being back here for almost 2 weeks, i can't help but feel that i'm being sucked back into some of the viscious cycles or mindsets that i have tried so hard to free myself from while i was overseas.
all the stereotypes, all the expectations of the society, all the invisible hierachies and pecking orders that quantify us and judge our worth as a person. its awful sometimes...

went back to RJC on saturday morning to play floorball with the guys from our batch. there was shaun, jon, ben lo, william, wenzheng, linus, john wu, candice, kaixiang, jerald and jeremy, wenduan, and a couple of others.

talked to some of them and caught up with the latest happenings of the who's who in our batch in RJ. some of them are doing pretty well...like apparently Mira in Northwestern uni has got herself an internship with Goldman Sachs. Nikolaus is in Wharton school of business, Shiming is on the Harvard debating team, etc...etc...

that's the thing about RJ, people are always quite preoccupied about talking about who's who...and who's with who...etc etc... it never ends and it seems to be quite a hot topic and a staple of conversations. it just seems that u're not part of the "in" crowd if u are out of touch with these happenings.

was on the bus with william on the way to orchard when we just happen to start talking about the state of the country now. he's a PSC (government) scholar and is gonna be off to Duke university in the states in a couples of months time, and will be serving for 6 yrs in the government upon graduation. he also feels that though the GDP has been growing steadily recently, it is very much due to the higher income brackets increasing the share of their wealth.

as for the lower income brackets, wages have been depressed. LKY is always talking about keeping basic wages low and linking the variable component to the company's performance and profit. According to him, this has worked well for Singapore Airlines and PSA. Its crazy....if this happened in western countries, there would be massive protests as union leaders fight for the workers' rights.

I have to agree with him though that as low end jobs shift toward china and india, the average factory worker is gonna be earning less and might even lose his/her job. yea....wages are low...it can't be helped....but the big problem here is that cost of living in singapore is going up! transport fares are going up, cinema tickets are more expensive...just to name a few. I was kinda surprised when i came back and found that shopping areas like City Link and Sim Lim Square are no longer as crowded on a sunday afternoon as they used to be before i left singapore. its a reflection of the state of the economy and how consumer spending is just going down.