Watsapp activity has increased 40 percent as per media reports since COVID mania started. Forwarding troll/fake news/propaganda will exacerbate fear and not stop the virus. It only show how we as a society are anxious and paralysed. Stay calm as the best solutions come from a space of quiet among the chaos.

In the light of the resilience package announced today by Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat, Singapore redefines strategic foresight to a different level. Decades of planning is needed for the black swan event, and as a former NRF-CRP Scholar at NTU i can vouch for Singaporean exceptionalism from a close quarter. Planning on building capacity in healthcare decades back by attracting the best talent globally at A-STAR and medical schools such as Duke-NUS needs the firm leadership disconnected from negotiating daily demands of electoral politics where strategic spends are taken in right context.

It’s day one of lockdown and already the local Kirana shop running out of essentials. A few vegetable vendors were plying today evening in Devachi Uruli Village, Pune Rural. Fortunately we were able to stock up for #21daylockdown #fieldnotes

All the critics of billions of dollars of Singaporean spends on A-STAR biomedical research over the past two decades, need to realise capacity is not built overnight rather a generational effort, as we can see during COVID.

History has to be captured in an image for posterity.

How is the health infrastructure in the Gulf responding after it’s loyal expat doctors, nurses and paramedics especially in the non capital areas were fired in the name of nationalisation during the past couple of years in the COVID era. These are the soldiers who built the health system from scratch, healed your people, delivered your kids. Healthcare is as strategic as defence. It is a national security issue.

The digital era is a distribution platform, perennially begging for attention. The attention then can be product, to be monetised. Google Analytics has taken over the agenda of writers as content producers, as performance is measured as data points. Writing is consumed as text art, screenplay for moving image and more often than not, as information. I started blogging a decade back as a space to catalog my thoughts, trying to appear wonkish as it seemed that sans a liberal arts education, options in policy were foreclosed to me. I wrote, with the comments ranging from toxic to lukewarm. But I continued to write, without any probable career pathways to build a writerly career. My formal day job as a sustainability consultant took me to a few countries and I got the raw material to write. Writing as been archiving the present through a blog, capturing the voices and the ‘encounter’ before it evaporates.  Writing is an act of subject formation, of the artist. But where do I ply my works?

Writing has modes of working within, through and across the self. It helps in clarifying the chaos and process the present through my blog. I get to write without gatekeepers, and de-performing the act of writing as a show of dazzling brilliance. Content shapes text artwork as a product in the market. The mad rush for eyeballs, navigating editorial political agendas, lit agent shenanigans and an attempt to carve a formal career in writing sans an MFA program under my belt, puts the very act or the art of writing at stake. Did I start writing to pimp my work? Or was it a way to express for a young man to express who was obese, stammered and found a hard time to find conventional acceptance.  I was simply to feel human, after a day of humiliating rejections by bosses and peers and feel good to have crafted a line which has come from somewhere, much above the mediocrity that one truly is. Art should be liberating for the artiste. Often the performance of the art paralyses to express any word which is of value and meaning.

I write now a days with the foregrounding that I am truly mediocre, and that writing should not be a performance to be ticketed. But if good writing helps communicate relevant ideas better, as in this hyper connected world, attention spans have shrunk- I am all for good writing. In a polarized polity, bad communication has consequences. Let writing be authentic, not as a trope but as a window into society, and the soul of the writer. Let it replenish our datafied lives, where content disappears, and words reappear again.