News this week included: Pritam Singh facing disciplinary proceedings from the Law Society; Jay Ish’haq Rajoo, a popular commentator, charged for alleged false statements in his TikTok videos; Singaporeans repatriated from the Middle East on RSAF jets; Johor residents deal with noise, dust, and water shortages as swathes of land make way for data centres; a Singaporean woman’s 13 failed BTO attempts spark debate about fairness in the housing ballot system; Shein’s boss praises Chinese roots, after having moved its HQ to Singapore, and having encountered opposition to listing in New York and London, sparking renewed debate about “Singapore-washing”; following the death of a 13-year-old boy in Kallang River, ST offers a guide to safe fishing in Singapore; the man behind the Quran-stepping video may be mentally unwell, and is likely the same person convicted for similar acts.

Below are the issues we explore in depth.

Society: ‘No girls allowed’ no more

Montfort Junior School (MJS) is admitting girls in 2028 and registration for the first cohort opens in 2027. Its secondary school will also become co-educational, by 2034 or earlier. Singapore’s falling birth rate and the subsequent decline in school enrollment are possible reasons for the shift. Since 2021, MJS has been undersubscribed. In its latest registration exercise, it only had 48 applicants, out of 150 vacancies. 

Discussions about whether to go co-ed were initiated in 2019. Town hall attendees raised concerns about its implications on discipline standards, uniforms and toilet arrangements, and how the schools would manage alumni concerns. For generations, Montfort institutions have been part of Singapore’s landscape of all-boys schools, which alumni often recall with a mix of nostalgia and bravado. A father of an upper secondary boy said: “[M]y expectation of an all-boys school and its boy-centric education with exposure to ruggedness was something I hoped for my son to experience, as I did in my schooling years.”

That sentiment captures the enduring romance of the all-boys school. Former students often describe them as environments that forged a certain kind of masculinity: tough-love teachers, relentless physical training, and the camaraderie of shared ordeals, particularly in Singapore’s elite independent schools, where character-building is frequently articulated through athleticism. Sports, especially its competitive quality, functions not merely as recreation but as a way to perform, refine, and reward particular forms of masculinity. The archetypes are familiar: Olympian, inventor, engineer, or self-sacrificing hero. Boys are encouraged to take on diverse masculinities that fit their talents. The common attribute is to shape tenacious boys befitting the role of a cosmopolitan leader. 

Studies show that male-only settings (as opposed to mixed-sex ones) tend to accentuate traditional masculine attitudes and behaviours. Changing the sex composition of schools can widen the range of gender expressions that feel socially permissible. But mixing male and female pupils does not automatically dissolve the structures that reproduce gender norms. Many sports-related co-curricular activities, even in co-ed schools, are not only sex-segregated but also sex-specific. Basketball, soccer, rugby, for the boys. Netball and volleyball for the girls. Then, there are the “gender neutral” racket sports and traditional martial arts. 

Opinions on whether to send children to single-sex or co-ed schools tend to revolve around the same set of claims. Co-ed advocates assert that classrooms allow children to cultivate socialisation skills across gender lines, mimicking the real-world. Those in favour of single-sex schools often believe that separating boys and girls is beneficial for their learning—boys are mischievous, girls are shy, and together they distract each other. 

The trouble is that when discussions hinge on supposed biological differences between boys and girls, they can drift into gender-essentialist assumptions that obscure more consequential factors affecting learning: classroom size, teacher training, or the absence of comprehensive sexual education. More significantly, many single-sex schools occupy particular social niches within Singapore’s educational geography. Some are clustered in neighbourhoods where class privilege and alumni networks are especially pronounced. In contrast, co-ed schools in heartland areas tend to expose students to people from more diverse socioeconomic and racial backgrounds.

If the conversation around Montfort’s transition to a co-education system focuses solely on one’s sex, it risks missing a broader issue. What matters is not just the mix of boys and girls, but the diversity of social networks formed in schools—how race and class intersect with gender. Friendships across different backgrounds shape how students perceive people from differing backgrounds and help to prevent them from growing up in social bubbles.

Society: Don’t call me ‘uncle’

As a teenager in the nineties, one stepped aboard the clanking, red-and-white, double-decker monstrosity, said hi to uncle, flashed a pass or pinched coins from a palm and let them jangle down that red metal throat, swung left and up the stairs, then to the front for peace and a view, or to the back for, depending on company and the hour, video games or swigs or puffs or necking, the wind through the open windows blowing away duties, obligations, worries. Some days the bus ride was a dreary, quotidian commute; others an island-tour reprieve from the drudgery of life.

The airconditioned bus, first seen in 1984, lured us into a brave new world. As the tarmac spread, as the island heated up, as the population grew, and as the workplace started to require suits, we became dependent on aircon. By 2013 the old buses were gone, the transportation system’s progression to “first world” complete.

But what of dear uncle? Many were forced out. Even as elite salaries hit stratospheric levels, an exploitative system controlled costs by replacing them with cheaper parts. Wages are related to productivity, the siren song of the millionaire meritocrats. “I would like to know how the Singapore bus driver can be more productive so that his income [S$1,800 per month] will approximate those of his Nordic Counterparts?” asked Tommy Koh in 2012, exposing in The Straits Times (ST) their shockingly low wages, “...largely because they are competing against an unlimited supply of cheap foreign workers.”

Later that year was the nadir of labour relations, when Singapore experienced an—“action”, “protest”, “episode”, “wage dispute”—illegal strike, that’s it, the first since the 1980s, by 171 mainland Chinese bus drivers at SMRT. (Four were later jailed for seven weeks.) A year later saw the Little India Riots, and though in wholly different circumstances, the rage of disenfranchised migrant workers surely sparked an awakening about the plight of all low-wage labour.

With our population ageing, xenophobia rising, and inequality a growing concern, the system responded. In 2016, a private operator made the news for a 3.5 percent wage rise. In 2019, public operators announced an up to S$3,500 monthly salary and 21 days annual leave. In 2023, another private company offered a S$5,000 monthly starting pay and a S$10,000 sign-on bonus. To attract the youth, one firm created a virtual digital universe on Roblox based on real roads to simulate the experience. And in late 2024, SBS Transit started offering S$20,000 sign-on bonuses.

This week we learned that almost 500 Singaporeans and PRs have taken it up. (The majority of our almost 10,000 drivers are still foreign pass holders.) Career progression has become clearer, and as salaries and job scopes have grown—for instance assisting persons with disabilities—so have titles. No more bus driver, it’s “bus captain”, thank you very much. (At SingPost, similarly, the postman has been replaced by the “mail ambassador”. Maybe journalists should henceforth be known as “interpreters of press releases”.) 

The opposition has long complained that Singapore, by hiring foreigners, is an outlier among developed countries. But in recent years, facing the same ageing population and labour crunch, Germany and Japan have done so too. Whatever the case, by accepting higher compensation, these young bus captains are also exposing the shallowness of that canard, “Singaporeans just don’t want to do this job.” Of course we do. We just want to be paid fair wages. Much like our dear ministers.

Society: The season of taking

Readers of Tuesday’s ST would have been greeted by a gigantic, corporatey photograph of a middle-aged female executive. “DBS chief Tan Su Shan’s 2025 pay was $9.6 million in first year at the helm”, screamed the headline in large font. Tan probably didn’t want to be embarrassed nationally with the revelation that her salary is over 200 times that of the bus captain who drops her to work. (Suspend transportation disbelief for a moment.) 

The truth is that our nation is ushering in that most crucial of springtimes. An “independent committee” appointed by our Mandarins will decide how much more to pay those Mandarins, so that they can remain content performing public service and continue to attract other Mandarins who otherwise wouldn’t do the job. They could have been like Tan, so it goes, but they forgo high millions for low, just to serve you. The propaganda war has begun. Our nation’s fate hangs in the balance.

Society: ‘Can I friend you?’

One in 10 Singaporeans and permanent residents say they have no close friends, and the government wants to change that. But can the state really repair friendships, or the lack of them? David Neo, acting minister for culture, community, and youth, appears to think it can. “[W]e need to do more to get people to interact, bond and identify with one another,” Neo said in Parliament at the Committee of Supply Debate. To that end, his ministry plans to step-up efforts to foster greater understanding and respect among Singaporeans through the arts, heritage, culture, and sport—what he calls the nation’s “identity infrastructure”. Cold words for warm bodies. Among the initiatives are a S$20m multicultural arts programme, a S$10m grant for multi-school co-curricular activity teams and 50 new multipurpose courts for badminton and pickleball over the next five years. Competition breeds multi-companionship?

Ten percent of a population may not sound like much in the midst of a loneliness epidemic. But in Singapore, it still amounts to several hundred thousand people. The one in 10 figure comes from a 2026 Institute of Policy Studies survey, which also found a steep drop in the average number of close friends respondents reported: 6.49 in 2024, down from 10.67 in 2018. If there’s any consolation, Singapore is hardly alone. An OECD report released last November found that eight percent of respondents across 22 EU countries had no close friends. In the US, the share of adults with no close friends has quadrupled since 1990 to 12 percent, reflecting a so-called “friendship recession”, and a broader shift in how Americans experience and sustain friendships. 

Explanations for this global decline include the disappearance of third spaces; economic pressures; and the rise of the internet. Online commenters here point, too, to hustle culture and workaholism as barriers to forming and nurturing deeper relationships, which require time, energy, and care. “Singaporeans are extremely time-starved…If we are struggling just to survive, it’s hard to think about thriving,” opined Kian Boon of the YouTube channel, “Red Dot Perspective”. The government can’t “force” you to have friends, he argued, but it can create environments that bring like-minded people together. Still, the issue may not be how many activities are organised, but whether we are building a society within which people feel “safe”, “relaxed” and “human enough to connect”, he concluded. (And maybe even procreate?)

Loneliness is linked to about 100 deaths worldwide every hour, a stark reminder that social ties matter not only for health but for our quality of life. No man is an island, even if we live on one. In the end, the question may not be how many close friends we have; closeness is, after all, a fluid concept, shaped by context, personality, and interpretation. What matters more may be the quality of our interactions; the depth, openness, and sense of connection they proffer. Even if only through one or two actual close friends, and not just in the flesh, but possibly through a screen. 

Some further reading: CNA’s “Can you make an emotional connection with a digital partner? Four Singaporeans find out” and The New Yorker’s “Love in the Time of A.I. Companions”.

History weekly with Faris Joraimi

Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, Malaysian thinker and scholar, passed away last week at the age of 94. The geographic span of condolences—from Europe and the Middle East to South- and South-east Asia—reflect the global contributions to contemporary Islamic thought by the late “royal professor” (a title granted to only one other Malaysian, his cousin Ungku Abdul Aziz). Born in 1931 in the mountain town of Bogor in Dutch-ruled Java, al-Attas was a member of the Ba’ Alawi sada, a group of families with origins in the Hadhramaut valley of south Arabia who fanned out across the Indian Ocean over hundreds of years, marrying locals, trading, becoming court advisors, and rulers. As descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, they gained fame and fortune in the Malay world through their participation in politics and commerce, but were later maligned in the 20th century by colonial authorities and nationalists who considered them suspicious outsiders. (Singapore’s most prominent Muslim shrine, Makam Habib Noh, and the Baalwie mosque in Bukit Timah, are both affiliated with the Ba’ Alawi, and continue to attract pious congregations from the region.) 

In world war two, al-Attas was taken in by his uncle Onn Jaafar, the founder of UMNO. At Onn Jaafar’s residence, al-Attas designed the flag of the party that would dominate Malaysian politics until 2018. While an undergraduate at the University of Malaya in Singapore, al-Attas produced his first major publication, a Malay translation of works by Omar Khayyam, an 11th-century Persian poet. Taught by leading orientalists of the day, al-Attas’s initial scholarship focused on the history of Malay literature and Islamic philosophy in South-east Asia. In response to the overwhelming dominance of the Western secular intellectual tradition, he developed his most consequential—and controversial—ideas, calling for a turn to foundational concepts about the nature of Man, reality, existence, and knowledge as theorised in Islamic philosophy. There’s no space here to do justice to their full complexity. 

Al-Attas’s impact on the politics of culture and religion in contemporary Malaysia, however, is hard to deny. His critics have accused him, among other things, of providing intellectual cover for the degradation of secular values and the rise of religious conservatism among Malaysian Muslims. The idea of “progressive Islam”, promoted by the sociologist Syed Hussein Alatas, his brother, offers a counterpoint. (Hussein Alatas’ classic work, The Myth of the Lazy Native, argued that the stereotype of the “lazy Malay” was invented to serve colonial capitalism). In very different ways, both siblings mounted responses to colonialism, shaping our language and ways of thinking. A young Anwar Ibrahim, however, came of age in the 1970s, enthralled by al-Attas. The latter thereafter gained an institutional platform and his followers went on to occupy high positions in government. Is the question about, perhaps, how far valid critical scrutiny can also become the basis for a political programme? It’s no longer controversial for historians and anthropologists today, for example, to criticise “Western” views from the Enlightenment, such as secularism, humanism, or rationalism. But there are no easy answers to how those critiques should translate to policy and public life.

Some further reading: “Naquib Al-Attas’ Islamization of knowledge: Its Impact on Malay Religious Life, Literature, Language and Culture” by ISEAS; and a tribute by Cat Stevens.

Arts: The rising star

Bergen, Norway. A busy airport LCD screen hints at an unusually warm summer in the Nordics, with the mercury almost touching 30 degrees celsius. A conveyor belt deposits both baggage and people on the cavernous stage of the Finnish National Opera and Ballet. These characters, tugged into each other’s orbits, are all trapped in their own little galactic spirals, not realising that the apocalypse is creeping down upon them in the form of a bright star. The timing of this performance is uncanny; we’re sitting here watching a show about the banality of the end of the world as flights are cancelled, fuel prices soar, and the war that pits Israel and the US against Iran teeters on the brink of a global conflict. People are dying and displaced, and others are watching the opera. 

Throughout the first act, an upside-down forest grows downward, almost imperceptibly, until the trees, like soft green tentacles, strangle the entire stage. It’s the premiere of “The Morning Star”, a nearly three-hour Swedish adaptation of a 600-odd-page tome by the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard—and conducted by a Finn. Down in the orchestra pit, we catch flashes of a baton waved by Hannu Lintu. It’s his penultimate performance with the national company before he makes the trek halfway around the world, swapping the arctic for the equator, to take up the mantle as music director of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra (SSO) in July. During the curtain call, Lintu leaps onto the stage to whoops and cheers, and takes several bows, hand on his heart. A doomsday clock, its bright red digits set to 23:59, looms ominously above him.

Conductors are a nomadic species; the SSO begged the Austria-born Hans Graf to take its reins four years ago. The 77-year-old is now gladly handing them over to Lintu, two decades his junior, a kinetic presence with a shock of silver hair and a quizzical brow. It’s a transitional season at the orchestra, which also has its very first Singaporean head of artistic planning: Christopher Cheong, the 35-year-old lawyer who founded the volunteer Orchestra of the Music Makers. The SSO had a buoyant season under Graf, breaking into best-of classical charts and orchestra lists, and is coming off the high of a sold-out three-city Australian debut, including rave reviews and snaking lines of young fans at the Sydney Opera House. It’ll be a tough act for Lintu to follow, but he has a few percolating ideas. For eight years, he was chief conductor at the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, where he championed Finnish composers, and he hopes to do the same in Singapore. “It’ll take some time before I understand what is needed here—what the audience needs, what the orchestra needs—it’s always a huge puzzle to put together,” he told ST. Lintu was a guest with the SSO last March, where he cruised through a challenging choral programme of Haydn and Mahler (not surprising, given his operatic home base), “sans baton, but using the full span of his long arms...as if in battle”. If the stars align, Lintu may not have to do too much flailing and fighting to win over both the orchestra and its public.

Faris Joraimi, Sakinah Safiee, Corrie Tan, Tsen-Waye Tay, and Sudhir Vadaketh wrote this week’s issue.

Letters in response to any blurb can be sent to sudhir@jom.media. All will be considered for publication on our “Letters to the editor” page.