Tag: income inequality

Singapore

Should Singapore tax the wealthy more?

singapore-sands_rich

This year’s Singapore Budget has garnered accolades for its focus on lower-income groups and the so-called Pioneer generation. One glaring omission, however, is in efforts to redistribute wealth. That is a missed opportunity; Singapore needs to address its drastic wealth inequality in order to, among other things, reduce social tensions, improve social mobility and maintain its commitment to building a fair and just society.

The distinction between income and wealth inequalities is important. In Singapore, a person can have immense wealth—inherited property, for example—with very little traditional income. This creates the somewhat perverse situation where some very wealthy people also own HDB flats and qualify for huge healthcare subsidies while simultaneously investing in stocks and second properties, furthering their wealth advantage over the poor. In order to properly address social inequities, both inequalities—income and wealth—have to be reduced.

Continue reading “Should Singapore tax the wealthy more?”

Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh3 Comments
Food, Singapore

Loving Singapore’s “cheap” hawker food

chilli crab

“I love local hawker food. There are not many countries in the world like Singapore where one can easily find reasonably priced food with the same high level of hygiene and great variety.” – MP Baey Yam Keng, in the wake of his recent $2.50 nasi padang.

Many people in the middle- and upper-classes love to cheer Singapore’s delicious cheap food. When my foreign friends ask me what’s great about Singapore, I often cite this (among other things).

Unfortunately for us all, it is a boast loaded with classist undertones. The main reason a country as rich and expensive as Singapore has such cheap hawker food is that many labour inputs are underpriced. Everybody from the lorry driver to the dish washer to the hawker is being underpaid. Indeed, for a country with a negligible agricultural sector, one would expect (the imported) food to cost more than in many other countries. Continue reading “Loving Singapore’s “cheap” hawker food”

Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh4 Comments
China, Food, India, Singapore, Travel

Letter from India: Philosophies

Note: This is an on-the-road blog post. To find out more about why I am on this trip, please read, Next book: From Kerala to Shaolin.

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A continuation of Letter from India: People

Philosophy and spiritual teachings have crept410px-BodhidharmaYoshitoshi1887 into conversations throughout the last eight weeks in India. Perhaps I should have expected this. Almost all Indian martial arts are grounded in spirituality, if not necessarily religion. Boddhidharma (pictured), who many believe brought some form of martial arts from South India to Shaolin sometime in the 5th-6th century, was a Buddhist monk.

Although, as somebody different reminds me every few days, back then Buddhism and Hinduism were not “religions” in the contemporary sense, and there might have been a lot more overlap between them. Many Hindus might have subscribed to the teachings of the Buddha; moreover, they would probably not even have identified themselves as “Hindus”, distinct from “Buddhists”. Even today, the terms “Hindu” and “Buddhist” do not have widespread currency across India. “I prefer to say that I am a follower of Lord Buddha’s teaching,” Kirit’s uncle, the secretary of a Japanese Buddhist organisation in Jaipur, tells me.1

All this is important, because as we consider the ancient connections between Chinese and Indian martial arts— a microcosm, perhaps, of broader cultural exchange—it is worth noting that undergirding those flows was not “religion” or “proselytisation” as we know them today, but rather a more universal ethos about living a good, honourable, spiritual life.

As such, the shorthand that I’ve been using this past year to describe kung fu’s origins—“Martial arts probably spread from India to China in the 5th-6th C with Buddhism as its vehicle”—is simplistic. Continue reading “Letter from India: Philosophies”

Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh8 Comments