National Day Rally 2017

That was the PM's dinner before he delivered his NDR 2017 speech in English. You get some idea of what eating healthily looks like especially the staple: brown rice. Many will say this is taking out all of the fun in life. They would say living a shorter and pleasurable life is better than a long and boring one. Of course the idea isn't between shorter and fun versus longer and boring, it is the on average eight years of poor health before death, much of it related to diabetes that is the problem.

The PM spoke on three issues this year: pre-school education, diabetes and smart city. Seemingly smart things with big impact down the road. Nothing mentioned on our external environment which suggests to me that he has finally taken Kishore Mahbubani advice that he is not LKY. We do need our leader to share with us what he thought of the region and the larger world because we are totally dependent on what is outside for our security and livelihood. Unfortunately he cannot do it safely or with sagacity.

Remember we are price takers. We can make all the plans we want but as always it will be what happens outside Singapore which will finally decide the choices available to us.

We badly need someone who can climb up the tall mast and look ahead. Every year the old map bequeathed to us by LKY gets more outdated.

Update: Aug 22 4:30 pm

These are extraordinarily abnormal times and even the taciturn Ray Dalio had chosen to share his views publicly on this issue. At home our PM had kept mum and since then I have told friends this year NDR speech was the worst ever.

Quoting Dalio from his essay,

History has shown that democracies are healthy when the principles that bind people are stronger than those that divide them, when the rule of law governs disputes, and when compromises are made for the good of the whole—and that democracies are threatened when the principles that divide people are more strongly held than those that bind them and when divided people are more inclined to fight than work to resolve their differences. Conflicts have now intensified to the point that fighting to the death is probably more likely than reconciliation.

That is between countries but within America, he had observed backed by repeated poll numbers and concluded,

..the majority of Americans appear to be strongly and intransigently in disagreement about our leadership and the direction of our country. They appear more inclined to fight for what they believe than to try to figure out how to get beyond their disagreements to work productively based on shared principles

I don't believe our PM is ignoring the elephant in the room. I think he does not have the confidence to talk about it publicly. Earlier this morning I came across this by Bilahari Kausikan.