a refreshing thought by kishore

A refreshing thought Kishore Mahbubani is probably the best mind in his cohort that Singapore has produced. I can't agree with him more when he said that in many areas Singapore is already world class or surpassed that. The fact that we are still exhibiting traits of little boys like I want this and that because the boy next door has it, like Kishore said, is a sign of our lack of confidence, not amounting to immaturity. The 'eye' is the most glaring symbol of a third world mentality. Just because London has it, so we must have it. But maybe that got a little to do with our colonial heritage. The next thing we may want to have, God forbids, is to have a Queen. We have the English Premier League living in the local papers and in the minds of all our football fans. They even know which brand of toothpaste or underwear their favourite footballers used or wore. And while we have achieved in some very important areas like education, and telling the world how good our education system is, which has been vindicated by the large inflow of students from abroad, we have started to dismantle our own education system which have been the envy of the world. We don't believe in ourselves. We always think that our local stuff aren't good enough. Our local talents from one of the top world universities, NUS, are of lesser talents than talents from universities of third world countries. Or just because a few who could not make the grades and went overseas and returned with inflated grades, talked a bit louder, and impressed the listeners, so foreign universities are better. Sure there are many great universities abroad. But not many of the rest are great. Otherwise our NUS ranking is pure fiction. Do we want to believe in these rankings? If not, then we should not pursue them. If yes, then we must believe that our local grads are good, or at least better than those from third world and lower ranked universities. Have we grown up as a nation?