One united people - Singapore's never-ending project
A new book examines the quest for racial harmony - can we 'forget' our differences as formulated in S. Rajaratnam's draft of the national pledge?
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Koh Buck Song For The Straits Times
"One United People" - the title of a new book of 23 essays on Singapore's racial harmony - deliberately carries quotation marks for two reasons: The phrase is taken from the national pledge; and it acts as a reminder that racial harmony is not a reachable destination, but a never-ending journey, an aspiration that every citizen and resident can contribute to every day.An earlier draft of the pledge - suggested by then Minister for Culture (and later Deputy Prime Minister) S. Rajaratnam in a letter dated Feb 18, 1966, to then Minister for Education Ong Pang Boon - reads:
Mr Rajaratnam's version was framed more provisionally - which is intriguing, and unsurprising, given his noted cultural sensitivity. His initial hope was, first, for a deliberate act of forgetting - that Singaporeans would push into the backs of their minds what their eyes could see clearly: differences of race, and other differentiating human characteristics.
