Familiarity breeds contempt

On the previous Sunday's paper, there was an article in which a columnist urged graduates from local universities to stop feeling inferior because local graduates do have some advantages over graduates from foreign universities.

I thought that this was a rather curious observation because the writer might well have mistaken the effect for the cause. From what I see, if local graduates feel inferior it is because the employers in Singapore and the general public treat them as somewhat lesser to the graduates from foreign universities. It has always irked me that the general Singaporean seems to automatically think that if you graduated from a foreign university, you must be better than the local graduate even if the person only went to the foreign university because his/ her grades were not good enough to get admitted to the local universities. Local people seemed to automatically associate superiority with anything that is foreign, especially if it is anything ang moh.

Evidently, in the eyes of the locals, a graduate from the University of Beijing is less smart than a graduate from some obscure university in Australia even though Beijing University enjoys a much higher ranking than most Australian universities. The fascination and worship of the west is of course not limited to just the perception of graduates but encompasses almost everything, from the perception of the capabilities of foreign talent, to branding of consumer goods, and even culture and language.

The government of Singapore slammed Singlish and discouraged its use. The rationale was supposedly that speaking Singlish would erode Singapore's competitiveness and made it difficult for foreigners to understand us. There is also the implication that foreigners would look down on us because we speak Singlish. If our government is really truly so puritan, then they should also ban all sitcoms, books and other forms of pop culture that contains any slang from other countries. Is rap proper English?! Of course not! Do your Hollywood movie stars speak Victorian English?! No! Why? Because dumbass, they are Americans, not British! And the simple reason why Americans have and keep their own brand of English, slang and other idiosyncracies show that unlike us, they have greater pride in been Americans. In addition, the fact that Americans speak their own American Engl