Sybil Kathigasu Who Epitomises Racial Unity

Posted by National Express Malaysia on 5/24/2011 02:13:00 PM

The 'real' Malaysian history would honour people like Sybil Kathigasu who epitomises racial unity.

Come June 12, it will be exactly 63 years since Sybil Kathigasu, the freedom fighter, died.

Most Malaysians know little of her. This is mainly because she, along with many other distinguished non-Malay freedom fighters, have been “buried” and forgotten by the ruling Umno government.

Why this is so is another hotly debated matter.

Recent reproaches by the people on the Umno government’s take on Malaysian history, which has erased all acknowledgement of non-Malay freedom fighters, tell of a new awakening in our midst.

This brings the focus to Sybil.

Sybil is the only Malaysian woman to have ever received the distinguished George Medal (GM) for gallantry and bravery. Instituted by the late King George VI, the GM recognises both civilian gallantry in the face of enemy action and brave deeds.

She wrote a book “No Dram of Mercy”, which gives an insightful account of a woman of great courage who should be held as a beacon and role model to all Malaysians.

In the 1940s, Sybil sacrificed a great deal in the fight for freedom of Malaya.

Born on Sept 3, 1899 in Medan, Indonesia, Sybil Medan Daly was a trained nurse and midwife.

Turning point

In 1919 she married Dr Abdon Clement Kathigasu and they were blessed with two daugthers, Olga and Thavam. Later on, the couple adopted a son, William Pillay.

Sybil and Abdon operated a clinic in Brewster Road, now known as Jalan Sultan Idris Shah in Ipoh, Perak, for 14 years before the war descended on them.

Sybil’s warmth, readiness to help and her fluency in Cantonese made her popular with the local Chinese community.

Then came the war and the invasion of Malaya by the Japanese army in 1941.

When the Japanese army occupied Ipoh, Sybil and her family moved away to Papan, a small town fringing Ipoh.

Papan would soon prove to become a turning point in Sybil’s life.

It was here that Sybil began “consolidating” her commitment to helping the local community who were members of the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA).

Sybil secretly supplied medicines, medical services and information to the underground guerilla forces of the Fifth Independent Regiment of MPAJA freedom fighters who camped in nearby hills and jungles.

She also secretly kept shortwave radio sets and clandestinely listened to BBC broadcasts to keep in touch with the situation around the world, especially in Britain and Europe.

Those acts were, at the time, considered criminal and highly subversive by the military administration of Japan in Malaya.

No betrayal

It has been told and retold by many that Sybil and her husband had treated more than 6,000 guerilla fighters who fought relentlessly for the independence of Malaya.

Eventually Sybil and her husband were caught. The Japanese army arrested them in 1943.

They promised to release Sybil and her husband but on condition that she revealed the names of the MPAJA forces.

But Sybil was adamant and refused to do so.

In fact, she is said to have told the Japanese government that she was “willing to die with my family, then disclose the 30,000 MPAJA and family members who fought for independence of Malaya”.

Sybil was prepared to face the punishment by the Japanese army.

They punished her husband, son and her daughter Thavam, who was then seven years old.

But Sybil, who suffered the anguish of knowing her family’s pain, did not relent.

She refused to betray the MPAJA members and their families. Finally, Sybil was sent to Batu Gajah prison where she was further tortured.

Tortured and tormented

According to her memoir, the Japanese army sprayed soap water into her vagina and forced her to sit for hours on ice cubes and she was not allowed to sleep.

Sybil survived three years of torture and torment under the Japanese army and was only relased after Japan lost the war.

Following her release, Sybil was flown to Britain for medical treatment. It was there that she wrote her now famous memoir, “No Dram of Mercy”.

She went on to write a second book “Face of Courage”, which gave a revealing insight into her family.

But the three years of incessant torture by the Japanese army took its toll on Sybil.

Sybil died on June 12, 1948, in Britain, seven months after she was released from her Batu Gajah prison cell.

Her body was initially buried in Lanark, Scotland, but was later returned to Ipoh and buried at the Roman Catholic cemetery beside St Michael’s Church.

The older generation who are familiar with the Sybil Kathigasu story recalled how her remains arrived in Penang from Scotland by ship and transported to her home in Ipoh’s Brewster Road.

It was one of the largest funeral processions ever seen in Malaysia.

Royal-style sendoff

Sybil, the Malayan heroine, was treated in royal style. Some 100,000 people from all over the country turned up to say goodbye.

Even people from as far as Thailand, Vietnam, Borneo and Indonesia came to pay their respects.

In Ipoh, a road is named after her to commemorate her bravery and Sybil’s shophouse at 74, Main Road, Papan, is now being presevered by Law Siak Hong, the president of the Perak Heritage Society.

In 2008, the Actor Studio’s in Kuala Lumpur produced a play and trained her grand-niece Elaine Daly to play the title role of “Sybil”.

There’s also a Singapore TV drama series titled “The Price of Peace” about her life.

Sybil’s life is perhaps the best example of unity – an Indian women who willingly sacrificed her life for MPAJA members who were mostly Chinese who fought for the independence of Malaya and Malays.

Prague Spring music festival: discovering a city's soul

Published by The Telegraph (UK) on 23 May 2011. By Peter Hughes.

The maestros of Prague intensify the pleasures to be found in this most sensual of capitals, says Peter Hughes.

No one should need an excuse to visit Prague; Prague is reason enough to go to Prague. But if ever you wanted to embrace an extra sensation in this most sensual of cities, go during the Prague Spring festival and add music to the palaces and museums, the galleries and churches, cobbles and colours and every flamboyant architectural furbelow, flourish and frill of the past 700 years.

Go now, if you can. This year's festival opened a week ago and runs until June 4. Or wait a year. Prague is nothing if not constant, or operatic: it is Mozart in stone.

Prague Spring now has the stature of one of Europe's major music festivals. You can tell that from this year's hot tickets. Michael Tilson Thomas conducted the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in the first week; John Malkovich and Simon Rattle are still to come. On June 2 the actor is narrating Michael Sturminger's 2009 work The Infernal Comedy, which includes music by Vivaldi and Beethoven, and the Berlin Philharmonic, under Sir Simon's baton, will perform Mahler's sixth symphony in the festival's closing concert on June 4. If those performances are sold out, it's still worth trying for others.

Music illuminates Prague. It also acts as a kind of stethoscope to the city's soul. Prague Spring, founded in 1946, was originally a celebration, an expression of liberation at the end of the Second World War and six years of Nazi occupation.

The optimism was to be short lived. Communist repression succeeded Nazi repression and the momentary glimmer of dissension during the "Prague Spring" of 1968 was extinguished by the invading armies of the Warsaw Pact.

So, May 1990 was a time of further celebration. The previous November the Velvet Revolution had brought the collapse of 40 years of communism and by huge good fortune I attended that year's opening concert. They were extraordinary days: Prague Spring now meant more than music.

I had been in the city in January. It was as if a great lid had suddenly been lifted from Prague and its people had emerged, dazed, into daylight. I was working for the ITV holiday programme Wish You Were Here…? Part of our story was that, instead of trying to survive on £10 a day, we endeavoured to spend £10 in a day. That notional budget would buy three Supraphon LP records, a set of Bohemia glass, lunch and dinner and travel by taxi. Only by buying a seat at the opera, which cost £3, could we hit the target.

It didn't last long. By the time I returned for the festival, prices had risen and a notice board, about 30 yards long, had been erected in Wenceslas Square giving news of the most important events of the past four decades. Every day crowds pressed up to the hoardings, curious to discover what had happened during the years of censorship in the state-controlled media. Today the destructiveness of those times is hauntingly captured by the sculptor Olbram Zoubek's Memorial to the Victims of Communism on Ujezd in Mala Strana – the Little Quarter. Six figures stand on a hillside in gradual stages of disintegration until heart and head are destroyed and only the legs are left. At the foot of the monument is this inscription: "205,486 convicted, 248 executed, 4,500 died in prison, 327 annihilated at the border, 170,938 emigrated."

The 1990 opening concert, held as always on the anniversary of the death of the composer Bedrich Smetana, was a profoundly Czech occasion. I felt an intruder. Rafael Kubelik, the Czech maestro, one of the founders of the Prague Spring, had come out of retirement, and self-imposed exile, to conduct Ma vlast – "My Country" – Smetana's set of symphonic poems.

Vaclav Havel, the "playwright president", as romantic a head of state as any nation has elected, was in the presidential box; the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra all wore the little red, blue and white "smiley" badges of the OF – Civic Forum – independence movement. It was at once powerful and private – all raw Smetana and emotion, almost sacred in its intensity.

Last week's opening concert was very different. The music was the same – Ma vlast – it always is, and the conductor was Czech, Jiri Belohlavek, chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The setting, under the painted ceiling and glass rotunda of Smetana Hall, was also unchanged. The auditorium, decorated in white and gold, the ice cream colours of a fairground organ, is in the Municipal Hall, the city's most fantastical Art Nouveau building. Its wooden seats are as hard as ever.

But then the similarities stopped. If the 1990 concert had been about the Czechs rediscovering what it meant to be Czech, this year's sashayed with the confidence of a nation with no doubts whatsoever about its identity.

It is not nationalism. "We are only nationalist now when we play ice hockey," said someone. "Especially against the Russians." That self-assurance permeates Prague. The city that had begun to homogenise itself with pizzerias and pseudo pubs to keep its tourists happy is now almost unconsciously restoring elements of its "Czechness".

For instance, the Lobkowicz family has got its home back, or more accurately, homes. With the roots of their influence and wealth reaching back to the 15th century, the Lobkowiczs are one of the oldest surviving families of the old Bohemian aristocracy. In 1948 the communist government confiscated their lands and possessions. Among them were 13 castles and a 16th-century palace, the only private palace inside the small town that is Prague Castle. The family fled the country but returned in 1990 when, to their surprise, their property was returned. Four years ago the palace was opened as a museum.

Is it ignoble to confess that I entered ready to resent anyone who possesses the palace's view across the furrowed pantiles of Mala Strana, across the Vltava river to the domes and spires of the old town, let alone the palace itself or its contents? By the time I left I could imagine I had been added to the Lobkowicz Christmas card list.

My conversion was because of the intimacy of an audio guide in which four members of the family "show" you around their palace and its exhilarating exhibitions. So personal and anecdotal was the tour that I was quite expecting to stay for supper.

The collection is stunning. There are priceless pictures: a landscape by the elder Brueghel, painted in 1565, and two Canalettos of 18th-century London. There is Delft and Meissen china, Chinese silk and a room with walls bestrewed with military and sporting guns. But my heart-gasping moment was to find, in a dark display case, first a score of the Messiah reorchestrated by Mozart with a broad-nibbed quill and much crossing out, and then, in stacks of dusty paper, manuscripts of Beethoven's Fourth and Fifth symphonies annotated, corrected and signed in the composer's hand.

Joseph Lobkowicz, the seventh prince, was one of Beethoven's most important patrons.

Hour-long concerts are given daily beneath the stucco ceiling of the palace's Italianate Concert Hall. That's typical Prague: classical pops in digestible chunks, more often than not in the sort of sublime settings where the pieces would have been first performed. You find it all over town. Where some cities put supermarkets, Prague has Vivaldi.

The Czechs are rediscovering their food, too. Saturday morning farmers' markets are springing up around the city. I went to the one on the quay beside the Vltava, on Rasinovo Nabrezi. There the stalls were selling not just fruit and veg but babouka cake and kolecko pastries, smoked fish and dark sausages 18 inches long. Wriggling trout were netted from a tank on a truck and plastic bottles filled with wine at around £2 a litre from taps in the back of a van. A generation ago life was not like this.

The Museum of Communism on Na Prikope is exquisitely sandwiched between McDonald's and a casino. Along with a replica school room and baleful interrogation office, complete with soundproof door, typewriter and desk lamp, there is the reconstruction of a food shop. A few tins fail to fill the shelves and the meat counter is bare. "Czechs sent their dogs to Poland to eat; Poles sent their dogs to Czechoslovakia to bark," went a mordant saying.

It's not just home cooks who are buying from the farmers' markets, restaurants are shopping there too. Lokal, on Dlouha at the edge of the Jewish quarter, is a revival of the Czech pub. Some would say there are enough Czech pubs that they hardly need reviving, but their food does.

Lokal's aim is to cook dishes so "they are not pub-like", with none of the "tricks to make the food faster and cheaper." The menu changes throughout the day but when I was there you could have spicy sausages for around £3 and beef shin goulash for £4. At the other end of the price scale, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, which unsurprisingly has an Asian eatery, offers a Czech menu as well.

I asked a friend how Prague had changed in the 12 years she has lived there. "It hasn't really," she said. "There's just more of everything." Rene Beauchamp, general manager of the Four Seasons Hotel, agreed: "Ten years ago I remember a lady bringing us herbs from her garden twice a week. We used to have a fish twice a week too; now we can have it every day."

There are certainly more tourists, but Prague manages to rise above them – literally. This is a city that is invariably more interesting when you look up. It's not just the sight of the 460-year-old Astronomical Clock, nor the hourly procession of the apostles above it; it's not the Gothic spires of St Vitus's Cathedral, which were actually completed in 1929, nor the Baroque statues lining the Charles Bridge.

It's the detail that delights: the turrets and mosaics on the Art Nouveau buildings along Parizska, the street where the convertible Aston Martins now park outside Dunhill and Porches prowl around Prada. It's the frescoes in the dome of St Nicholas and the stucco and gables in Old Town Square.

It's the way centuries-old buildings have been imperceptibly adapted to 21st-century purposes. The Four Seasons, enviably situated beside the river, a stroll from the Old Town, is an architectural chameleon. Ten years ago, three buildings – neo-Renaissance, neo-Classical and Baroque – were turned into the first true five-star luxury brand in the Czech Republic.

From the outside you would never know. Whatever else may happen, Prague will always look like Prague. But if you really want to know what's going on, the answer is in the music.

• Peter Hughes was a guest of the Four Seasons Hotel and Carrier(www.carrier.co.uk; 0161 492 1357), which currently offers four-night breaks in the Four Seasons from £1,145 per person (£945 per person at the end of June). The prices include breakfast, a return British Airways flight from London and private airport transfers in Prague.

• Tickets for the Prague Spring festival, which normally go on sale in mid-Dec, are available at www.prague-spring.net. The Four Seasons concierge (www.fourseasons.com/prague) will also obtain tickets for guests given sufficient notice.

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  Prague is best for a bargain break

  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/7545539/Prague-is-best-for-a-bargain-break.html

  
  

  Five free things to do in Prague

  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/picturegalleries/7885396/Five-free-things-to-do-in-Prague.html?image=1

American College of Pediatricians Warns Against Same-Sex Families

Published by National Catholic Register (USA) on 3 June 2008.

LONDON, Ontario — Dawn Stefanowicz says she knows from personal experience that what the American College of Pediatricians recommends is true.

She is a Canadian woman who grew up in a homosexual household. She says Americans wouldn’t support same-sex “marriage” if they understood how it can harm children.

Stefanowicz, author of the book Out From Under: the Impact of Homosexual Parenting, rejects the claim of homosexual activists that same-sex households are just as healthy for kids as heterosexual homes.

“That hasn’t been my experience or the experience of people who have contacted me who have been raised in a similar situation,” said Stefanowicz. “We’ve all faced negative challenges in this kind of household.”

Brad Luna, director of communications for the Human Rights Campaign, disagreed with critics of same-sex households with children.

“My response would be to look at every major psychological and child-welfare national organization,” he said, “who have all come out and said that children raised with same-sex parents have no less development than children who were raised in a heterosexual relationship.”

But one organization that does not endorse homosexual parenting is the American College of Pediatricians.

“The environment in which children are reared is absolutely critical to their development,” the college states in a position statement about homosexual parenting posted in the “Position Statements” section of its website, acpeds.org.

“Given the current body of research, the American College of Pediatricians believes it is inappropriate, potentially hazardous to children, and dangerously irresponsible to change the age-old prohibition on homosexual parenting, whether by adoption, foster care, or by reproductive manipulation,” it says. “This position is rooted in the best available science.”

The American College of Pediatricians’ position statement references the many studies that have found that children thrive best in families with a married mother and father.

Dr. Michelle Cretella, a Rhode Island general pediatrician who is a board member of the American College of Pediatricians, said Luna is correct in saying that major medical groups have expressed support for homosexual parenting.

But she said that they have done so despite the fact that scientific research has not established that such families are as healthy for kids as married heterosexual families.

Faulty Comparisons

Cretella said that when the American Academy of Pediatrics endorsed same-sex parenting in 2002, it acted on the recommendation of a small committee that she says had an agenda.

The academy endorsed homosexual parents over the specific objections of some committee members who noted the flaws in the research studies that found same-sex parenting to be as healthy as heterosexual parenting, she said.

A key methodological flaw in those studies is that they compared the wellbeing of children in homosexual households to those raised in difficult circumstances such as single-parent households that resulted from divorce, Cretella said.

None of the studies compared children raised by homosexual parents to children with two heterosexual parents in a stable, loving marriage.

Said Cretella, “Because if you do that, and we have decades of studies that have compared children in a traditional home with children of single mothers, children of single fathers, adoptive children, stepfamilies, children raised by a mother and grandmother, and across the board socially, emotionally, intellectually and physically children reared physically by their two biological parents do better across all those measures.”

Cretella cited a recent meta-study conducted by two pro-homosexual researchers. It found that girls raised in homosexual households are more likely to be more aggressive, boys are likely to be less masculine and that both girls and boys engage in sexual experimentation at earlier ages and are more sexually promiscuous.

While the researchers who conducted the meta-study did not regard their findings as negative, Cretella said, “those of us on the pro-family side look at that and say, ‘No, you’re rearing children with some gender confusion and you’re putting them at risk for sexually transmitted diseases.’”

Another documented consequence of same-sex parenting is an increased likelihood that children of same-sex parents will claim a homosexual identity themselves. Cretella noted that multiple studies have found that homosexually behaving teens and young adults suffer increased rates of depression, anxiety, eating disorders, addictions and suicidal thoughts.

And in the case of boys who adopt a homosexual lifestyle because of the influence of their same-sex parents, Cretella said, they face a 30% chance of being dead or HIV-positive by the age of 30.

Personal Experience

Dawn Stefanowicz has personally experienced some of the negative consequences of homosexual parenting.

In the 1960s and 1970s, from the age of 10 months old, she was raised in a Toronto household where her chronically ill mother lived along with her father and a succession of his same-sex partners. Her father eventually died of AIDS in 1991.

Exposure to her father’s promiscuous homosexuality hurt Stefanowicz in a variety of ways, she says. The fact that he had multiple same-sex partners generated profound feelings of insecurity, she said.

“I always had that fear, beginning as a little child, that I could easily be discarded although I was a dependent living in this household and he happened to be my biological father,” Stefanowicz said. “His partners were more important than I was. That was the sense I had.”

Compounding her insecurity was the death by suicide of two of her father’s sexual partners, and the confusion she felt about her own sexual identity because she was a young girl living in a home where male homosexuality and transsexuality were held up as attractive qualities.

Said Stefanowicz, “It wasn’t good enough to be a girl.”

Stefanowicz said she also learned from an early age that she shouldn’t discuss what her family life was like. One of the things it included was accompanying her father to sites where the homosexual cruising subculture was occurring, such as parks and beaches and bathhouses.

Along with witnessing her father’s abnormal sexual behaviors, Stefanowicz said she also had to deal with other problems that he and his partners had, including mental health issues and addictions.

Other adults who were raised in same-sex households have told Stefanowicz that they had to wrestle with the negative consequences of the same kind of experiences.

Said Stefanowicz, “We see that as children and we are going to struggle with some of the same issues.”

Ignoring the Consqeuences

American College of Pediatricians board member Cretella said that the interests of children like Dawn are being ignored in the renewed debate over the legalization of same-sex “marriage” that was triggered by last month’s California Supreme Court decision legalizing such unions in that state.

“The way the issue has been framed by same-sex marriage activists is purely looking at individual rights — the rights of adults,” she said. “And they have removed any concept of family from the definition of marriage.”

Cretella said this ignores the historical fact that the primary purpose has always been to bond the father to his children and the children’s mother, in order to create a healthy family environment where children will thrive.

Said Cretella, “Marriage has everything to do with family.”

Catholic psychiatrist Dr. Richard Fitzgibbons, co-author of the Catholic Medical Association’s handbook “Homosexuality and Hope,” said that highlighting this negative reality for children is critically important in explaining why same-sex “marriage” should not be legalized.

“Children should not be placed in that lifestyle,” Fitzgibbons said. “All of the sociological and psychological research makes it clear that the gold standard for children is a family life with a mother and a father who are married.”

Stefanowicz agrees. Through her Christian faith and years of counseling, Stefanowicz was able to come to terms with the damage caused by her upbringing and subsequently to marry.

Today, she is an accountant and home schools her two children and operates a website, dawnstefanowicz.com, dedicated to providing support and healing to other people reared in homosexual families.

And she’s also determined to tell Americans about the heartbreak they are inviting if they allow courts and legislatures to legalize homosexual “marriage” nationally, as Canada’s federal parliament did in 2005.

Said Stefanowicz, “I’m hoping that many, many people will wake up and start looking at children’s best interests.”

Tom McFeely writes from

Victoria, British Columbia.

The value of your vote

Published by Free Malaysia Today on 17 May 2011. By Stanley Koh.

PETALING JAYA: Some say money is the lifeblood of politics. And as the general election draws near, some desperate politicians are doubtless asking themselves whether the price of votes this time around will be affected by the rising inflation.

Perhaps the following true story will give them some hints. It was related by someone—let us call him Musa—during an election campaign.

“Last week, an amazing drama unfolded when a politician tried to convince my neighbour to vote for his a party. When he realized that he was getting nowhere, he decided to use the power in his pocket. He took out a bundle of money and almost shoved it into my neighbour’s face.

“’How much is your vote?’ he asked.

“My neighbour hesitated for a moment and then grabbed a piece of paper. He scribbled something, gave the paper to the politician, and said, ‘This is the value of my vote.’

“The politician read what was written and then angrily squeezed the paper and threw it away. He turned to me and said my neighbour was being irrational.

“My neighbour picked up the paper and waved it at me, asking, ‘Am I being irrational?’

“He had listed all the family expenses which he said the government should have provided but had not throughout the four years of its current tenure. The list included expenses for health care, utilities, education, housing and social costs.

“He claimed he was not being irrational.”

This episode did not happen in Malaysia, but it might well have.

Money politics is one of the biggest obstacles to having a fair and level playing field in the conduct of free elections. It is illegal, but prosecution is almost unheard of.

Indeed, there is quite a widespread belief that candidates and political parties routinely break a slew of election laws, but prosecution is rare either for lack of hard evidence or because the government is reluctant to tighten campaign practices to accord with legislation.

Making elections

S Sothi Rachagan, an associate professor of law, has written that “widespread bribery, ballot box stuffing, repression and violence can result in stolen elections”.

He has also spoken of what he called “made elections”, which he describes as “less obvious but more insidious than stolen elections.”

Made elections happen when officials intervene to enable the system to favour of one set of candidates over others. According to Rachagan, these are minor interventions carried out skilfully at a large number of points.

“The officials do not block all opposition by sabotaging the nominations of all candidates. They merely twist matters a little in delimiting constituencies, dealing with nominations, giving facilities for the campaign, conducting the polls, inquiring into disputed cases.

“The sum of these cases should be enough to keep the government in power.”

Does this sound more and more relevant to the worth of your vote?

Perhaps a more pertinent question is this: Does official manipulation and lack transparency undermine the value and outcome of your vote?

Italian political scientist Giovanni Sartori thinks so. In Sartori’s opinion, election laws make up the “most manipulative instrument of politics”.

Experts in electoral laws contend that money politics is only one of the factors that obstruct free elections.

It is a common allegation in developing countries that the administration of elections is dishonest, incompetent and partisan. Although there are election laws to ensure fairness to all candidates, these are often negated by lack of monitoring and enforcement. Hence media coverage is lopsided and opposition parties are hamstrung by draconian campaign regulations while the ruling regime happily uses public facilities to its advantage.

Critics believe that the Malaysian parliament should review some of the existing legal provisions relating to the functioning of the Election Commission to inspire public confidence in its independence and the integrity of its decisions.

Some allege that things have worsened in recent years, with election fraud and malpractices becoming more blatant. They suggest that election monitoring should become a standard practice to ensure adherence to universal standards, methodologies and ethics.

Take care of your vote

In his book, Law and the Electoral Process, Rachagan cautions against assuming that the flaws in our election laws are all premeditated. He says many amendments were made on an ad hoc basis to deal with tropical problems.

Despite all this, the Malaysian electoral process remains robust, as reflected by the fact that up to 90 per cent of those eligible have registered as voters although registration is neither compulsory nor automatic.

Still, it cannot be denied that election laws are in need of refinement and the functions of the Election Commission needs to be reviewed.

Indeed, some would say that we need a complete overhaul of both the laws and the commission itself.

Until then, take care of your vote. It has great value.

Stanley Koh is a former head of MCA’s research unit. He is also an FMT columnist.