Why the obsession for FTs?

Many CEOs are chirping and blowing their trumpets about the virtues of recruiting foreign talents. We need talents from all over the world, with a world view, with diverse views, to grow, to be competitive and innovative. Sure, when your company is an international company competing in the international market and needing an international team of staff with cross country knowledge and information to keep the company in touch with the rapid changes overseas. No body can argue against that. So Citibank has a very international staff, recruiting people from all over the world, as they have branches all over the world.



Why does a local company with local operations and local interests like the SMRT or the NTUC need foreign talents? For what? Why would the ministries, the stats boards or GLCs need foreign talents, to be international in their staff composition, to look international, to show people they are international when they don’t need to? There may be a need, an important need for some companies or institutions to want an international outlook, an international perspective that only foreigners and foreign talents can provide. But many do not need to do so. And this is simply commonsensical in a local operation when the customers are locals. Even banks like Citibank do not need to fill its staff with foreign talents when the branch is serving their own locals, in the cities or counties.



The obsession for foreign talents must not be allowed to become a blind fetish fad, a nice to have thing. Hiring foreigners must have clear and distinct objectives, a comparative advantage. Foolishly hiring foreigners for foreigner’s sake has an economic cost, a social cost and also a political cost. When our citizens are unemployed, especially the qualified, this is going to turn into a serious problem for families and the downfall of a govt.



In the medical industry when there is a shortage of local professionals, there is a need for foreigners to fill the vacancies. The doctors and nurses, preferably local to be able to relate and communicate with their patients could come from foreigners and with acceptable consequences. There are many jobs and professions that don’t need foreigners. Such companies and organisations are pretty obvious and when they do employ foreigners they will stand up like a sore thumb when locals are available. Worst, such institutions may be national in nature and have a national duty and responsibility to its own citizens.



The other big danger of padding the top management with foreigners is that the organisation could be hijacked and turned into their own fiefdom at the expense of the local owners. Citibank and many MNCs are good examples of being hijacked by their international crews and lost their identity and purpose of who they are and whose interests they are serving. The Americans and Europeans are facing this problem when the MNCs uprooted and left America for greener pastures.



The govt should seriously come out with a policy to curb this wanton recruitment of foreigners for the sake of looking international when there is no need to and when the local PMETs are left redundant, left in the lurch. I am referring to local and govt linked companies or govt institutions and ministries. For goodness sake, why do you want a Greek god as your PR man or Jolie Angeline as the receptionist for companies like NTUC or SBS or Pasar Malam Incorporation? Or why would you need a foreign accountant in your backroom? Your domestic operations and businesses do not need foreigners or foreign talents for their world views and perspectives.



There must be a place for the natives and for the natives to be gainfully employed with dignity and pride as citizens of the country. They must not be treated as expendables to be discarded ASAP when a FT is available.

Taking photography to new heights

40 years ago when I held a SLR it was like holding a precision machine with very accurate engineering to be able to do what it was designed to do. Today, a DSLR is still a very precise machine and more. It comes with a computer inside. This is the kind of power in the hands of a photographer.

40 years ago I was messing around in the dark room all alone, with chemicals and fearing a little ray of light sneaking into the room. And the processing of the negatives and printing were mainly done manually with a lot of guess works. Manipulating them for different effects was tedious and failure rate was extremely high. Today, every thing a dark room processing can do can be done much better and easier, with more control and refinement using a processing software loaded into a computer. No more messy stuff and expensive errors that had to be thrown away at great cost. The software can work practically at anywhere with no fear of sneaky lights. And any error can simply be erased and redo again at practically no cost.

The tools of photography and the nature of photography have taken a qualitative leap to allow photographers to do many things that they could not do before. With such powerful tools and computing power, there are many avenues to explore for the photographer. I was not content with just doing and repeating the same thing all over again, shooting the best portrait, the best bird in flight, night photography, sports photography, travel photography, macro or micro photography. In many of these areas, everything has been done and shot by the professionals.

With two computers, one in the hand, one sitting on the table, and a more power third computer in the head, I started to explore and experiment with the untouchables, the taboos, the things that were frowned upon, striking out into new frontiers, to capitalise on the power of 3 computers. Photographers must do justice to the enormous creative powers their tools are able to perform today.

The first step I took was to embrace refraction, something that was nearly totally disregarded by photographers for the distortion it caused. Conventional photography is all about reflection, shooting an object to get a clear and crisp image. At times blurring and zooming effects were introduced, bokehs etc, but still an act of reflection.

Refraction is about seeing light travelling through more than one medium of different density. The bending of light through a prism to reveal the rainbow colours is a basic example of reflection. Light contains many things that the naked eyes could not see. Light is after all an electromagnetic wave. The signals received on radio or the television, through the phone, are all electromagnetic waves with information of sound and images embedded in them. The decoder in the TV unscrambles the information to make them visible and audible.

Light entering and exiting a medium like water are distorted by refraction and reflection. It also picks up other information that we could not see but exists. If only such information can be translated into something visible, revealing what they were like a TV image through a decoder, the final image can be stunning and unpredictable.

The Art of RAR or Reflection and Refraction is a technique that I have developed exactly to do this function. The images taken in the water will not be seen through the naked eyes or the camera sensor. The water will still appear as an image of water in the sensor. Through processing, the multiple images hidden in the light that came out of water can be seen in all its glories.

The Art of RAR is a key or a decoder to do this job. Many unseen images cannot be obtained from a seemingly non existence object in the water. With this methodology, photography is now able to do something new, something that was impossible and now possible. The images that came out from this technique can still be like a photographic image or an image that looks exactly like a painting with no trace of it being a photograph. It is a new field of photography that modern technology makes possible with the help of the creative and imaginative mind of a photographer. The possibilities are unlimited and photographers, with their creativity and imagination, could move beyond the confines of conventional photography, to explore new frontiers using the camera to produce new art forms.

The Art of RAR is not the only new technique available and more creative usages of the camera and technology would likely to lead to more innovative ways to expand the art of photography and how to use the camera. The art of photography is beginning to see new light.

Chua Chin Leng

Natural selection in Sin

Survival of the fittest is the oldest law of Nature. In the wild, Nature ensures that the fittest survives to continue the existence of specie. There is no exception, survive or perish.

There is a NYT article in the Sunday Times today on the success of Asians in American elite or specialised high schools. Of 14,415 students admitted to New York City High Schools, 59% were Asians. In 1971, Stuyvesant High School was mostly white, with 10 % black and 4% Hispanics. Today, it is 72% Asians and less than 4% black or Hispanics and the rest white.

There were protest that the admission system based on test or academic abilities is unacceptable as it would edge out the blacks and Hispanics. The govt stood its ground. NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, ‘You pass the test,…you get the highest score, you get into the school, no matter what your ethnicity, no matter what your economic background is.’ There is no affirmative action for the less able blacks and Hispanics.

After centuries of practicing racial discriminations against the Asians, the US of today is living up to its Constitution, of equal rights for all. Of course in many areas, this is still far from the truth. In this particular area on education, in New York City, this is the way forward.

Close to home, how far is this meritocracy being practiced? In many ways we are like New York City, the most able academically will be allowed to go to the best schools. Meritocracy in practice by the human beans is closely mirroring survival of the fittest in the wild, a process of natural selection. Of course there are exceptions.

The practice of natural selection has its consequences. The less able will eventually be extinct or elbowed out of the system. In New York City and in Sin, there is this other element that is not recognised or not spoken. The New Yorkers are protesting against meritocracy for their own reasons. They do not want to lose out economically. In Sin, when ‘foreign talents’ are imported in large numbers, as much as 50% of the population, and if they really are more talented than the natives, the outcome would see the natives being discriminated by meritocracy when the foreigners moved in to secure the places in the good schools, the good jobs, the better housing and everything else.

It is only a matter of time when the less able natives will have to move out, to make way for the foreigners, the new citizens, the more meritorious. Is this what we want, is this what nation building is all about? Do the natives think that their country should be inherited by the more talented and they have no place of existence or be around just to serve the new and more deserving citizens? Is this a country, or just a hotel.

Persistence, perseverance and tenacity

These are the cornerstones of a man with a purpose. Professor Lim Chong Yah is so filled with a mission to do something for the country and people that he is not going to be dismissed and ignored. He is coming back again with his prescription to erase the wrongs in our economic and social system. We need more able and distinguished men like Lim Chong Yah to stand up, and stand up again and again, when pushed down, when ignored or when attacked. It is not only the calibre of the man at stake, it is his ideas, his conviction to do something right that is the powerful force behind such men with a mission.

Those able men out there who believe in the cause, that the country is going down the wrong way and wanted to do something, it is now. Join the likes of Lim Chong Yah, stand up and be counted. Speak the truth, push your ideas, your views of what Singapore needs and should be and could be. We need intellectuals and professionals, people with many years of experience and wisdom, to speak out in the genuine Natcon.

If the Natcon is going to be the stage for the aunties and uncles in the kopitiams to tell us what they want for the future of this country, what do you think you are going to expect? Let’s be serious and get serious people of substance to do the thinking. I am not dismissing the young in institutions of higher learnings to speak up. Unfortunately many are still too inexperience to have a full grasp of the complexity of nationhood, of a people, of a country, and what and where the country should be heading, the good life for the people, not just for a few.

This is the time to stand up for Singapore, by well meaning Singaporeans. You need not be invited to speak. You must have the gumption to speak out without being invited for the show. Your country needs you in such dire times.

When more professionals and people that count stand together, they carry more weight. It is time to tell the boys and girls to go shopping for their branded handbags and sports cars. Let the real thinkers, those who have more wisdom, to do the serious thinking.

Lim Chong Yah is showing the way, the dedication to stick to a worthy cause and not be brushed off as a little noise in wilderness.

Secrets of Mother Nature Exhibition

 Secrets of Mother Nature Exhibition at NUSS Guild House Kent Ridge 22 Oct -21 Dec.

This is a section of the exhibition and some of the works I put up. Everyone is invited to see the exhibits. Admission is Free.

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