If A Very Sick Man Was About to Die, Wouldn't You Help To Let His Mother Know?

Apparently not. Today we look at a human interest story in the Straits Times. To summarise, a man had a stroke and would soon die. His relative tried to contact the man's mother. The Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA), which is also our national issuer of NRICs, knew exactly where the man's mother lived, but refused to reveal the details.

ST June 13, 2008
One last look at prodigal son
ST helps cousin of man in coma to locate his family; son dies 15 minutes after mum leaves hospital
By Teh Joo Lin

MORE than 20 years ago, Mr William Rajasingam Kasinathan became estranged from his family. He lost touch with his mother, sister and son.

... Last week, the 53-year-old prodigal son suffered a stroke and was on his deathbed. And the search was on for his kin.

On Tuesday, mother and son had a reunion of sorts - Mr Kasinathan was comatose - in the intensive care unit of Tan Tock Seng Hospital.

The frail woman gazed upon her son and looked lost as she repeatedly rose from her chair and sat down.

Fifteen minutes after the 78-year-old left the hospital, he died.

It was his cousin, Ms Prem Bir Kaur, 53, who managed to track down the old woman.

Aided by a doctor and a medical social worker, she contacted the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA), the custodian of the national registration records, in the hope of securing an address.

The hospital staff offered to furnish proof that Mr Kasinathan, a bar musician, was in a critical condition so that the ICA could try and contact his mother on Ms Kaur's behalf.

But rules forbade the ICA from revealing her whereabouts, Ms Kaur was told.

On Monday night, she called The Straits Times, which helped her locate Mr Kasinathan's mother by going down a list of possible family names in the phone directory.

When given the news that her son was gravely ill, the old woman told her daughter: 'He's still my son. Take me to see him.'

Ms Kaur is relieved mother and son got to 'meet' one last time but wonders why the ICA would not help her.

She said: 'It's not fair for him to die alone. At least I can say I've tried to fulfil his last wish.'

And why did the ICA not help to fulfil he dying man's last wish? What reason could the ICA possibly have?

An ICA spokesman told The Straits Times that the National Registration Regulations make it an offence for any public officer to disclose to anyone information from its records - on pain of jail time, a fine or both.

The exceptions are few - when it is in the public interest and with the permission of the ICA Commissioner, or for the purpose of criminal proceedings.

This was not a criminal case, so the police could not formally help either.

Dr Teo Ho Pin, who chairs the Government Parliamentary Committee for Law and Home Affairs, agreed it was important to protect the private information of people.

Recently I commented that PAP MP Teo Ho Pin is quite a clever person. After reading the above ST article, and Teo's remark as quoted in it, I feel compelled to withdraw my comment. I no longer think that Teo is very clever.

According to the law, ICA was not allowed to reveal the old lady's address to Prem Bir Kaur. However, there was a very simple solution. ICA could have contacted the old lady directly, by phone or by mail, and said:

"Dear Madam

We were informed by Tan Tock Seng Hospital that your son William Rajasingam Kasinathan is seriously ill in Ward ___. His cousin Ms Prem Bir Kaur has also contacted us about this matter. She has been trying in vain to locate you.

To safeguard your privacy, we have not given them your personal contact details. However, if you wish to know more about the matter, you can directly contact Tan Tock Seng Hospital (tel no. XXXXXXX) or Ms Prem Bir Kaur (tel no. YYYYYY) yourself."

Simple as that. As I see it, there could only have been two reasons why ICA didn't do it:

(1) ICA is just too stupid; or
(2) ICA just can't be bothered.

Either way, it just reflects very badly on the ICA.

On a separate note, isn't it really quite ironic? If you have died in hospital without signing the opt-out form, the government has the legal right to immediately cut out your organs for transplant purposes. But while you're dying in hospital, the government won't even help to let your mother know.

Thinking About Critical Thinking

A reader, AM, writes from Melbourne University to tell me that he is a final-year law student. Recently he has had to write many legal essays. AM wonders how he can learn to think more critically. Evidently he feels that his earlier education in Singapore has disadvantaged him:

"Of course at this time, being a Singaporean, I would readily point the blame finger at the government and MOE for creating a flawed system where schools do not encourage critical thinking but hard memorization and accurate application (or maybe that was just my school only). So I was just wondering, how does one develop critical thinking if the system we are in doesn't necessarily encourage it?"

Personally I am very interested in the mind. But less interested in critical thinking. While critical thinking is no doubt a useful tool, my personal adventures into the intuitive right brain (via meditation, self-hypnosis and certain other esoteric methods) have made me a little wary of the dangers of over-reliance on the logical left brain.

I'm sure that the above statement will surprise, perhaps even upset, some people. And it is not exactly the easiest thing to explain to a general audience via a blog post. So I shall not elaborate. Not now anyway.

Back to the left brain then. Here are six questions about critical thinking:

1. What is it?
2. Who said so?
3. Why should I be interested?
4. Where can I use it?
5. When shall I use it?
6. How can I apply it?

Guess what, I am not providing the answers. I posed those six questions just to demonstrate a certain critical thinking skill. It's called asking questions. This one, specifically, is known as 5W1H.

The five W's are what, who, why, where and when, and the one H is how. 5W1H was originally conceived as a journalistic tool. Out in the field, reporters would use 5W1H as a mental checklist to generate questions and make sure they cover all the basic facts needed for their news story. Now 5W1H shows up in all sorts of other places, such as in the Six Sigma processes.

As far as AM's law school adventures are concerned, 5W1H can be applied as follows. Suppose you are reading a legal article where the good professor is expounding certain opinions. Since he writes persuasively, you feel inclined to agree. On the other hand, if you wish to consider his article more critically, you simply generate questions to consider. Such as - what is he really saying here? Who would agree with this? Who wouldn't? Why not? What is the justification for this point? Where are the examples? What are the alternative views? When would this idea fail? And so on.

You might not have expected that such a simple thing as asking questions would be so important as to merit its own special acronym "5W1H". Well, it just goes to show you that critical thinking isn't that difficult, after all. On the other hand, many of us know from our personal experiences that Singapore's teachers often implicitly discourage questions, especially if the question strays outside the confines of the school syllabus. And over the years, many Singaporeans will forget how to ask questions. So perhaps we do need to remind ourselves about 5W1H. In fact, asking good questions is probably the most important thing that an MP can do in Parliament.

Not to flog a very dead horse, but there's a useful illustration from April this year:

Mr Low Thia Khiang: "Did MHA conduct regular audits at the Whitley Road Detention Centre (WRDC) prior to the escape of Mas Selamat?"

Mr Wong Kan Seng: "The WRDC and the Gurkha Contingent guards have their respective procedures. When the detainees are in the cell block, they are watched by a significant number of guards. The ratio of guards is more than what one can see in the prison.

When they're taken to other blocks, most of those movements are in passageways that are enclosed and they're also blindfolded, to keep them from familiarising themselves with the surroundings.

The only thing that ought to have been done better is a regular system check and audit. These will now be carried out on a regular basis."

Paragraph 1 of Wong Kan Seng's answer was irrelevant to the question. Paragraph 2 of his answer was also irrelevant. Well, no, not exactly, they did serve a purpose. They distracted people.

Now, look at Low's question again. And then just focus on the only relevant part of Wong's answer:

"The only thing that ought to have been done better is a regular system check and audit. These will now be carried out on a regular basis."

What would be the most natural follow-up question you would ask?
Probably something like this:

"Did MHA ever conduct any audit at WRDC at all? If so, when?"

The question was not asked. So we will never know the answer. We do know what happened next. Various lowly MHA officers were punished for the Mas Selamat escape, while the Minister was completely unscathed. In fact, he was the one handing out punishments.

But what if the question had been asked? And what if the truthful answer was that not only was there no regular audit system, but there had been no audit at all, for many years. For example, what if the answer turned out to be something like this:

"WDRC has never been audited. Not even once, ever since I became Home Affairs Minister fourteen years ago, back in 1994. As a matter of fact, we've simply never bothered to audit any of our prisons and detention centres for security."

Under such circumstances, I think that it would be more difficult for PM Lee to assert so blithely in Parliament that it is unthinkable for Wong Kan Seng to be punished.

But then we don't know. We probably never will. The right question wasn't asked; it was never asked; Wong didn't have to answer it; and so, the political history of Singapore took a certain turn, and went on in a certain way. As I predicted quite long ago, Wong Kan Seng managed to make the Great Escape.

Caning As A Form of Punishment

ST May 23, 2008
25 Years 24 strokes
Man tries to retract his police statement but is convicted of raping stepdaughter
By Selina Lum

HE TOLD the police he did it.

He told a psychiatrist the same thing.

The 37-year-old IT specialist admitted to having had sex with his stepdaughter since she was 11, but that it had been consensual.

But when the case went to court, the Indian national changed his tune - insisting that there had been no sexual relations between them at all.

Yesterday, the High Court's decision was clear: He was guilty of all the charges brought against him for raping and having oral sex with the girl, now aged 14.

The Singapore permanent resident, who cannot be named to protect the girl's identity, was jailed for 25 years and ordered to be caned the maximum 24 strokes.

I have very little sympathy for child rapists. In my opinion, raping a child is just one of the most evil sorts of crimes possible.

I just wanted to use the ST article as a starting point for a more general discussion - whether our criminal legal system should continue to use caning as a form of punishment. Needless to say, human rights organisations such as Amnesty International regard caning as "cruel and unusual punishment", which is the technical way of saying that caning is a breach of human rights.

Some months ago, a friend alerted me to a Youtube video which purportedly shows the actual caning of a convicted child rapist in Malaysia. I would suppose that caning in Singapore would be somewhat similar (that is, the IT specialist mentioned in the ST article will suffer a similar fate).

Anyway here's the video. Please do not watch if you are squeamish. The caning takes place at a leisurely pace, but by the end of 20 strokes, the flesh on the buttocks is torn into a quivering, bloody mess.



Link to Youtube.

Thank You For Reading My Blog, Aljunied Town Council Members

A surprising reversal of events:

ST May 11, 2008
Litter index not linked to conservancy charges
By Shuli Sudderuddin

The air has been cleared over the litter index. Residents in Aljunied GRC need not worry about having to pay higher conservancy charges if their estate is deemed dirty.

Netizens were abuzz over a supposed link between the charges and the index after Aljunied Town Council chairman Cynthia Phua mentioned on May 3 that a litter index was being considered to find out which estates were the dirtiest.

It was reported that the index would be based on the cleanliness of lifts, condition of public property and how large pieces of rubbish were disposed of, and that the town council would consider raising conservancy charges for the dirtiest precincts to cover the extra work involved in maintaining them.

Clearing the air yesterday, Madam Phua told The Sunday Times: 'I mentioned that the litter index and conservancy charges can be linked in terms of dollar amount because there will be an increased cost to cleaning dirtier estates.

'However, that does not mean that the Aljunied Town Council intends to link them. I would like to make it very clear that the Aljunied Town Council never had the intention of punishing the residents with higher conservancy charges.'

She added that the town council may use the index to identify the dirtiest precincts. The staff can clean them and residents encouraged to maintain cleanliness. The index has not even been drafted.

Let's recall the earlier ST article, dated 5 May 2008. These sentences were, and are, crystal clear:

ST May 5, 2008
Aljunied trash index aims to wipe out litterbugs
Conservancy fees may be tied to index, with dirtiest precincts paying more
By Alfred Siew

TIRED of hardcore litterbugs, Aljunied GRC plans to start measuring the cleanliness of its precincts under a new litter index to be introduced in October.

Officials also said they will consider raising the conservancy charges for the dirtiest precincts to cover the extra work that goes into maintaining them.

As I see it, either the Aljunied Town Council has suddenly changed its plans about the index, or the Straits Times made a big error in reporting the story the first time around. Or perhaps there was just some breakdown in communication, when the Straits Times and the Aljunied Town Council were talking to each other. What do you think?

Anyway, all's well that ends well. Raising conservancy charges anytime in the foreseeable future is just plain silly - considering, among other things, the way that the price of oil, electricity and basic foodfoodstuff have been shooting up. Surely we don't want to risk destabilising Singapore?

Interestingly, I just went to the ST archive service to read the 5 May article in full again. Surprise, surprise. It seems to me that the original article has now been edited. A few extra paragraphs have been added, which I'm fairly certain were not in the original article I saw. Here's some of the "additional reporting":

Other town councils are not yet considering the same move.

Dr Teo Ho Pin, coordinating chairman of the 14 People's Action Party town councils, had reservations about the plan.

He said it means a few litterbugs at a block could end up causing everyone to be punished.

Well, as you can see, it is obviously untrue that Mr Wang and the PAP are always in disagreement.

In this case, I agree wholeheartedly with Dr Teo Ho Pin. As a matter of fact, Dr Teo is simply reiterating the very same view that I myself had earlier expressed here, so I cannot possibly disagree with him.

Well done, Dr Teo! In my opinion, you have just shown yourself to be a clear-thinking, clever person.

Films That You Won't See In Your National Education Classes

While we're still on the topic of citizens and rubbish - refer to my preceding post - I thought I would feature this short film by Martyn See. It seems quite relevant, since it contains many scenes about poor people and the trash in their environment.

No doubt these people live in the more run-down, dirtier precincts in Singapore. But do you think that their respective MPs should therefore raise their conservancy fees? As Aljunied Town Council is considering doing, for residents in Aljunied's dirtier precincts?



Interestingly, one of the places featured in the above video is Eunos. I could be wrong, but I think that this place is probably part of Aljunied GRC. (Aljunied GRC comprises five divisions, including the Eunos constituency).