Dear Jomrade,
Today we’ve published:
- “Singapore This Week”, by Jom
- “Where does your story begin?”, by Sudhir Vadaketh
It’s the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Where were you on the day? I was in the Indian state of Rajasthan, in a town called Kota—known for its gargantuan private tuition industry. Every year, students in their hundreds of thousands enrol in the hopes of securing the few thousand premium medical and engineering seats on offer across the country. Over a rice and dal dinner in my hostel, I watched live images of the Twin Towers on fire, awed and horrified by the catastrophe but totally clueless, like most, of how fundamentally the world was about to change.
The next year, having traded my Indian dream for the Singaporean one, I landed on these shores. Old-timers speak of a pre-9/11 world where air travel was all niceness and pleasantries, where security guards ushered you to the boarding gates and kindly pilots with twinkling eyes invited you for tours of the cockpit. I don’t know that world. The flight to Singapore, on SIA, whose modern Indian connections we explore today, was my first. But I do remember the 1990s as having a, for lack of a better word, lighter quality about them (I was stunned to discover that about half the world is younger than 30, which means some 4bn people have little to no memory of a pre-9/11 society). The very palpable sense that while all wasn’t right with the world and billions were still struggling, “Things” with a capital ‘T’ were headed in the right direction. The “End of History” was round the corner. Blossoming reality, privileged delusion, or foolish nostalgia?
Since 9/11, events have veered quite spectacularly from that real or imagined timeline. American involvement in the Middle East diverted incomprehensible volume of resources away from that country; the spectacular failure of that involvement bred serious distrust of the establishment and the elite. Some draw a straight line from that to the rise of MAGA, the election of Donald Trump, and his scorched-earth policies that have singed virtually everyone on the planet. I also thought this compendium of opinions from the Council on Foreign Relations, and this older Lowy Institute debate on the legacy of 9/11 worth sharing.
Anniversaries, sombre ones too, inevitably trigger other trips down memory lane. In 2001, with the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) having “plummeted” to 1.41, Singapore implemented its first Baby Bonus Scheme. A quarter-century later, you could consider it far-sightedness (would the TFR have been worse without it?) or a lack of imagination in that we continue to dangle money as an incentive to have babies, despite the fertility rate having declined to 0.87 since.
The other thing that stood out from 2001 was the fact that Speaker’s Corner had just turned one. For many, it felt like the dawn of a new era in free speech and political liberty that, let’s just say, hasn’t quite panned out. Just this week, six were charged for peaceful pro-Palestinian activities and protests against the death penalty. Saki, Jom’s head of social media and research, went to the State Courts to attend the hearing on Wednesday, September 9th.
Here’s what Saki saw:
“There was a crowd of mostly young people making their way to the State Courts from Chinatown MRT Station Exit D. Many had wrapped keffiyeh [a traditional, Middle Eastern cotton headdress] wrapped around their waist or shoulders. I saw familiar faces—friends, school mates, people I’ve flown kites together at Marina Barrage. There was a buzz, almost like a concert was about to begin. There was plenty of media around. Those of us comfortable being photographed posed on the stairs. (We were actually posing for the activists’ side, but kaypoh mainstream media took photos too.)
Inside, the court was packed, so much so that I had to go one floor up to the gallery. That was full too, but luckily, I snagged a seat with a good view. The hearing lasted less than 10 minutes because the investigative officer requested an adjournment since the prosecution was “not ready”. Anticlimax. There were titters from the gallery. Later, while the defendants were still in the dock, I moved to a seat behind Elijah’s family with some of my friends. We noticed that the defendants were handcuffed.
When I finally left the court to head to the MRT station, some kaypoh auntie in a mask asked me why there were so many people milling around. I asked her to Google Elijah Tay and she would know…”
- The Nepal-Air India-SIA-racism fracas
- Should Singapore consider chemical castration for certain offenders?
- Why the new world map endorsed by the United Nations matters
- Thespians who perform without rehearsing
- The exciting new collectives nurturing Singapore’s nascent circular economy
Above are the issues we chose to explore in more depth.
News this week included: Anthropic researcher claims there’s a greater than 10 percent chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade; Anak Krakatoa eruption causes regional travel disruption; Kishore Mahbubani receives flak for comments on a potential China-Taiwan conflict; terrorism threat here remains high; Singaporean pleads guilty in S$260m crypto scam in the US; in China, 52 Singaporeans arrested for links to alleged pyramid scheme; DBS sued for S$1.3bn in 1MDB scandal fallout; PSP, RDU, and SDP criticise ministerial salary hikes; Grab’s new microdrama, and the backlash; Singapore students master PISA, again (read Jom’s free essay on PISA from earlier this year); activists of varying hues handed a bushel of charges; new guidelines for earlier osteoporosis and breast cancer screenings; microorganisms break down spilled oil faster under certain conditions—stopping spills (and oil use) still the best way to not destroy marine habitats; Tagore forest won’t be designated a nature reserve anytime soon; NTU undergrad creates new game simulating life choices and their consequences in Singapore; social service workers finding new ways to usher “hidden adults” back into society (an older Jom blurb on social withdrawal); CNA commentary on workplace culture’s impact on TFR; Singapore Food Agency studying whether it’s safe to donate food past its “best by” date; imminent JB-Singapore RTS Link prompts overseas Medisave scheme review; MOE student well-being survey cannot indicate “overall well-being levels”; ST graphic on Singapore’s changing playgrounds; and another fascinating one on the Singaporean accent; to pee or not to pee in Farrer Park MRT male toilet; social media jilts couple wanting love for giving their helper a shred of privacy; and the relaunch of Aijek, local fashion brand.
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“Where does your story begin?”, by Sudhir Vadaketh
Our essay this week traces a more uplifting journey, an entrepreneurial voyage that spans London, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Malacca, and Sulawesi. Two of its protagonists are the mother-daughter duo of Sharifah and Faezah Shaharuddin, creators of beloved furniture pieces. A third protagonist is the wood itself, the material so lovingly carved into shapes that hold us.
In the past, I have discussed how Sudhir, who wrote this essay for Jom’s print issue last year, has an uncanny ability to weave disparate themes and ideas into a marvellous whole. The ability is on display here too as we get deep insights into the evolution of a business, a relationship, and the history of a material so integral to our being since our seafaring ancestors sailed across the world on “majestic, wooden sea creatures”, as Sudhir puts it. Some other phrases I loved include: “For early South-east Asians, it was less a case of humans moving wood than of wood moving humans.” and “When teak meets rattan, worlds collide…”.
If these are not enough to lure you, I hope Sudhir’s introduction is:
“Where does your story begin? The wooden, four-legged table in the Singaporean flagship store of Diptyque, the French luxury fragrance brand, invites this question. Its circular black top, and overall proportions, speak to Malaya’s marble-topped kopitiam tables. Its legs, and the horizontal ‘H-stretcher’ that connects them near their feet, are more of a mystery.
“Each typically linear part is not a solid, contiguous piece, but a series of what look like brown-and-black beads, small enough for an average palm to coddle, to feel the wood’s warm softness, to breathe in any lingering, heady, essence of teak. The beads look like they might have been inspired by saga seeds, or cylindrical ceramic cups, or wooden friendship bracelets worn by hipsters enamoured by the Dao. For Malayans, there is something so familiar and elemental about the design, and yet also distant and oblique enough. We’re instinctively drawn to this piece of furniture without recognising its heritage, its homage to the balls that we pop into our mouths every day across the peninsula.”
Jom fikir,
Abhishek Mehrotra,
Head of content, Jom
Behind Jom’s art
Our longtime photography collaborator, Jaya Khidir, who also contributed to Jom’s first print issue, returns with evocative portraits of Faezah Shaharuddin and her work at Studio Kallang.
As Sudhir observes, “You see Faezah sitting, on her favourite chair, with poise, elegantly, ‘properly’”. But if you look closer, you’ll also see her moments before, leaning to her right, elbow on the chair’s arm, chin cupped in hand, chilled out, an homage to the little(r) girl and past self that’s captured in archival photos, the movement from adolescence to established artist implied.
Through his use of long exposure, Jaya captures Faezah’s various dispositions. In doing so, he shows a movement both in time and of the way wood has transformed under her care. His deft use of photographic craft folds well into Issue No. 3’s themes of magic, movement, and materiality.
Jom on voyages
Sim Jiaying
Marissa Lee
Damien Thow Xin Wei
Corrie Tan
Singapore This Week
International: Seeing the world differently
The African continent is large enough to fit China, India, Japan, most of Europe, Mexico, and the US within its borders. You would hardly know it from the widely used Mercator map. There Africa looks roughly the same size as Greenland; in reality it’s about 14 times larger. That could now change. The UN has voted to right this 450-year-old wrong through the “Correct the Map” resolution, which describes rectifying such distortions as an act of “cognitive justice and memorial reparation”. “A fair world begins with a fair map,” said Robert Dussey, foreign minister of Togo, which spearheaded the resolution. The point, Dussey stressed, is not to condemn Mercator, the 1569 projection devised by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator to aid maritime navigation which remains widely used today. But Dussey linked its dominance to colonial history, arguing that the map’s widespread use was itself a consequence of colonisation. “The world is changing,” he said. “Africa also is changing.”
“Fair”, in this case, looks more like the aptly named Equal Earth projection, which was developed in 2018 to represent continents more accurately by preserving their relative land areas. Mercator does the opposite: the further land masses sit from the equator, the more they are stretched, making them look disproportionately large. The effect becomes especially pronounced in a world where roughly 70 percent of the planet lies in the Northern Hemisphere, amplifying the apparent size of Europe, North America, and northern Asia, while diminishing Africa and other parts of the global south.
The vote, although non-binding, is expected to shape how institutions use maps. Supporters argue that the shift carries geographic, educational, and symbolic significance. As a University of Tennessee geographer told nature magazine, maps don’t just identify location, they function as “social texts”, influencing how we imagine the “importance, centrality or peripheral position of places.” Correcting the distortion, then, is also an attempt to correct our tendency to conflate size and importance, and in doing so misread the world. Over time, a more proportionate map could help undo centuries of geographic bias, changing how future generations evaluate global trade, economic weight, and the relative significance of different regions.
Not everyone north of the equator agrees, however. The United States cast the sole vote against the resolution. Instead of focusing on “genuine problems of international peace, prosperity, or good relations”, the UN General Assembly was debating 16th-century map projections, said Yaryna Ferencevych, deputy US representative to the UN Economic and Social Council, in a statement. “Resolutions like this and the ideological agenda they promote, are barnacles on our work here, and the reason this institution is losing its credibility.”
The charge of ideological overreach is a curious one, given that her commander-in-chief has himself turned place-naming into an instrument of politics, unilaterally renaming the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario. Cast under the banner of “America First”, the recent push is hardly ideologically neutral. Renaming territory is a way of projecting nationalism to assert authority, recasting history, and in some cases, staking claims over resources.
Every flat map considers projection, orientation, scale, centre, and naming. What looks fixed is often constructed. Singapore’s recently announced plans to merge several southern islands into a new western island make the point uncomfortably literal. Conservationists have warned that reclamation could permanently alter or destroy coral reefs, seagrass beds, and other marine ecosystems. Others have questioned what it means to celebrate and protect the heritage of indigenous island communities, even as the landscapes from which those histories emerged are subsumed beneath new development. Maps don’t merely describe territory. They can also legitimise who gets to name it, reshape it, and decide what disappears in the process. Maybe not so fair, after all.
Other stuff we like
Secret Pals turns four. The creative collective celebrates their birthday with nine hours of music by local and international DJs, Filipino food, karaoke, performance, craft, and community. More details details here.
“Destroying Books to Build a Mind”. The New Yorker’s Francesca Mancino explores what it means for AI giant Anthropic to scan, then destroy, millions of physical books.
A flavour of Jom. Occasionally, Jom publishes essays outside the paywall. These are on issues we think are in the public interest, and deserve a wider airing. In the past two years, we have published nearly 50 such pieces. Read some of these if you’d like to see samples of our work. We hope they’ll convince you to subscribe. And even if you’re here with no intention of doing so, we hope you’ll enjoy these offerings and consider it time well spent!
