Monday, July 11, 2011

Rant Against the Machine

Yes I have left Singapore for some time, two years in fact, but is it just me or has inflation gone through the roof lately? I mean, forget the oft-reported ridiculous costs of housing these days, but just how did a cup of ice teh-O come to cost $1.80 at foodcourts? And if you ever need to photocopy stuff at the library, know first that you first need to buy a cashcard for $10, which comes with a stored value of... FIVE DOLLARS!!! How did the people who decided on this ever think its acceptable to make the public pay double for a piece of plastic that's supposed to hold the cash in? Its daylight robbery!!!

And so today marked my return, after a hiatus of two years, to the 9 to 6 work crowd (abeit on a short-term basis). Imagine my surprise at the MRT platform to find a mob of people trying to swarm inside an already packed train. It was like Chinatown during CNY except this was just a regular Monday morning! And after jostling around for 10 minutes in the sweltering heat, I finally managed to squeeze into the fourth train that arrived. It then took another 10 minutes just to travel ONE STOP from Ang Mo Kio to Bishan, crawling and stopping intermittently.

What is going on here? I mean, what's the point of having the economy grow 14% when cost of living is rising at an equally manic speed and quality of life is actually going downhill? I can't believe that this is the work of the government that I had supported and voted for all these years (not the recent one though, as I was abroad)! Let's hope it won't be another 5 years before we repent from our collective decisions again.


1 comment:

  1. Somehow reading this made my day. I thought I was having it bad here, now not so much. :-) Hopefully things will get back to 'normal' there soon.

    PS: Nice interview you did at Smorgzone and very interesting website here, too.

    Jay Sunford

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