singapore, sleep deprivation, and skipping tuesday

I'm currently in the Singapore Airport, and have been for the past five hours or so. I left San Francisco very early (1:20am) on Tuesday morning, after a prolonged goodbye in the food court of the airport with Claudia, Tammy, Terry, and John. That was about as much of Tuesday as I feel like I experienced; I was in the air for 12 hours, then landed in Hong Kong just in time for the dawning of Wednesday. It's really weird to spend eighteen hours in constant nighttime; despite the fact that my elementary school teachers in Iowa were unnaturally obsessed with teaching us about Alaska, I do not think that I would do well if I lived there.

I was only in Hong Kong for a couple of hours, and very ill-advisedly ate some chicken tenders despite the fact that the airport had periodic announcements advising travellers to see a doctor immediately if they thought they were coming down with bird flu. However, chicken tenders barely qualify as meat, so I think I'll be okay.

Now I'm in Singapore, at the tail end of a seven-hour layover. The Singapore airport, like everything else I've seen of Singapore, seems impossibly clean and very nice. For starters, they offer a free two-hour bus tour of Singapore for people with long layovers; hence the photos I've uploaded below. The bus tour also included ~fifteen minutes on a boat in the Singapore River, which was nice. Then, I came back to the airport and paid to take a shower and sit in the premier lounge (w/snacks and internet access).

However, there is something just a little bit scary about Singapore. I thought the city was breathtaking--they're working hard to preserve the rainforest within the city, which is strange and simultaneously very cool. Everything is clean, historic buildings are restored to their former glory and used for new purposes (museums, art galleries, hotels), they're reclaiming land from the sea, etc. I'd really like to come back for a long weekend while I'm in India, since I love museums and Singapore has some interesting history.

The flip side, though, is that my paranoia about totalitarianism hits its zenith when I'm in places like Singapore. The idea of a planned city, with ample green space, buildings that make sense, affordable housing for all citizens, etc., has huge advantages--the tour guide said that something like 94% of the population owns their own apartment, which is huge in a place where apartments easily start out at S$700000 (~US$425000), although the government subsidizes some apartments. The city planners are apparently planning up to forty or fifty years in advance, projecting growth, land reclamation, and building developments for a population that will mature long after the planners are dead.

But, with intense city planning comes an added level of governmental control that I am personally uneasy about. I think city planning itself is innocuous enough, and I know that many urban areas in the US could benefit from massive public works projects that would drag up the crumbling sectors of the cities. Unfortunately, the same process that clears out the slums also makes everything exactly the same. We drove past row after row of identical apartment high-rises, which replaced the slums of a couple of decades ago, but it wasn't clear to me whether this was actually a tangible improvement, or if it was just a high-rise slum village w/better plumbing and a nicer exterior to show the tourists on the airport road.

City planning aside, Singapore also has compulsory military service, incredibly harsh laws, and scholarship programs that, in my opinion, push kids so hard to achieve perfect grades at American engineering schools like Stanford that the students never have time to experience everything that college has to offer. The goverment has the right to demand perfection; they're selecting the students, they're writing the checks, and they're hoping to improve their overall workforce through education. But, the more rights the government has to make demands of you, the less actual freedom you have.

I don't think it comes down to one 'right' answer, however. Singapore has incredibly low crime, a rapidly-diversifying economy, a major position as one of the world's most important harbours, a populace that can own their own homes, and therefore has a lot of security to offer its residents. I personally would rather have less security and more freedom, but that isn't a preference shared by everyone. I guess I'm confident enough in my abilities that I wouldn't feel much of a benefit from a state-sponsored safety net, and would simply chafe at all of the restrictions, rules, and obligations that such a safety net would provide.

At the end of the day, I'm too passionately opposed to totalitarianism in any form to tolerate an aspect of it, even if that manifestation seems benign. Singapore has a long ways to go before it turns totalitarian (as far as I know, the government doesn't attempt to isolate individuals and destroy faith in humanity), but there are enough classic symptoms to make me slightly wary.

Next stop...Hyderabad!