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Exciting Life Updates

I know I haven’t been updating this blog because I’m too lazy. Years 2 and 3 have been an exciting flurry of business (both work and busy-ness). I constantly spew bite-sized thoughts that stream into my mind on Instagram Stories anyway, and I am remarkably easily bored and excitable, so longer, more considered pieces on Blogger aren’t sustainable. I digress. Many exciting life updates! I’m now officially done with my undergraduate PPE programme at King’s College London. I loved every bit of it: the depth, rigour and intellectual intensity of the course, the international student community, the bustling city of London and all the travel opportunities around Europe. Words can’t do justice to the profundity of the experience. In typical Quincean fashion, I milked everything I could out of the three years: went to Cumberland Lodge (for free) as a photographer with the Philosophy Department in Years 1 and 3, clinched the Principal’s Global Leadership Award (PGLA) in my second year (spending

Convictions

In the past four and a half months, I dealt with convictions. Convictions of others, convictions of my own. I thought about criminal justice. About how persons in custody became unlikely friends in the lock-up, brought together by a peculiar mix of circumstance and necessity. How excited I was when I saw quadratic curves in sentencing benchmarks. The hotchpotch of emotions I felt when family members cried before we handed a convict over to the Prison Service. How it felt to be a symbol of legal authority, with the Balance of Dikē weighing on my shoulders. Being an active controller or enforcer is not my natural disposition, though it is my current duty. I have always been the community relations kind of guy, and that’s also my working style. If I have subordinates, they run around freely like kampung chickens. Notwithstanding minimal caveats for subsistence, legitimacy and operational requirements within the bureaucracy, I can coherently articulate my reasons and motivations behin

Songs of The Years

2020 sodagreen –  他夏了夏天 2019 Kana-Boon –  Silhouette 2018 Queen –  Under Pressure 2017 The Fray – The Wind 2016 Mayday – 倔强 2015 Beyond – 光辉岁月

Lessons from the Singapore Writers Festival 2019

I’m not a writer. I’m not in the Singapore literary scene. Well, I studied English Literature in secondary school and junior college but that’s about it. My primary creative outlet is photography, specifically documentary photography. Yet, I make a point to attend the Singapore Writers Festival (SWF) year after year. And it’s not just me. Hundreds of people show up — students in school T-shirts, old people, families — people who also aren’t in the literary scene. Why is this so? Is it because the written word is more universal than photographs? But we see as much as, if not more than, we read or speak. Certainly, the medium itself cannot account for this observation. As I participated in SWF, I kept thinking about why it seemed more “democratic” than the photographic equivalent – the Singapore International Photography Festival (SIPF). The best art festivals have something in store for everyone. All genres, price points and levels of expertise, from the critics and connoisse

The Purpose of the University

tl;dr  I believe the purpose of the university is not to solely pursue truth, champion social justice or impart vocational skills, but to grow the person by being wholesome and balanced in various ways, possibly combining the above aims. In “Why Universities Must Choose One Telos: Truth or Social Justice” , Jonathan Haidt’s central argument is that each university must (and can only) explicitly choose between truth and social justice as its telos. This is because truth and social justice are compatible at the individual level, but not at the institutional level. He attributes truth to Mill and social justice to Marx. Clearly, he stands by Mill, suggesting that academic freedom and intellectual diversity exist if and only if truth, not social justice, is king. Although he tokenistically tries not to moralise the issue by allowing universities to choose between the two teloses, he doesn’t bother to do a good job at it. “At the very least, be explicit about the choice!” In “