The concept of rebirth is common to many religions. From the ashes of his past, the man is given a chance to live again and redeem himself. In some ways, I feel reborn as I write these words. It has been too long since I last felt the desire to give some semblance of permanence to my thoughts. Days became weeks, and weeks became months; the fun times rolled by with barely a whisper and, with little fanfare, a full year had vanished into my past. How appropriately ironic it is that the best year of my life should go completely unrecorded here.

So yes, I am still alive and well. The last time I updated, I was a wide-eyed freshman about to embark on a quest for knowledge and liberation. Today, I am a sophomore, slightly battle-hardened and a smidgen worse for wear, back home in Singapore for the short winter break. Having spent the last summer interning in the Silicon Valley, this is the first time Iâ€ve been home since taking off a year ago.

It is an odd feeling to be back – the feeling you get when you try to watch an old VHS tape you found in your closet and it starts to play from the middle. What were you doing when you stopped the video? Does that point of time bear any significance or is it just random chance? And just what the heck is a VHS tape? Vague recollections swirl at the back of your mind teasingly, but try as you might the answers are not forthcoming. Perhaps your unconscious is just playing a trick on you. After all, records of our past thoughts and feelings exist only in our gullible minds. If history carved in stone tablets could be altered and remade by the ambitious and the delusional, then our inner past might as well be entirely fictional. Indeed, it probably is.

If we truly have the power to (re)invent our past, then let us use that power for good. Believe that you are kind, moral, and just, so that your future conscious decisions reflect your new self. Though I am and have been an atheist all my life, I too operate on beliefs. I believe in my intuitions under the baseless assumption that my unconscious has noticed something that I have not. I believe in my feelings because questioning them leads one on an endless recursion of self-doubt and cynicism. I believe in the people I love because it feels wonderful for your feet to be grounded even if there always exists an irrefutable non-zero probability that you are stepping in quicksand.

When you say you believe, you allow the possibility of disappointment. And from disappointment or betrayal, there may come despair. Such is the way of the mind.
— Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Haruki Murakami

To believe is to make a completely rational decision to suspend rationality when it proves counterproductive. If we refused to believe that the images sent by our eyes to our brains reflect the realities of a real physical world, then we would quickly find ourselves paralyzed into inaction by the epistemological void. To believe is not to deny the possibility that we live in the Matrix, but to make the sensible bet that we do not. A smart gambler weighs the odds against the rewards and maximizes expected returns. Of course, sometimes the odds simply do not make sense, which is why I remain an atheist. Still, I acknowledge and embrace the power of believing. Sometimes, our personal experiences compel us to attempt irrational feats, and that is simply what must be done.

At this point, the few of you who stumbled upon this long lost relic of Internet past are probably bewildered by this senseless soliloquy. Rest assured, my year at Stanford has not driven me mad, nor am I under the influence of any mind-altering substance. I just figured that itâ€s been a long while and some rambling would do me well. I suppose this bit of drivel on belief shall suffice for now. Maybe Iâ€ll write more if my Muse decides to show herself once more. In the meantime, please watch Contact if you havenâ€t already. It was the movie from my teens that reshaped my thoughts on beliefs.

Hello, it’s been a while.

Some people have been emailing me asking if I am still alive. Yes, I am. Life has been uneventful and empty recently. The mundane tedium left me somewhat creatively challenged and unable to write. In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about life and my future, and I most certainly have not been wasting my time away farming Icecrown Citadel for loot in World of Warcraft. Derp.

In the brief time I have cut myself away from the real world blogosphere, many things have changed. Naoto Kan became the Prime Minister of Japan. Arizona passed SB 1070 and attempted to take immigration enforcement into its own hands at the risk of racial profiling. WikiLeaks‘ profile blew up overnight with the release the Apache shooting video and a database of Secret-classification US ground reports in Afghanistan. HP bought over Palm for WebOS. Singapore’s Orchard Road shopping area experienced its first flood in three decades. Avatar the Last Airbender scored an insanely low 8 out of 100 on Rotten Tomatoes.

It’s frustrating to see the world changing and feel like you are being left behind. That’s part of the drudgery of everyday life as a nobody, but National Service brings it to a new mind-numbing level close to par with imprisonment (or so I imagine). I can feel something inside me withering away with every passing moment as each tick of the second hand takes another eternity. I had long since emptied out, emotionally.

For the longest time (well, not that long…I’m just being dramatic), I had been finding it difficult to be entertained and, as a result, difficult to be inspired. A younger me could find the words to respond to even the most braindead episodes of Gundam 00 (which is saying a lot) and the motivation to patiently put those words together one at a time. But for the past few months my vocabulary has been limited to a few shades of grey. It was difficult to find anything worth writing about and even more difficult to find the right words. And of course, one of the universal laws of blogging is that a prolonged hiatus is as fatal (for the blog, not the blogger) as it is long, proportionally speaking.

That said, as I now stand much closer to the end than the start of this phase of my life, I am beginning to feel some vestige of passion and hunger stirring inside me.

Most recently, Inception almost made me care enough to write a review (but it was overrated) and Densetsu no Yuusha no Densetsu actually managed to single-handedly renew my hope in anime as a form of entertainment. The final push probably came from Volume 10 of Kimi no Iru Machi which, in my fanboy opinion, represents a new high in author Kouji Seo‘s relentless efforts to create a shounen romance that is indistinguishable from shoujo (other than the pink covers). Reading the latest ups and downs of Haruto and Yuzuki made me spend a sleepless night reviewing my own life in high school. I felt entertained and inspired. Sweet tears of joy made me feel human again.

Writing this blog had been one of the greatest pleasures in my simple life so far and I really want to find my Muse again. Of course, there’s no way for me to immediately, if ever, go back to my old rate of almost one article every two days, but I hope that this is a start. I’m not sure how many of you out there are still subscribed to this blog (or if the RSS feed is still working), but whoever you (yes, all three of you) are: I am still alive!

There was a time in this blog’s history when its popularity grew to the point where I felt pressured to pander to my audience, and I now think that it was a mistake. The future is uncertain, but for now I am going to try to get myself and this blog back to reasonable speed at my own pace. Hopefully, the end result, however long it takes to get there, will be something more consistent with my personal goals for writing and still provide some interesting read.

Anyway, I am working on an article right now. I don’t want to give a deadline, but it should be Done Soonâ„¢. In the meantime, please enjoy this video.

This is one of those rare posts I make about my personal life so that one day I may look back at this blog and realize that I was once a young and naive idealist. It is the cumulation of a train of thought that has been running on and off for the past six months and a snapshot of me at what I consider to be the first major crossroad in my uneventful life.

I was offered the Public Service Commissionâ€s Overseas Merit Scholarship (Open) earlier this year (2009). While it was an honour to be given one of the most prestigious scholarships in Singapore, I ultimately resolved to turn down the offer. It is a decision that few of my peers (and perhaps even myself) fully understood at the time.

Seeing as we are once again approaching the end of the year and a new batch of A-level graduates will soon be going through the same things I did, I thought itâ€s about time I finally put my thoughts down in words.

The Scholarship

PSC OMS (Open) is one of the many scholarships administered by the Public Service Commission, a state organ that manages and grooms public servants. It is given to Singaporean A-Level graduates selected through a standardized IQ/personality test, a psychological interview and a panel interview. It covers tuition fees, housing and allowances for the duration of the studentâ€s overseas undergraduate studies in exchange for a 5- to 6-year work bond with the government under various ministries or statutory boards. It is also an open secret that OMS scholars enjoy faster career advancement and better work opportunities than local scholars and non-scholars working in similar capacities within the civil service.

Just to make my position clear, I am of the opinion that OMS (Open) is an excellent opportunity in many ways (job stability, competitive pay, fast-track promotions, prestigious brand name) and that people intending to enter the civil service should definitely take it up. But unfortunately, it turned out that I was not one of these people.

The Commitment

There are many passionate arguments surrounding the merits and demerits of the work bond that comes with government scholarships. Here are what I feel to be some important points to consider.

A government scholarship is not just a simple exchange of goods and services, but a complete career package. It requires one to make a major commitment that will last well into oneâ€s early thirties. Many people I know see the scholarship as a simple work contract or even a form of student loan, but this view misses the bigger picture. The purpose of the scholarship is to develop future leaders of Singapore and its sponsorship of undergraduate education is but a portion of an extensive talent-grooming programme designed to produce future top-level management. If oneâ€s intention were to leave the civil service after having served the work bond, then the bulk of development would not have achieved the intended positive outcomes, both for the organization and for the individual.

While it is often said that the civil service (in Singapore) serves as an excellent platform from which recognized talents (i.e. scholars) can enter equivalent high-paying private sector jobs with ease, this is only true if we only consider management positions. Despite what the PSC claims to be a diversified career offered to its scholars and the highly corporate nature of Singaporeâ€s government, the civil service is ultimately an enclosed ecosystem populated by its own performance benchmarks and cultural oddities. Beyond corporate management positions that mirror those found in government ministries, there are few other careers into which one can easily transit, after having spent 5-6 years in this unique environment.

Therefore while it is true that an OMS (Open) award may not necessarily tie one down to public service, it does at the very least make things very difficult for one to move out of corporate management. That is, unless you are willing to start again from scratch at the age of 29-31 in a completely unrelated field, pitting yourself against fresh graduates who have yet to forget the things they learnt in their major. This is of course irrelevant for people who intend to remain within the eco-sphere made up by government-linked organizations and semi-private companies, but should be a major consideration for those who see scholarship as merely a mean to pay for college.

I personally cannot see myself either as a bureaucrat or a politician in the long run. I am not very good at following rules.

College Experience

This brings me to my second point: your college major. The fact that you want to spend four years studying something (presumably in a decent college overseas) should mean that you have at least some interest in the topic. (You should reconsider your choice of major if you donâ€t.)

The college experience, particularly an overseas one, is a catalyst for great change in a personâ€s life. New sights, new sounds, new people and new experiences will change you, no matter how impervious you are to external influence. Many of the famous startups of our time came from ideas incubated during their founders†years in college. During the four years of undergraduate studies, you may end up falling in love with journalism, philosophy, physics, politics or bio-tech. Most of these studies are unlikely to be put to any significant use during your time in government service.

My point is that a scholarship commits you to a bureaucratic career (albeit a well-paid high-flying one) at a stage of your life where you have probably next to no idea what your real talents are and what you truly want to achieve with them.

Although many would probably disagree, college to my naive mind is supposed to be where we find that certain elusive purpose that aligns with our natural and nurtured talents and interests. When I enter college, I wish to spend four (or five) years discovering and affirming my purpose in life, and I do not wish to commit blindly beforehand.

If one is lucky enough to discover that purpose and if it happens to lie outside the civil service, then the six-year bond that comes after graduation can only be seen as an unpleasant obligation, bringing us into the politically-incorrect realm of bond-breaking and all the passionate arguments it engenders.

Breaking Bond

I am personally against bond-breaking, but I do not subscribe to the blind patriotism message, nor do I believe that it is acceptable to accuse people who break scholarship bonds of being “immoral”. To me, bond-breaking is merely a pragmatic decision and a formalized part of the contractual agreement signed when one receives the award.

The whole of Singapore can be summed up by the word “pragmaticâ€. Every government decision has to be backed by facts in the form of spreadsheets and pie charts. Indeed, many of the talented scholars recruited by the government are put to use to churn out these reports and statistics on which critical decisions are made. The end result is a highly technocratic and prosperous nation, a classic success story that has instilled in the people a strong belief in the power of pragmatism.

Bond-breaking is therefore a natural outcome of such a fact-intensive system. If one stands to earn significantly more working in the private sector, then bond-breaking is the obvious logically-sound option after one weighs the facts. It is as simple (simplistic?) as the reasoning that if we raise our corporate taxes to provide better social welfare, foreign investments will run off to other countries — the government-promoted idea that we should not sacrifice pragmatism for sentimental reasons.

But if one, in spite of being a product of the system, happens to be a believer in the importance of the intangible irrationalities in life, such as compassion and social justice, then bond-breaking does seem like an unpleasant last resort. Of course, such a hypothetical person may not be best suited for the pragmatic culture of the civil service in the first place. After all, it is difficult to quantify compassion as a KPI in a PowerPoint bar graph. Stop me before I get too bitter. Heh.

While I personally see bond-breaking as a necessary evil that should not be encouraged, I find it offensive that bond-breakers are put in such a terrible light by the media when they are merely practising what has been preached. I mean even ex-PM Goh Chok Tong apparently broke his bond, so what gives?

All in all, the whole bond issue just seems to be a huge schizophrenic doubespeak mess that I donâ€t want to get myself into, so I decided not to.

Big Picture

At the end of the day, the intention of the PSC Scholarship is to recruit talented individuals to work in the civil service. The emphasis should therefore be on public service and not career advancement.

Unfortunately, the core purpose of the scholarship has been long lost in translation through all the glitzy publicity, scholarship talks and peer pressure. A lot of talented JC students become caught up in the idea that securing a prestigious government scholarship is the way to success, even though they have no prior interest in civil service and little understanding of what policy-making entails. Some may argue that this is an intended feature of the scheme: attract the talent first and then make them interested enough to stay on.

I personally find the merit of this methodology somewhat questionable. Given a limited pool of talents, the success of the PSC Scholarship in attracting talents will always come at the expense of something else. For every IPhO winner absorbed by the civil service, Singapore loses a potential future Nobel Prize winner. There is always a trade-off involved, a fact that is often overlooked when we talk about “grooming the next generation of leaders”.

If the PSC Scholarship becomes too effective in attracting top-tier talents, then what effect will that have on the rest of Singapore? The PSC Scholarship should therefore ideally strive to attract not merely talents, but talents whose passions coincide with its core purpose of public service.

It was once said that the economic boom of the nineties drew so many talented mathematicians and physicists into financial engineering that it might have statistically delayed the emergence of the next Albert Einstein by half a century. That may be a wildly simplistic guesstimation, but it describes the invisible economic balance behind talent management.

Before people accuse me of proclaiming myself the next Albert Einstein, my point is simply that I decided that the best I can achieve lies elsewhere. PSC can decide if a person is suitable for the civil service by offering him/her a scholarship, but it cannot determine whether the person might be better suited for something else. That is a decision that has to be made by the individual.

And from a larger perspective, I believe that Singapore would be better off as a whole if the best talents excel in the fields that match their abilities than if they were all concentrated in the government, even if we buy into the (debatable) basic assumption that the government is the most critical entity in ensuring Singaporeâ€s long-term success.

Conclusion

The extensive bond-based scholarship system in Singapore is both a blessing and a curse. It gives poorer students the opportunity to study overseas and richer students the added incentive to join the civil service, but at the same time it also serves to discourage organic growth and innovation in Singapore. Creativity and entrepreneurship thrive in uncertain environments and the comforting and calculated certainties offered by scholarships to our top talents are, in my opinion, not entirely beneficial to Singaporeâ€s efforts in cultivating future leaders. They grow averse to taking risks and that can only lead to complacency.

Having been through the system, I arrived at the conclusion that my life so far has been too smooth and well-planned. Though I do not come from a well-to-do family, my academic performance and luck have brought me to the top of the rat race that is our education system. I saw the PSC Scholarship as an opportunity offered to me to continue riding this boat to the end, and I decided that itâ€s time to try something else.

But ignoring all my personal ramblings about the macro-economics of scholarships and my somewhat unrealistic expectations of life in general, the overall take-home message is that it’s always a good idea for one to take a step back and seriously consider the personal motivations behind taking up a bonded scholarship. The excuse “everyone else is doing it” doesnâ€t work for drug abuse, and it wonâ€t work here either.

Of course, reality is always imperfect. Parental pressure, peer expectations and financial constraints are ever present in the decision-making process of every scholarship applicant. The reasons for taking up a scholarship are sometimes beyond the individualâ€s control, occasionally resulting in unfortunate situations where both the scholarship sponsor and receiver end up unhappy… That’s life I guess — a reality which may yet catch up with me. Heh.

A Tale of Interest

Let me end off with an interesting anecdote.

In Japan, there is a bond-free scholarship for foreign students called the Monbukagakusho (or Monbusho) offered by the MEXT. The undergraduate award covers tuition fees and expenses for five years of studies, including one year of language and foundation courses.

Singapore sends around one to two Monbusho scholars to Japan every year. The Japan embassy in Singapore conducts selection tests here but, until last year, the applicants were pre-screened by PSC to only include PSC scholars selected to be sent to Japan. The end result was that these PSC/Monbusho scholars were bonded to the Singapore government even though their education was actually paid for by the Japan government.

This amusing system, which as far as I know existed for decades, was abolished last year (at whose volition I have no idea) and the Monbusho in Singapore is now opened to all local applicants. (The deadline for 2010 is over, by the way.)

I think thereâ€s a moral-of-the-story in there somewhere about differing philosophies of scholarship in the two countries and Singaporeâ€s brand of ultra-pragmatism. Iâ€ll leave you to decide what exactly that is. :P

P.S. Longest blog post ever?

<3 Google. I feel totally motivated to blog now.

Anyway, it’s not like I haven’t been keeping up with the latest season. I’m currently following Hayate no Gotoku, Claymore, Nagasarete Airantou, Lucky Star, Romeo x Juliet, Bokurano and Darker Than Black. This is about the number of series I’ve been following for every season for the past year or so. I just need to find a bit more time for blogging… I wonder if you guys will mind if I blog more about non-anime related topics? My Real Lifeâ„¢ recently has been really… exciting. LOL.

Spoilers and thoughts after the break.

I still can’t decide if episode 22 was the greatest plot development ever since episode 1 or whether it’s the most blatant and out-of-place plot twist ever in the history of mecha anime.

Zero has finally descended to Mao’s level and can no longer turn off his Geass power at will. Oblivious to this terrible turn of events, he has a private meeting with Euphemia during the official inauguration of the Japan Special Administrative Region in an attempt to regain the support of public sentiments by forcing her to shoot him and using this act as a proof of Britannia’s intention to backstab the people of Japan. But Euphie’s charms are too great for him and he gives in to her request to help build a new Japan together. HAPPILY EVER AFTER…

YAY!

Or for 5 seconds at least. In a completely unexpected plot twist, Zero accidentally suggests to Euphemia to kill all Japanese, unaware of the fact that his Geass power is now constantly activated. And we bear witness to a rapid descend into hell for the remaining one third of the episode.

Yay..?

While it seems somewhat contrived for such a convenient plot twist to happen and it feels out-of-placed and totally unexpected, I think it just rekindled my love for the series.

It’s a perfect example of proverb made famous by and often wrongly attributed to Samuel Johnson: “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Lelouch believed he could plan out the world like a game of chess and destroy a system of social injustice. Euphemia believed everyone could get along in peace if she tried her best. But no one can predict the results of his/her actions and the butterfly effect will ultimately complete one full circle and kick up a tornado in your yard. No one is at fault for trying to achieve happiness, but fate can often turn our good intentions against us.

Newton has it right, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So it seems that the only way for nothing bad to happen is for one to do nothing at all. But alas, few of us can accept that. We desire happiness and it comes at a price, the price of uncertainty. An action can produce a good or bad reaction and we can never tell what the results will be until it’s too late to turn back.

It is human to believe that things will turn out well until the evidence overwhelmingly says otherwise. Often, we end up getting hurt. It takes time to recover and try again, and some people will never recover.

The whole process seems like a futile struggle. We will all die one day anyway, so why bother chasing after fleeting illusions of happiness at the risk of getting hurt? Why not just give up and do nothing?

I think it’s because that’s what makes us human. If we give up on trying, we will be no different from a piece of rock.

But I guess sometimes, like Lelouch and Euphie, we have to suffer for just being human. It’s better than committing spiritual suicide, or so I choose to believe.