“I was not
allowed to fly, so I had to cancel the trip back home”, she said with a tinge
of disappointment in her voice.
“Why were
you not allowed to fly?”, I asked, though I half knew the truth. It would be
better to hear it straight from her before I jumped to any conclusions.
She smiled
and did not reply, and me being me, felt the urge to remove the elephant from
the room.
“Is it coz
of this?”, I questioned while using my hands to carve out a belly bump in the
air, though on hindsight it was perhaps not necessary given pointing to my beer
belly would have been enough.
She quietly
acknowledged.
Then there
was no stopping me. I dug around to find out more details. Here was a woman who
was not married and not in a serious relationship who was about to have a kid (not
mine). A week earlier I had came across an article about single mothers in
Korea who were discriminated against and shunted by the whole family, a
situation I would quite associate with all Asian countries including Singapore.
I worried my friend was going to go through the whole thing though she was a
German in Germany.
“So how are
you feeling about all this? Stressed?”
“No. I am
very happy to be having a kid”
“Huh what?”
She was
happy. Though she loved kids, doctors had earlier ruled out her chance of
having any due to some medical issues (lesson learnt: take everything doctors
say with a pinch of salt) and she was plainly overjoyed that she was going to
be having a kid, whether there was a man by her side or not. Her parents shared
her joy too, all the more surprising given they were a generation older.
It was a
bit of a culture shock. I had often heard in the West of the large incidences
of single mothers and couple getting married a few kids later, which was
considered sacrilegious to the Asian conception of marriage and the institution
of family. However, here It did not matter as much. What mattered was not how
people or society judged you, but how you judged yourself.
This I feel
is the real sign of a developed country. While in Singapore we often like to
laud ourselves as being a very economically advanced nation, I have always felt
we were backward in our thinking (though this has been changing for the better),
mainly because we made everyone else’s business our business. The person who
sat on the reserved seat, the couple who showed affection in public, all had to
be taken a photo of and shamed online. If you were single, you had to get
married. If you were in a job that meant you had to settle for a HDB over a
condominium, you were not ambitious enough. And if you thought Singapore was bad,
India was even more interesting, a place where relatives and outsiders, whose
own lives were a total mess, wanted to control and judge every aspect of yours.
Often this lead to lives that became unnecessarily stressful and ultimately meaningless.
I guess
what I am trying to say can be very simply summarized in a sentence and perhaps
even used as a future benchmark by economists to judge the development of a
country, a sentence that goes
‘Live, and
let live”.
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