![]() ![]() I was young, and as young are likely to be, I was not very scared of him. Shanmugam, the formidable Singaporean Law Minister, had experienced something similar in his early career: I first met him in 1987 when he interviewed me to see whether I was suitable to be a candidate. LKY was in his 80s then, and I didn’t really understand why a man known for his intellectual power had to resort to such dismissive ad-hominem attacks. ![]() When I started following the man seriously, in university, one of the things that most perplexed me about him was the repeated pattern of LKY saying some form of “You are young, you have seen nothing, what do you know of this topic that you speak of?” He would deploy this phrase in his great old age, against intellectual interlocutors or ideological opponents or even students, which I watched him do (not live I hadn’t thought to apply for tickets) at the Kent Ridge Ministerial Forum in 2009. LKY was a great man by international standards, a legend by regional ones I was excited to learn as much as I could about the country. Look to the systems, not the buildings: Singapore’s institutions were built with his values, the technocracy that governs the country was his doing, Singapore’s bookstores carry his ideas, and even in the gardens of the city you see his mark, in the form of leafy bushes and large shady trees (handpicked and delegated to research for potential cultivation within Singapore, it was said, whenever the Prime Minister chanced upon some promising plant) today grown along boulevards by the scentless Singapore river. You have to know how to look for them, of course. If you have lived for any amount of time in Singapore, you would find it impossible to ignore the shadows cast by the founding father of the city state, the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew. ![]()
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