I Really Hate Jet Lag

I am back.

The moment the plane touched down and I entered the arrival hall full of dark-haired people speaking in our Singaporean-accented English, I felt a sense of heaviness. "You better do your homework in the next few days," a mother said sharply to her boy who looked dismayed that his holidays were over too soon. She sounds like me. The tiredness gets to my bones.

The city looks ugly to me this week. The lunch crowds, the traffic, the noise and the humidity all seem to conspire to drive me deeper into a kind of deep hate and from it grew a resoluteness that I should not have to grow old and die here.

And to think that many years back, I had no sympathies for people deemed 'quitters' in the 'stayers and quitters' debate triggered by the large numbers of people emigrating out of the country then. Just starting work, I was filled with a sense of hopeful idealism that things would get better for me. What that meant now is hazy to me. Probably, the prospects of starting a family, of building a career and in doing things I loved - those things gave meaning to my life then. I was brought up to love my country and I saw it as an act of service that I could contribute to the education of our young people.

Behind the splendor of the gleaming jewel, everything else has crumbled. What remains is a shell that hastens to the buying and selling, the commodification of everything imaginable. What have we given up to build this gleaming metropolis?

It's again another long night. This jet lag is taking longer than expected to wear off.