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Roger Lim

Meeting Roger Lim — An Eighty-Year Journey This afternoon at the NTUC grocer, among shelves of bottles and bright labels, I met a man who quietly carried eighty years of history in his body. His name was Roger Lim. At first, what caught my attention was not the wine he was selling but the label itself. The bottle looked almost like a modern photographic advertisement—bright, playful, and very unlike the restrained elegance one expects from classical wines of Bordeaux or Burgundy. This particular wine was flavoured, even mixed with chocolate notes, something quite different from the pure and austere wines I usually enjoy. Two bottles cost about seventy dollars. But the wine was not what stayed with me. Roger did. When he told me he was eighty years old, I looked at him again carefully. He was standing the entire day promoting bottles, speaking to customers, explaining the flavours, lifting cartons and arranging shelves. Eighty. Yet he stood there with the alertness of a much younger man...
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Soon Keong

Soon Keong: Three Functions, One Life Soon Keong has a way of telling stories that makes you laugh first, and only later realise you’ve been shown something serious. He begins with understatement—almost always. When asked about his years in Raffles, he shrugs it off as “not very exciting”, and then, as if accidentally revealing the real centre of gravity, adds: except that he played rugby all the way through school and university. In that single “except”, you hear the whole blueprint. Because with Soon Keong, rugby is never merely sport. It is pedagogy. It is fraternity. It is the early training of leadership in a world where bodies collide and excuses do not hold. It is the place where boys learn what a classroom sometimes forgets to teach: responsibility has weight; commitments cost; and belonging is not a mood, it is a duty. He remembers the arc of institutions the way an old map-maker remembers coastlines. There is a trivial fact, he says—yet it isn’t trivial at all. His cohort ...
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Hendrickson Affair

Another day, another call with Sodeep. With him, conversation never begins gently; it bursts in laughing, swearing, tumbling over itself. That familiar rhythm again — fucker, fuck — not as aggression, but as punctuation. Commas and full stops in his spoken language. A way of keeping things light, friendly, alive. His exuberance is almost suspicious in a world where so many around him seem weighed down. He told me the whole day had been consumed by errands. Family matters. Both his sisters live in landed property now — secure, respectable, the visible markers of having “done well” in Singapore. Their sons, he said, studied well, even went to elite schools. A perfect script, the kind the nation loves to repeat. And then, almost casually, he added that both brothers-in-law suffer from depression. Another depression case. He said it without judgement, more with puzzlement. How could men who had followed the rules so carefully end up hollowed out inside? The contrast was striking. Here was ...
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Life’s Twists and Turns

Life’s Twists and Turns  by Hamamoto Satoshi and Choo Meng Foo Walking has always felt to me like a form of thinking with the body. It clears the mind, loosens the joints of thought, and somehow makes conversation flow more honestly. When two people walk side by side, there is no table between them, no fixed posture to defend. Sharing deepens without effort. Words arrive at their own pace. Yesterday, I walked 4.2 kilometres—from Buddha Tooth Relic Temple to City Square Mall . A simple route. A simple act. Yet walking, for me, has never been merely about distance. It is about discovery: new streets, new ideas, new perspectives, new understandings, sometimes even new opportunities. Walking welcomes the world in, and in doing so, opens oneself. Life, too, moves this way—through twists and turns that only make sense when we look back while still in motion. As we walked, Siew shared a story from a time when he was the General Manager of a  Hall . It was a story about a Pakist...
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Transition

  Transition A Life Formed Too Early, Briefly Met, Then Lost in Transition Loon grew up poor. Not in the way poverty is later retold—cleaned, sharpened, moralised—but in the way that compresses time. Childhood shortened. Adulthood arrived without invitation. Curiosity was not guided; it was simply exposed. The Singapore of his youth—late 1960s into the 1970s—was a country tightening itself into order. Independence was recent. Industrialisation accelerated. Housing blocks rose. Factories multiplied. Discipline, productivity, and survival were the virtues taught openly. Private life lagged behind. Parents worked long hours. Oversight thinned. Childhood protection was assumed rather than designed. The language of safeguarding had not yet caught up with the speed of modernisation. At the same time, a quiet revolution entered homes. In the mid-1970s, video cassette recorders arrived. First Betamax, then VHS. The format war mattered less than the effect: moving images left cinemas and en...
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