What defines beauty?

Who defines what is beautiful, ugly, smart or stupid? Only through the comparison of looks, IQ, and the evolution of tastes and preferences over time do we cultivate an idea of an ideal look, or amount of intelligence that is necessary before we deserve respect.

If there were nothing to compare to, what is a pretty girl? Have you ever questioned the notion of what is goodlooking, and what is hideous? Today, slim waists and proportionately big breasts fit the category of what a hot girl should look like, yet centuries ago, it was the suppleness of a fat women that made her desirable and deserving of man’s lust. Even in some villages at this very second, long necks dictate a lady’s beauty, and in others, tiny feet is the embodiment of gentleness and ladylike-ness.

Every century, generation and new wave of fashion brings along another wave of the ideal look, something whose relevance is constantly evolving and never the same for too long. Yet, we all spend so much of our time trying to become the ideal candidate that will deem us desirable in the eyes of others. We look at a slightly plump girl and laugh at her cellulite, and create jokes about “muffin tops”, but the main idea behind it is to make ourselves feel that we have the perfect figure, perfect oval face and nice smooth shining hair, or whatever not.

There’s nothing to be proud of if you’re prettier than most girls in your generation; it merely means that you happened to be blessed with the better combination of looks and flair; not that you deserved it or that others didn’t. Looks tend to inflate people’s egos, and they raise themselves on pedestals created for that very purpose. But the old adage that beauty is only skin deep still rings true. It is the inner shine of a person that separates him from the rest of the good looking, shiny-with-tanning-oil crowd of beauties and hunks. It is his personal thoughts and individualistic mindset that sets him apart from the rest of the people who have stuck themselves in a bankwagon driving down the wrong direction.

I know someone who looks plain on the outside, nothing fantastic; not someone you would take notice of in a crowded lift or even trigger your memory of anything interesting. Yet when you talk to him, you never run out of things to ask him, because he has opinions about almost everything; it’s hard to find someone that exudes confidence that surpasses materialism. You know, in corporate reporting we learn that for a piece of information to be “material”, it must be such that when investors have possesion of this information, it is sufficient to make them change their opinion of a company and its valuation. Similarly, when we are obsessed with materialism, it is to create an impression on others that without which, when we are plain and naked and stripped of all the flashy jewellery and revealing tops, would never have been formed. Yet this person I know wears the most boring and plainest of clothes, doesn’t give a damn about what people say about his pants or hair, but still manages to command respect and attention when he is in a room.

I think we need more of such beautiful people; the world is getting too boring once you look past their clothes and gucci bags and flamboyant hairstyles.

To be interesting, that’s what we all want, isn’t it?

You know how certain gifts look really nice and fun out the outside, but when you unwrap them, they’re really just nothing spectacular, and really just absolutely boringly normal? I feel like that sometimes, and I wonder if all I ever do is in aid of making myself feel less ordinary.

But I really don’t want to be normal, or nice, because these are words used to describe someone when people don’t have other words for them. It makes me feel frustrated, and all I want to do is to bungy jump, parasail, climb a mountain, just to prove that I’m anything but boring. It bothers me really quite a bit, and I want to be less bothered by it. I want to start living a life, not for other people, but for myself. Not that I have been a saint and have devoted my life to serving others; but that I am mostly living other people’s dreams for me. Because I realize that sadly, I haven’t carved out any dream for myself.

I sometimes think of doing great things that will awe the world, to make the rest of them sit up and realize that they’ve been missing out on a hidden treasure. Then I realize that I don’t know how to get there.

I need to live a life that is fulfilling, woven with dreams and destiny that I so love to proclaim. Maybe I might start with WorldVision, and do something about what I really feel for those less fortunate.

The World is Flat

Thomas Friedman, author of “The World is Flat”, commented in his book that when he was young, his mother told him to “Finish up your food, people in India and China are starving.” Nowadays, he tells his daughter, “Finish up your homework; people in India and China are starving for your jobs.”

As globalization continues its rampage around the world, mobilization of everything is possible. Jobs are no longer confined to domestic citizens; its buffet time for all who are willing to travel and grab them. To transit and be willing to take the cheapest pay in exchange for having a job at all.

There are billions of people starving for jobs, and it makes the stark acknowledgement that productivity is so crucial for survival even more real.

Inequality and human capital

Living in a developed city where meritocracy is the only way up the ladder of success (for those without the necessary strings to pull), there is an innate inclination towards looking down on those who haven’t had the same level of education as us.

Saintly as we might like to believe we are, we are not. Simply because having one more certificate than another makes us feel that little bit more secure, and confident that we have the right merits to signal our efficiency to the future employers that we hope will choose us. We may look with slighted eyes at people who seem uncaring of their future and unconcerned about their studies.

Yet, we did not realise, that what we are looking at or looking down at, is actually the fruit of unequal opportunities. In Singapore, where every additional year of education leads to an average wage increment of 13%, it is definitely not a choice of not wanting to take up more years of education, but the fact that such an option was not available to the people who most lack.

The chapter on human capital management shoved the reality of inequality in my face. And because of the cruel fact that many people are deprived of the chance of education (in most developing countries) and of higher education (in Singapore), it gets progressively harder for the poor to break out of their poverty cycle. Mincerian equations and studies on human capital have shown that for each year of education, your wage increases, but only up to a certain point, where there will be a peak, after which wages will start to decline.

For the less educated, this is a double whammy for them, because with each new year of work experience, their wages increase, but lesser and lesser than the marginal increase for their more highly educated counter parts. Especially because the people with lower levels of education tend to be settled in more manual or blue collar job occupations, this increase in work experience doesn’t neccessarily compensate them in terms of increase in wages. After all, some one who has been in the construction industry for 20 over years is not necessarily more outstanding and in demand than someone who has only been in it for 5 years; in fact, the older a lower educated worker gets, the less desirable and in demand he becomes, because in the manual indutries, youth and vitality are more important than being old and more experienced.

On the other hand of the spectrum, the professional and managerial jobs give increasing wage premiums to the highly educated workers, and as work experience increases, so does their wages, and even as the law of diminishing returns sets in, the peak for highly educated workers is reached only much later as compared to the lower educated workers.

With these results, it is easy to comprehend the government’s strong efforts at making primary and secondary education as accessible as possible. Yet it also reminds me that the reason for so much inequality in the world is really not because of a matter of choice; it really is a matter of not having a choice at all.

Have you become immune?

Reading the news can make you numb, if you don’t consciously make sure you aren’t.

Just a glance at the headlines today, and I see strings of words that note the number of deaths, the number killed, the number of people made homeless. Whether it’s about the floods in Indonesia or Florida that leave hundreds of thousands without a home, or the killing of the Taliban leader, these digits are but just statistcis, that we as readers see from the viewpoint of one who is removed and too far away to feel anything.

Pictures of little schoolchildren wading in the waist high waters admist pouring rains may ignite a spark of sympathy, but only for a brief second, before I click onto another link and read about the 130 killed in a new Bagdhad bomb blast. Then I click on another link and find myself reading about turkeys being slaughtered because they carried the H5N1 virus. I read news after news, absorbing the data that remains no more than data, because it doesn’t hurt me and it doesn’t make me cry.

I’m reminded of the time when I first started reading the newspaper, and every rape case or robbery left me shocked, worried that such a scenario could happen to me as easily as it happened to the said victim; but slowly, like the way we become immune to the bad smell in a room, I too, become immune to the news (mostly bad), as my heart hardens from the truth that no matter how bad I feel about it, it’s not going to make the world a better place.

But today, I felt a prick in my conscience, rebuking me for even thinking that way. Because, these victims never asked to be part of the brutal statistics that sell the papers; they never wanted anything more than just a roof over their heads and some peace to go with their daily meals. But it is their misery that gives the media its job; it is their heartaches that should remind us not to take our lives for granted; it is them who should wake us up, and shake us into being productive beings.

Where we have the opportunity to have an education, to have a good home, a proper living environment without fear of bombings and terrorist attacks (at least I’d like to assume), we should take every good thing that we have and make it something even better.

In flowers lie far more than they look.

My obsession with flowers bears not from the actual flowers themselves; it goes nothing more than the words and terms that I use.

But, since they have attained a permanent spot on my header, credit will be given where credit is due. Flowers are beautiful when they are alive, short lived though their glory may be; henceforth the name “Morning Glory”, where each new day brings a new burst of blooming flowers waiting to sing in pretty songs.

Other than the superficial representation of loveliness that is open associated with flowers, flowers also represent something else whose importance far outweighs that of its surface looks. A flower represents the beginning of a birth of new life, because after a flower wilts, a fruit is birthed forth, small though it may initially be, yet when ripe, is teeming with freshness and seeds for greater procreation.

The symbolic definition of what a flower brings stirs deeply in my heart; because not only does that signal a pleasing feast for the eyes, it captures the essence of a flower’s existence– a destiny far greater than its fleeting beauty; embedded deep within and continuing long after the flower has gone.

Oh oh, we’re in trouble; Is someone going to burst our bubble?

In 1997, I was in Primary 6, didn’t give a hoot about the world, nor the fact that the Asian Financial Crisis was hitting all the Asian countries in full force, wrecking havoc whose effects on certain countries like Indonesian have left them still recovering from the shock.

This year its 2007, I’m in University, and through my readings and courses as well as of course, my new interest in the world whose effect on all of us I can no longer deny, I read over and over again, about the 1997 crisis. It’s weird to read a Caucasian’s reports on the effects of the Asian Crisis, and weirder to find that it seems in the field of Asian Monetary Policy, there are more good writers from the Western part of the world than from Asian. Even my Asian Monetary Professor is American.

Apart from that brief digression, I really want to talk about the possibility of another crisis, another crash, but this time, perhaps not just involving Asia, but perhaps America (very likely) and maybe also Europe. I’m not advocating that such a scenario is good; but looking at the news everyday that mark yet another all time high on the stock exchange, in Singapore, China, and many other places, where the prices of goods are going atrociously high. In a time and age where the economy is booming, everyone is busy swiping out their plastics to make use of more and more credit, it seems the stage is set for a market correction. Maybe Crash is a word too harsh; corrrection may be more correct (pun intended).

As I mentioned a few posts ago, hedge funds are taking on dangerous amounts of debt, and together with the package, risks that they may be unable to handle.  Everywhere, it seems the press is screaming with news about inflation curbing, in the USA, Thailand, China; all the Central Banks are scratching their heads over whether to maintain or increase interest rates. If you were to keep up with the news everyday, you’d realize that every country seems troubled by any news that may hint at increasing inflation, yet at the same time, investors with money to act on these news are moving capital in and out of countries, hedging their bets that these interest rates increases or decreases will move currencies and bond prices in the direction of their favour.

Everything happens so fast, many are pumping in much money and taking on leverage to accelerate the growth of their wealth. Suddenly it feels like we’re trapped in an air tight bubble that keeps getting larger and thinner. Will it be another bubble that bursts? How can we identify it? Someone wise one said that you can never identify a bubble until it bursts, but by then it would have been too late.

Alas, writing the history of the future is harder than writing the history of the past (in Eichengreen’s beautiful words). Only time will be able to unravel the mystery that has left so many worrying about.