Alex Ong pushing an old lady off a bus

Posted on June 7, 2012 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Man provokes Internet outrage after pushing elderly woman off bus’, 7 June 2012, article in ST

A man has come under fire from internet users after being captured in a video pushing an elderly woman off the bus along Upper Thomson Road. In a video uploaded by The New Paper on Wednesday, the young man, identified as Alex Ong, was seen in a heated argument with the woman before he pushed her at the bus exit.

Mr Ong said on his blog later that he was merely advising the woman that she should not press the bell at the last minute. He claimed that the woman shouted back at him and that in a fit of anger, he threatened the woman that she should ‘get off the bus’, or he would slap her.

However, he added that he had spoken to the police, and apologised to the woman, who he said accepted his apology. The man claimed that he was struggling with ‘psychological issues (obsessive-compulsive disorder, clinical depression, autism-spectrum disorder)’ and that he did not mean to hurt the woman.

Nobody has classified a ‘really bad temper’ as a disease yet ( or is there?), but if you have to pick a mental illness to justify rude and violent behavior you can’t go wrong with ‘clinical depression’, though the only victim that the most extreme depressives will attack is themselves and not old ladies on a bus. ‘Depression’ garners sympathy, more so than admitting ‘paranoiac schizophrenia’, because everyone can relate to it. Beat up taxi drivers in a fit of rage? Blame ‘clinical depression’ (and then appear on Star Awards a few months later). I’m just surprised bipolar disorder wasn’t evoked here. I’m no psychiatrist, but from the way angry people are citing mental disorders like plucking groceries off the shelf, it’s not surprising that they’ve become trivialised and regarded by many as lame excuses in Alex’s case.  What we do know is that he’s not a Tourette’s sufferer, from the surprising lack of profanity in his tirade.

Before the fancy names and acronyms, there was one Singlish term that embodies all 3 of Alex’s afflictions – ‘Siao!’.  But that catch-all term, too, has become politically incorrect, even if it’s first thing that comes to our minds before over-diagnosing it and sugar coating the parlance into ‘I can’t help myself, please symphatise’ mode. If he was indeed diagnosed with a trio of mental disorders, Alex Ong’s intolerance for people pressing the bell last minute may be a sign of his OCD, while the ‘autism spectrum disorder’ may explain his lack of empathy or patience for old people holding up the bus and breaking his ‘routine’. None of the above explains the scarf though – That’s just bad taste. It may be too early to judge if Alex is just being a total ill-bred bastard, notwithstanding the lengthy defence of his actions on Facebook, which suggests a high-functioning, marginally psychotic individual with a flair for ‘nobody understands me’ emo verse, blaming his environment for jolting a few screws loose up there. It could very well be a disease talking, or a reflection of what almost all of us in our most irrational moments believe when someone pisses us off – that ‘the other person started it first’, or that ‘the whole world is against me’. It’s called venting, and the whole blog universe is filled with angry, but perfectly normal, people with a bone to pick on everyone else except themselves. You could call it Alex’s ‘coping mechanism’, or ‘pacifier’. Or the trendy mental illness name dropping could be an elaborate, devious lie, in which case, all the more unforgiveable for giving autism-depression-all-colours-of-the-DSM-rainbow-spectrum  a bad name.

Some folks are speculating that this could be a ‘viral marketing’ hoax to promote the Kindness Movement, but even so, there’s no reason to bring mental disorders into the picture and risk stigmatisation of sufferers who genuinely need help. I wonder what ‘Mad Dog’ Glenn Ong has to say about this, after being slammed for his comments on why some people should be institutionalised, and here we have Facebookers telling someone that he deserves to be institutionalised for potentially causing grievous hurt.

Here’s a sample(no names revealed, I’m not Xiaxue)

I’ve seen the video. U shld be locked up and detained. No matter what sickness or whatever excuses u have, hurting an elderly woman who has caused u no harm at all is just so wrong.

if your soooooo mentally unstable and such a menace to the public i don’t think you should be allowed to roam free

Pushing people off buses shouldn’t be condoned of course, whether you’re a scoundrel or are prone to very severe bouts of crankiness, but recommending the strait-jacket in an asylum treatment is itself a pathological form of intolerance and meanness. Or maybe you guys just simply have a spectrum disorder of ‘nothing better to do’.

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Filed under: 2012, Bloggers, SBS Buses, Violence | Tagged: , , , , | 8 Comments »

No MRT stations named after Indians

Posted on August 6, 2011 by gdy2shoez

From ”Is there an MRT station named after a prominent Indian Singaporean?’, 5 Aug 2011, ST Forum

(MR DANNY CHUE):…Is there an MRT station here named after a prominent Indian Singaporean? At the start of the Japanese Occupation, Lim Boon Keng represented the Chinese community at the Syonan Memorial and Srish Chandra Goho, better known as S.C. Goho, represented the Indian community in Singapore in a ceremony in which all four main communities were represented. A road and an MRT station have been named after Lim, but none after Goho, which is a glaring omission. As well as a community leader as the president of the Singapore Indian Association, and a lawyer, Goho was an independent candidate who became one of the first of six elected legislative councillors in Singapore. He was also the legal adviser to the Singapore Traction Company’s Employees Union and had fought for the interests of bus employees. Perhaps a bus interchange should also be named after him.

There’s a Boon Keng and a Tan Kah Kee station, and others that sound like the names of prominent Chinese (Yio Chu Kang, Choa Chu Kang, Yew Tee), but no, there aren’t any MRT stations named after famous Indians. There are, however, references to Indians, like Dhoby Ghaut (washing place in Hindi) and, of course, Little India. Our Malay MRT stations include the two Bukits (Batok and Gombak), Tanjong Pagar (cape of stakes) and Telok Blangah (cooking pot bay), all names to remind us of our humble, rural origins or hilly places,  but not dignitaries of the respective races. When it comes to public buildings, although there’s the S Rajaratnam School of International studies at NTU, this is but one Indian- named building among a smattering of many others named after famous Chinese, public hospitals especially (Tan Tock Seng, Khoo Teck Puat, Ng Teng Fong).

S C Goho isn’t exactly a household name, but other than his involvement in politics and buses, he was somewhat of a saviour of fellow Indians during the War, setting up the Indian Passive Defence which put 25,000 Indians under its care (Mr S C Goho dies in Calcutta, 26 July 1948, ST). According to the complainant,  he doesn’t even have a road named after him, not to mention a bus interchange, the latter a consolation prize compared to having his heroic contributions to the nation commemorated in the form of an MRT station. Bus depots are constantly shifting locations, and are fast disappearing as distinct entities, being incorporated gradually into mega malls or engulfed by MRT stations themselves, which makes the writer’s suggestion as useful as naming this man after the largest cloud in the sky.

Even Indian poet and Nobel Prize for Literature winner Dr Rabindranath Tagore has a package of roads named after him: ‘Tagore Lane, Drive, Road and Industrial Avenue’, when he was really more of a global celebrity who popped by for a visit in the 1930s rather than a pioneer who got his hands dirty for Singapore, as was what I initially thought (Glimpses of Tagore’s paintings, 30 March 1984, ST). It’s like the modern equivalent of naming our roads after the Dalai Lama. As a lawyer it would probably make sense to name S C Goho after a Law school, instead of a amenity most commuters associate with long queues, noxious fumes, noisy chugging engines, blaring horns, smelly staff canteens and dustbins overflowing with cigarette butts. But first, to the history textbooks.

Filed under: 1940s, 1980s, 2011, MRT, Names, Public works, SBS Buses | Tagged: , , , , , | 5 Comments »

British buses are rattle-free

Posted on February 24, 2011 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Rattled by rattling buses’, 24 Feb 2011, ST Forum online

(Ong Tiong Meng): LAST Thursday, I took SBS service 143 from UE Square to Scotts Road and back. Both the double-decker buses I was on rattled non-stop throughout the whole journey.

On Monday, I took service 64 from Sim Lim Square to UE Square. It was not a double-decker bus, but it rattled non-stop too.

I hope the Land Transport Authority monitors the bus services as the rattling reminds me of the old days when the buses were operated by private companies.

Perhaps we can learn from Britain where the buses are rattle-free and the drivers do not execute knee-jerk stops at bus stops to the detriment of senior citizens.

Senior citizens are probably more rattle-intolerant than the rest of us because any form of vigorous jiggling in their seats causes  their dentures to come loose and send a sound similar to a firing semiautomatic pistol resonating directly through their frail and hollow jawbones into their heads, so I guess they can be forgiven for making a fuss about  anything so disrupting as the incessant ticking of a clock,  the sound of newspapers fluttering under air-con or the swiping of fingers across a touchscreen. Of course it’s disappointing that our buses rattle, what good is a journey if it’s not as smooth and quiet as riding a cloud-mobile considering how much we pay for pubic transport, or that you can’t lean you head against the glass pane to grab some shut eye without suffering repetitive concussions? I mean, nobody should make us think that we’re sitting in a hunk of  assorted metal on wheels, and no one, elderly or not, deserves to have their daily commute turned into a mobile Stomp! concert. By all means, hire foreign bus drivers who don’t know what Ulu Pandan is even if they drive past the area everyday, let aunties hog empty seats with their market catch all they want, but please, for the love of God, let us have our rattle-less buses at least. This, amazingly for a country that boasts of first rate public transport infrastructure, has been going on for far too long, as seen in this letter below(16 Aug 1971, ST)

 

Filed under: 1970s, 2011, Noise, SBS Buses | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Semi-nude lingerie model wearing only panties

Posted on February 16, 2011 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Does lingerie ad show women in right light?’, 16 Feb 2011, Today online. Thanks to quirkyhill.

(Grace Leong): I saw a big lingerie advertisement near a bus stop along Pasir Ris Drive 1. It shows frontal view of a bigger-than-life semi-nude model, wearing only panties, her bare chest covered by her arms.

…Are there are any decency guidelines for public advertisements to adhere to?

As such advertisements are easily accessible to children and teenagers, how can parents protect their young children and teenagers from being exposed to such images? Where does one draw the line?

If the purpose was to sell ladies’ panties, I am not sure how successful it is considering that most ladies are probably too embarrassed to look long enough to find out what is being sold.

How should lingerie companies advertise then? Ask your customers, whom I assume are mostly women, what is tasteful and what is taboo?

Women like to be seen as sensuous and beautiful but not objects that gratify sexual lust. It is a fine line and it may backfire if the line is crossed.

Double happiness

Not only does the writer imply that all women are prudes like herself by suggesting that such imagery do not work because they are ‘too embarrassed to look long enough’, but she’s hopelessly naive to the fact that lingerie ads are not girly Sex in the City movie posters designed to capture only female attention. Lingerie ads are a classic example of collateral seduction in advertising, where the actual consumers of the product are of a different sex from those whose attention the ads were  really designed to capture, namely male audiences with female counterparts, who upon noticing that their aroused male partners are drooling over topless women in panties, are subliminally fed with the magical, irrational association that wearing such panties would make them more attractive to their men. If this planet were made up of nothing but women, we wouldn’t have Guess models and Victoria’s Secret would be just be called The Bra Shop. And if the major brands were to let women decide what to put on an ad from the very beginning, granny panties would never have gone out of fashion.

I believe women, unless they’re lesbians, don’t wear designer lingerie to impress other women. That job is done by shoes and bags, not lacy underwear. And I believe women  today are resilient and mature enough not to be so affected by topless ads they have to shield their burning eyes from it. I believe they are smart and independent enough to embrace sexuality as a confidence-building weapon to wield control over the lust-driven visual automatons that are men, and perhaps the writer should spend some time frolicking in the garden smelling daisies  instead of sequestering herself in an iron tower spending her free time browsing chastity belt catalogues.

In fact, the reasoning of ‘women too embarrassed’ to identify the product is a presumptuous excuse for what is clearly a cry against blatant sexploitation and an overzealous and misguided ‘preservation of moral fibre and conservative Asian values’ stance so skewed to monastic nanny proportions to be taken seriously. Kids probably spend more time in front of the TV watching nasty trailers or on their iPhones playing with naughty apps than nursing erections at bus stops. So complaining about bus stop ads being too sexy is like lamenting about seashells washed ashore on a beach having edges so sharp you can cut your feet on them i.e useless. Sometimes even a harmless image in the national papers ( with naked men, mind you. Does that show men in the ‘right light’, then?), or a Rolling stone magazine, would get misinterpreted as a conspiracy to bring out the perverts in all of us. But then again, in the light of our flailing fertility rates, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all.

Filed under: 2011, Advertisements, Nudity, SBS Buses, Sex | Tagged: , , , , , | 8 Comments »

Blankets protect a person’s modesty

Posted on January 4, 2011 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Put blankets on buses, for modesty’s sake’, 4 Jan 2011, My Paper

(Mak Seck Hong):…The writer highlighted an incident about a mentally ill woman who removed her clothes at a bus stop and then boarded an SBS Transit bus.

With presence of mind, the bus driver quickly stopped the bus and managed to get the female commuters on board to shield the woman, while using a woman’s sweater to cover her modesty.

As such incidents may occur again, our public-transport operators may want to consider equipping all their buses with suitable blankets.

Should the need arise, bus drivers can then use the blankets to protect a person’s modesty, until help arrives and the person is taken to hospital or a police station.

Blanket makers rejoice, for nothing else in the world would put a stop to this nudity nonsense other than having emergency modesty-saving blankets handy to preserve the very moral fabric and decency of our society. Why stop at buses, where there may be old people who, upon finding the air-con too cold, may divert the blanket away from its one true noble purpose (smothering naked people) and instead use it for something as trivial as warmth? Imagine how much trauma a naked man on the loose would incur on the minds of innocent civilians, the excruciating dilemma of  bystanders having to sacrifice part of their own clothing (a sock, a cardigan, a tie if necessary) to cloak someone else’s sweaty genitalia. Imagine the manpower and resources needed for phalanx formation around the culprit every time he or she goes Full Monty. Emergency blankets, unlike fire extinguishers and automated external defibrillators, are  also cheap and easy to operate.  I mean, just look at the odds of a streaker incident occurring (105 cases last year) and compare that to the probablity of someone having a cardiac arrest or an entire building burning to the ground, and you’ll probably agree with the writer that every public premise where a naked human may run amok, be it at a cafe, bus stop or  at the ATM machine, should be equipped with at least 1 picnic-sized blanket, preferably with the  emergency hotline of the nearest mental hospital printed on it for convenience.

But seriously, not even halfway into the first week of 2011 and we have a potential award winner for Worst.Suggestion. Ever.

Filed under: 2011, Nudity, SBS Buses | Tagged: , | 2 Comments »

Singaporeans plugged into headphones all the time

Posted on November 30, 2010 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Being friendly will help foreigners feel more at home’, 30 Nov 2010, My Paper

(Tian Guiqing): …There are people from all over the world living and working in Singapore, and this is helpful in fostering cultural exchanges.

However, there has not been enough sharing between cultures. People here need to communicate with one another, and learn to understand the social customs and habits of people from different backgrounds.

If we understand and respect people from different countries, it is easier to be friendly with one another.

Perhaps we should start from the basics – with commuters practising courtesy on public transport.

A friendly smile or a hello will be a nice gesture to fellow commuters, instead of being plugged into headphones all the time.

This takes only a few seconds but will go a long way in making the atmosphere in trains and buses friendly and will help foreigners feel more at ease.

Good intentions to be admired no doubt, but Ms Tian comes across as an urban Luddite from a land with prairies, milkmen and hay-loaded horsewagons who has probably little experience travelling to modern, bustling cities like ours, cities which suffer from characteristic disdain for our fellow man, not to mention foreigners. What the writer proposes is the kind of bloated rhetoric a New World foreign invader would deliver before a miscellany of tribes who have worked and lived together for more than a century with the occasional scuffle over defaced totem poles . Like any effort to harmonise ethnicities anywhere in the world, it’s obviously easier said than done. In the first place, there has to be some evidence that we don’t intermingle enough, and unless Ms Tian can cite some concrete examples of near-riots occurring because people celebrate Christmas during Deepavali, such a letter probably boils down to a bad personal experience lazily extrapolated to Singaporeans in general.

Technically, before one even begins to understand another’s culture, not to mention initiate a conversation, it would probably be useful to also speak the same language, and if our foreign friends don’t make the effort to assimilate into the local lingo, the natural assumption by most Singaporeans is that they prefer to be left to themselves. It also doesn’t help that we Singaporeans are generally a cold lot too, whether towards a foreigner or a long-time next door neighbour. The general resistance to playing host thus perpetuates a social vicious cycle in most situations with the classic exception of uncles at the kopitiam cavorting with PRC beer ladies, a tip-of-iceberg example of how such relationships can probably exist only with sexual undertones, where the context of ‘fostering cultural exchange’ would be nothing more than an underwhelming euphemism for a more primitive sort of interaction.

Smiling randomly at strangers on trains may work in a little hamlet where everybody knows which fishmonger you patronise, but any overt friendliness here will be viewed with nervous suspicion. Allow me to ‘share’ a common term that Singaporeans will toss around for good measure in the event that a stranger greets them with a warm and bubbly ‘Good morning!’ on the train. They will wonder if you are ‘Siao!’ or are hiding a clipboard with a survey ‘that will only take 2 minutes’ to fill. So, instead of blaming Singaporeans for being unfriendly, perhaps one should look at this from a ‘it takes two hands to clap’ perspective, and remind yourself that this is Singapore, not the Shire from Lord of the Rings. Even if one made immigration officers smile lovingly at foreigners, locals will complain about preferential treatment, as seen in this 3 Jan 2003 letter, Today.

 

Filed under: 2000s, 2010, Bureaucrats, Changi airport, Foreign workers, MRT, PRCs, SBS Buses, Tourists | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Pay exact fare by tapping

Posted on September 29, 2010 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Fix commuter-unfriendly anomalies’, 29 Sept 2010, ST Forum

(Paula Tan): …Why the (bus stop) benches are slanted is a mystery, as there is certainly no artistic merit in it. Furthermore, the benches are so narrow, one would have to have modestly sized posteriors to sit on them.

…Proper English is apparently not the practice when it comes to instructions. A bus commuter is told to ‘pay the exact fare by tapping’. Since when was it possible for fares to be extracted by tapping?

…The sound of an approaching train brings on a guessing game for commuters. For instance, the Raffles station platforms have trains going in two different directions: one to Jurong East and the other to Marina Bay. When a commuter hears the sound of an approaching train, he must turn left and then right to find out which train is approaching.

Can’t the operator provide automatic announcements indicating the destination of the approaching train, as Hong Kong’s operator does?

Being a seasoned commuter, I guess it’s hard to see why using the most basic of senses to decipher which train comes first at an MRT station would be such a traumatic experience for Paula Tan that, instead of taking a few more trips and getting used to the idea of ‘turning left and right’ or ‘tapping’, she complained straight to the press. Naive really, considering that while we train veterans bemoan the plight of overcrowding and annoying, repetitive jingles,  or MRT station duplications, we have virgin riders trivialising the ‘anomalies’ that really matter, you know, the things that really affect our mood for the rest of the day, not whether our butts are too big for the slanted seats. Technically one doesn’t need to tap the ez-link card in order to have his fare deducted. It’s more a  ‘scanning’ action. And it’s a given that the exact fare would be deducted anyway since you can’t ‘scan out’ less credit even if you wanted to. So, to give the writer credit,  ‘Pay the exact fare by tapping’ doesn’t really make any sense. Otherwise, just because one person out of millions of commuters tends to suffer crushing disappointment when she realises that it’s not actually her train that’s coming doesn’t justify adding more announcements (in 4 languages I might add) to already noisy platforms.

Filed under: 2010, MRT, SBS Buses, Singlish/Broken english | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Hey, this is not a taxi

Posted on July 26, 2010 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Drivers lack courtesy’ 26 July 2010, Speakup, The New Paper. Thanks to quirkyhill for the suggestion.

(Nur Umairah): When the bus arrived, I gave him (my 8 year old son) a peck on the cheek as he was standing behind another passenger. But I noticed the bus driver’s expression turned sour, so I hurried my son to tap his ez-link card.

But when the door closed and the bus moved off, I realised I hadn’t given him his pocket money. Thankfully, the bus stopped slightly farther ahead to let traffic pass. So I ran towards it and motioned to the driver to open the door.

To his credit, he did. After saying sorry to him several times, I quickly handed my son, who was still standing near the front door, his pocket money.

To my surprise the driver gave me a nasty look and remarked, ‘Hey, this is not a taxi.’ Yes, I don’t deny this. But how long does it take for a mother to kiss her child? Or to quickly hand him some money?

Would a little patience have hurt?

Sounds like the venting of a loving mother spurned and embarrassed rather than someone who genuinely thinks bus drivers lack manners. Oh please spare us the smoochy details! This is a forum letter, not a My Kid’s First Day at School  essay. He’s 8, it’s time you teach him how to handle money instead of dispensing it to him every morning like you dispense goodbye kisses. Being broke for a day also trains your son to exercise some social humility and borrow  money from his classmates, or from any caring form teacher. You should be grateful the bus driver entertained your overprotective mothering and accept the snide remark as a lesson in future not to chase after buses and endangering your own life while at it. It’s not like he unleashed a slew of Hokkien vulgarities or insulted your mother . You also wouldn’t want to delay an entire bus of commuters who don’t have the privilege of having their moms kissing their cheeks and have to actually work for a living, their precious time eaten because your son can’t survive in school without pocket money.  But what really irks me is that your minor humiliation is nothing compared what your son experiences when others see him being mollycoddled by you. Thumbs up for neurotic parenting, Nur, but really, considering that you gave the driver ‘credit’ and then turned around to complain about a harmless quip is forgetting the fact that most drivers would simply ignore you, whether you’re running behind desperately flailing your boy’s schoolbag, pocket money or Spongebob Squarepants water bottle, and would only stop if you’ve got your hair clamped shut between the rear doors. As if we don’t have enough spoilt princesses already.

Filed under: 2010, Parenting, SBS Buses | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Hub-and-joke

Posted on April 2, 2010 by gdy2shoez

From ‘Think of the elderly, too’ 2 April 2010, Voices, Today online

One can hardly get a seat on the train, even during non-peak hours. During peak hours, one has to fight to squeeze into the train. After you succeed, you have to fight just to get your fair share of oxygen: The ventilation on board is usually poor, and it’s usually warm and stuffy on the train.  It’s all made worse if the person standing next to you has morning breath.

We also have to consider our ageing population. With the “hub-and-spoke” system, the elderly will be made to walk even more.

Smart move, using the elderly as a reason for not shunting more bus passengers to the already crowded MRT.  Talk about Third-World-Class public transportation. Someone once remarked that our ministers should embark on a peak hour traffic trip themselves, but that would be akin to Siddartha Buddha breaching his palace gates and experiencing degradation and poverty, and we can’t afford to have our ministers  gaining enlightenment and leaving office.

Why old people dig their long bus rides

Filed under: 2010, MRT, SBS Buses | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Dents on bus

Posted on March 6, 2010 by gdy2shoez

From Untitled 8 Jan 1976 Letters to ST

How can drivers with any self-respect be proud of the buses they are driving if they are dented, even though they are brand new. If they are not proud of their vehicles, they cannot be proud of the service they are providing for the public.

Ed: Most people nowadays would be too busy queuing to board  to notice if a bus is brand-new, not to mention inspect its exterior for dents.

Filed under: 1970s, SBS Buses | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

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