David vs Goliath: Singapore version

No I am not talking about the Party versus the Opposition since the GE might not come any time soon (contrary to my earlier expectations). I am referring to the picture as portrayed in an article written by my cousin, a journalist with TODAY, on the continued battle between Singapore and The Mosquito. Not any mosquito, but The Aedes Mosquito that is responsible for the spike in dengue fever cases and that have quite a number of ministers and top civil servants sweating.

Talk about mosquito. Do you know who killed one of the greatest and youngest conqueror of the ancient world, Alexander the Great? It was a mosquito for he died of malaria. If he lived in this century or the last century in the modern age, chances are he would have survived it, but then he probably wouldn't have the chance to have the Great added behind his name. Conquering land is out of fashion now, instead dominating the economy and been fiflty rich is the macho thing now. Perhaps we should call Bill Gates the Great or something.

Anyway, I digress. I wasn't going to talk about Alexander the Great or the Mosquito that assassinated him or the reaction of his possibly gay Companions. I had wanted to comment on the fact that the efficiency of the Singapore Inc seemed to have meet its match in the adaptiveness and resilience of the Aedes Mosquito that just refused to die despite all the efforts of the government to crush it. People in general like things big. We think larger companies and larger countries are better and more powerful. Perhaps. But been small has its advantages too, especially when the situation calls for responsiveness and adaptiveness, the same situation faced by the Aedes Mosquito when Singaporeans are actively trying to destroy its livelihood. When this whole saga is over, perhaps Singapore as a country can draw inspiration from the agility and resilience of the mosquito.

And by the way, in this documentary called "The Most Extreme" (which ranked the top 10 animals for a particular characteristic), the creature that has been ranked as the number one survivor is the disgusting cockroach. If I did not remember wrongly, it can withstand up to 200 times the radiation that would kill a normal human, live on a film of oil left by a fingerprint for 3 days and best of all, it can survive without a head (until it starves to death). So when one day, we humans got wiped out by the kind of comet that exterminated the dinosaurs, it would be the cockroaches that feed on your feces that would rule the world.