Cambridge examination, scoring distinctions in English language, literature and geography.

His results were good enough to qualify him for a Queen's Scholarship - and the opportunity of a sponsored education in England - but he opted for Raffles College in Bukit Timah instead.

Apparently, the decision had to do with the toll the Great Depression had on the family finances.

Baffled by the downturn, he made economics his major.

In college, after the death of his Canadian lecturer Ralph Arakie, he would study economics on his own, reading tomes by Alfred Marshall and John Maynard Keynes from cover to cover.

Raffles College was also where he made good friends, among them, the late Mr Lim Kim San and Mr Eu Chooi Yip, who would later become a senior cadre of the Malayan Communist Party.

He graduated from the college in 1939 with a diploma in Arts and joined the War Tax Department as a tax collector soon after.

He was not a very good tax collector, according to his colonial bosses, and was almost sacked. It was there that Dr Goh met and fell in love with his first wife, Madam Alice Woon.

They dated for several years and married in 1942 during the Japanese Occupation. Their 'honeymoon' consisted of a hurried ride around the Esplanade in a borrowed car.

Their only child, Kian Chee, was born in 1944 on the eve of Chinese New Year. In 1968, Mr Goh Kian Chee married Ms Jennie Chua, who is now chief corporate officer at CapitaLand.

Their son, Ken-Yi, who was born in 1972, instantly became the apple of his grandfather's eye.

'He never failed to be amused by each and every facial expression of his grandson. He was keen on photography and Ken-Yi soon became the more-than-willing subject of GKS's lifelong hobby,' Ms Tan noted.

Dr Goh would get another grandson, Shaoyi, 17 years later. This was from Mr Goh Kian Chee's second marriage to Ms Tan, who authored a book on her father-in-law.

Dr Goh's own marriage to Madam Woon lasted for more than four decades. But they went their separate ways in 1986.

Then in 1991, at age 73, he married an Education Ministry colleague, Dr Phua Swee Liang.

His retirement and his remarriage gave him a second lease of life. They travelled widely, to Thailand, Australia and China, among other countries.

In a booklet that Dr Phua published in 2008 after she set up the Goh Keng Swee Foundation, she described her husband as humble, magnanimous and frugal.

She disclosed how he wore a Casio digital watch for years. If the strap broke, he would replace it with a rubber band.

Yet he would not think twice about donating $5,000 to a hospice which sought funds to buy an electronic wheelchair for a patient.

Even in his later years, he remained ever chivalrous: 'Whenever he was warded, he would never forget to order an extra meal for me. When his food was served, he would not start on his until the nurse brought in my food tray.'

And he enjoyed books and documentaries. Documentaries on animals were his favourite, said his sister-in-law, Madam Phua Soh Lian.

Indeed, it was Dr Goh's idea to start the Jurong BirdPark. He was inspired by a free-flight aviary he visited in Rio de Janeiro and envisioned a similar attraction here, where people could escape the hustle and bustle of city life.

The Underwater World in Sentosa was also his brainchild. Impressed by one he visited in the Bahamas, he rang the Sentosa Development Corporation to convince them to start one here.

Music was his other passion, particularly classical music. It was thus no surprise that he initiated the idea of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.

But his biggest passion was undoubtedly his work.

'You know, as a Minister, your work is your life. Even when you are not working at the desk, you are still thinking of your work. You've got no other life outside your work. But really, there's no other interests outside your work,' Dr Goh was quoted as saying in Ms Tan's book.

'Such other pursuits that you undertake, such as exercise, golfing, is really to make you more fit to work. Even listening to music is just to clear your mind so that you can address your mind to work problems more effectively. So we just get encapsulated in this business.'

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ST: Dr Goh, the pragmatic intellectual

Prime News

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May 17, 2010

Dr Goh, the pragmatic intellectual

By Ooi Kee Beng

IN THE past three years, I have been hunting down the writings of Dr Goh Keng Swee. There are three collections of his speeches and articles published by Federal Publications, but his writings go beyond these.

There were, for example, pieces he published as a student at Anglo-Chinese School (ACS) and speeches he made as one of Asia's most respected personalities in the mid-1990s.

We tend to think of Dr Goh as an economist, but he was more than that. The earliest piece of work he ever published was not directly about economics.

Titled My Ambitions, it appeared in the ACS Magazine in 1931. Although only two paragraphs long, it expressed a young man's deep ponderings on his future and his sense of self.

'He who has ambition will do his best in order to satisfy himself. He will stick to his work and see that he is the best man that ever has done that work,' he wrote.

Today, everyone who has benefited from the genius and dedication of Dr Goh will agree that this boy did have ambitions, and he did fulfil them.

Dr Goh, like other founders of the People's Action Party, was considered a socialist - but he also had a strongly strategic mindset that would not take simple short cuts.

In lieu of ideology, Dr Goh placed strong emphasis on searching for solutions. His early professional years were fully taken up with concrete research on the dire social conditions in Singapore then.

He studied how workers were housed, how the sickly fared, how the poor schooled or did not school their children, and what meagre incomes the lowest classes earned.

Perhaps because of these ground experiences, Dr Goh often expressed disdain for certain scholarly experts.

His attitude seemed provoked by what he saw as the latter's blind reliance on and respect for theories merely because they were Western or fashionable. He derided as 'cowardice' their preference for moralistic postures over getting their hands dirty, and their unwillingness to fathom local conditions and construct practical solutions.

His own practical sense was legendary. Understanding a problem meant identifying the specifics of the dynamics generating it.

This was vital, because a solution was workable only if it was responding directly to the network of local factors.

This approach was at work when Dr Goh discussed the wartime economic front in 1940; when he created export industries in the 1960s; when he developed the tourism industry; when he devised Singapore's national service and defence science organisations; when he envisaged the financial strategy of the country; when he helped reform the education system in the 1980s; and when he was advising Deng Xiaoping's China after his retirement.

Even as an economist, Dr Goh was economical in his reliance on mainstream thought. Although he preferred the free market economics of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, he often highlighted their limitations, once proclaiming that anything later than Ricardo was of 'doubtful value'.

To him, blind loyalty to Keynesian thinking was the bane of modern Western economic policies.

As was obvious from the portfolios that he held, his most manifest contributions were in the fields of economics, finance, defence and education.

Being holistic in his attitude, he had strong views on cultural issues as well. If there was anything he had mixed feelings about where Singapore's phenomenal economic success was concerned, it was Singaporeans' fixation with business opportunities and wealth.

He found their subsequent parvenu behaviour disturbing, but accepted it as a necessary stage in the country's rise from chaotic trading port to thriving global city.

The pop culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s he found insufferable, calling the music of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones 'barbarous'.

By today's measure, here was where Dr Goh the pragmatist was most conservative. He reacted against the 'music produced by the steel guitar linked to an ear- shattering system of sound amplification' accompanied by 'inane tasteless wailing', that propelled him to call for a Singapore Symphony Orchestra to be formed.

In fact, his contributions in the field of culture were substantial, and his propensity to found institutions extended into most areas of Singapore life.

Dr Goh's intellectual genius and productivity cannot but awe and inspire Singaporeans. With his passing, his writings are bound to be increasingly revisited.

The world has changed much since his day, partly thanks to him. Hopefully, his open-mindedness will inspire Singaporeans and others to be as original as he was.

That would surely be what he would have wanted.

The writer is a fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. His intellectual biography of Dr Goh Keng Swee, tentatively titled In Lieu Of Ideology, is expected to be published by August.

BusinessWeek: C.K. Prahalad, 1941-2010

Tribute to C.K. Prahalad

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Global Economics April 22, 2010, 11:00AM EST text size: TT

C.K. Prahalad, 1941-2010

The late management expert was a thinker who told companies they could boost profits—and benefit the poor—by crafting products for them

By Susan Berfield

C.K. Prahalad, who died Apr. 16 at 68, was hell-bent on shaking managers free of what he called their "dominant logic"—deeply held assumptions about the world. He was a provocative thinker who regularly came up with startling insights that would send executives scrambling. During his 33-year career as a business philosopher, a professor of strategy at the University of Michigan's Stephen M. Ross School of Business, and a well-paid consultant, Prahalad developed theories that have become so commonplace it's easy to underestimate the impact they had at the time. In 1990 he argued that businesses should focus on their "core competence"; corporate strategy has never been the same. Prahalad's insistence that companies engage the billions of potential consumers at the "bottom of the pyramid" was controversial in 2004. Today it's global economic conventional wisdom. His dictum that customers want a greater voice in what they consume has gone from cutting-edge to cliché in six years.

Prahalad was born in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu in 1941, one of nine children. He learned his bookish ways from his father, who was a judge and Sanskrit scholar. Prahalad studied at the Indian Institute of Management and then at Harvard, where he received a PhD from the business school. He intended to settle in his homeland but found nationalist India of the 1970s inhospitable to his global outlook. He returned to the U.S., where he could roam intellectually.

Prahalad had eclectic interests: bird migratory habits, historical maps, the spread of languages. He wasn't especially gregarious, but when he traveled, which was often, he tried to pry useful information out of everyone he met. He was always looking for connections and patterns, hoping to predict change.

As a teacher, Prahalad nudged his students to stretch their minds. As a consultant, he demanded his clients do the same. When he arrived for a weekend with senior executives at Royal Philips Electronics (PHG) in the early 1990s, he told them he had just read a news report that Philips was heading into bankruptcy. "Forget what we are supposed to talk about. There is a major crisis," Prahalad recounted in a 2006 BusinessWeek profile. "You had better figure out what you are going to do about it." Within a few hours the executives had drawn up ideas for a radical restructuring. Then Prahalad admitted he had made up the whole thing to spur the team to think creatively. "His style could be mean, but effective," Jan Oosterveld, a retired Philips executive, said at the time.

Among Prahalad's last works was a column in the April Harvard Business Review. It concluded with this thought: "Executives are constrained not by resources but by their imagination."

Education

Indian Institute of Management, Havard Business School

Work

Management Guru/Business professor, University of Michigan

Key Insight

Billions of consumers await at the "bottom fo the pyramid"

Berfield is an associate editor at BusinessWeek .

FT: My proven formula for cheerfulness

My proven formula for cheerfulness

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: January 17 2010 20:33 | Last updated: January 17 2010 20:33

Monday is supposed to be the most depressing day of the year. Not long ago, a man in Cardiff University came up with a formula that linked the weather, debt, the time since Christmas and various other factors to a measure of discontent, like this:



If you plug the appropriate variables into this most curious of equations, it will tell you that the third Monday in January is as bad as it gets.

As the equation seems a little complicated, I’ve come up with a simpler, more convincing formula: MDD + MG = ££££. Where MDD is the most depressing day and MG are motivational gurus who seize on it as a way to hawk their wares.

Jessica Pryce-Jones is one of these new cheerfulness experts who has produced tips to help workers get through Monday. First, she says, we must stop getting upset about bankers’ bonuses and think instead about people less fortunate who have lost their jobs. I recall a similar argument being deployed by the dinner ladies at my primary school when we refused to eat our vinegary beetroot. They would say: think of the starving children in Africa. As an eight-year-old, I didn’t understand how that made the beetroot any more palatable – and I still don’t.

However, I obediently tried to think about someone who has recently lost their job and Baroness Susan Greenfield came to mind. Ten days ago she was kicked out as head of the Royal Institute, the world’s oldest independent research body, leaving her enemies crowing in delight and her threatening to sue.

This story really is quite cheering. It makes me profoundly grateful not to be a leading academic, because the egos are so large and the scope for advancement so small, and because there is so little money at stake, bitchiness, plotting and bad-mouthing are more popular pastimes than in any other line of business.

It also makes me glad that I’m still doing what I’m trained to do – writing – and not having to manage anything. The Greenfield story shows what a mess you can get into when you take someone who is good at neuroscience and let them start bossing people around and then give them a cheque book to spend £22m on tarting up a building.

However, the story is also tinged with sadness. There are so few loudmouths who survive at the top or even get there in the first place that it is sad to lose one of the few examples left. The only one I can think of who is still comfortably in situ is Jamie Dimon, who looks safe for now as JPMorgan is doing so well that it revealed on Friday it was paying out $9.33bn in the things we are not meant to be thinking about.

But really I don’t see what harm it does thinking about bonuses. There is no evidence that dwelling on bankers’ undeserved riches makes us depressed at all; on the contrary, I find all the indignation, disgust and outrage rather enjoyable in a self-righteous sort of way.

Ms Pryce-Jones’s next idea for making Monday a bit happier is to say hello to everyone in the morning. I’ve just done a dry run and have to report that the scheme is problematic. I greeted a colleague I don’t know from Eve and she looked startled. Now I fear I’ve set a dangerous precedent and if I don’t greet her tomorrow, she’ll think I’m cutting her dead. One of the great things about being British is that saying good morning is optional to the greeter and not always welcome to the “greetee”. When someone says “good morning!” to me in an excessively bouncy way first thing, it makes me want to growl back: “What’s good about it?”

Her third suggestion is that we do something difficult on Monday, on the grounds that succeeding at something hard makes us feel great. This seems a crazily high-risk strategy as failing at something hard makes you feel terrible – and difficult things, by definition, carry a high probability of failure.

Still, the fact that all these tips are hopeless may not matter much. If Monday is really the most depressing day of the year, by bedtime the worst will be over. Tomorrow will be better all by itself, without us doing a thing. But in case anyone wants to take a more proactive approach to alleviating Monday’s misery I have another formula that I’ve tested on a statistically significant number of occasions. I + M = H, where I stands for me, H stands for happiness and M stands for a packet of Maltesers.

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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.