national deaths bring the country together, and bring out buried feelings - with each elegy, each retelling of a life story, the forgotten biographies, submerged histories and veiled pasts all come back into focus.

i've just watched the video of rajaratnam's memorial service - lky really has a good voice, doesn't he? i can imagine he must have been a real lion at rallies in the early 60s - my dad was telling me how he and my grandfather would attend rallies in those early days, and how lky truly pushed himself to the limit, speaking tirelessly all over the island, even as late as 1 or 2 in the morning, trying to rally support the merger wth malaysia. he - that generation - really fought - for a nation. can you blame them for thinking we have no faith, no courage, no ideals? for not wishing to hand over the reins to us - they who had fought for nationhood - the ones, janadas devan wrote, who got their ics late in life - to us - who to them are namby-pamby, weak, unpatriotic?

when i go home i'm going to spend more time getting my dad to talk to me about politics - my mum too - but then she is much younger - and hers is a chinese perspective - the chinese-ed have never really forgiven lky for closing nanyang u, have they? my mum won't even read the alumni newsletters - they send her both the nus alumni newsletter - injury upon injury! as well as the one for ntu - which hurts. and i have had aunts on that side of the family - bright people - who stayed up till 2 every morning with a dictionary struggling with the english and ultimately withdrew from university - my mother was lucky to have been born earlier - to have been amongst the last batches to graduate from nanyang u before the merger.

but my father was old enough to remember - and old enough to be politically aware - at a tremendous moment in our history - to remember the 1962 referendum - to live through the merger and then the separation - to remember seeing for the first time what we've seen repeated - lky breaking down on television - "in my whole adult life, i have believed in merger and unity of the two territories." to live through the earliest years of independence, and to receive the first identity cards issued - you know, i never can understand european (and american) resistance to - and suspicion of - national identity cards - their voiced fears always seem like hysteria to me. and that must be because, for the first singaporeans to receive an identity card, it was proof of belonging, of their new citizenship, of the existence of a nation which fate was still so uncertain - our cards today have the year of birth built into the first two digits, but our parents had ic numbers that begin 00. and i saw my grandmother's birth certificate once - "british subject" it said. i'll be damned if i shall ever give up my ic for that of any country.