I’d think the following excerpt from a recent BBC article is actually alarming. It goes to show what a complete control Lee Kuan Yew has over his people. No one dares to help anyone in Singapore, in my opinion, under the presumption that it is none of their business to help any people lest they offend the ruling elite who may be doing their dirty work.
The following is an excerpt from an online BBC article
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Ten weeks of morning sickness ensued, turning my daily commute into a 45-minute gauntlet.
One morning the nausea finally got the better of me just as I had stepped on to a packed train. Worried I was going to faint, I crouched to the floor, holding my head in my hands.
And so I remained, completely ignored, for the full 15 minutes it took to reach my station. Nobody offered me seat or asked me if I was OK.
For the first time Singapore had made me feel unhappy. I had been vulnerable – completely reliant on the kindness of strangers. Singaporeans, I felt, had let me down.
As I sat recovering on the platform, I wondered if this was part of the story behind those Gallup poll results. By this time a follow-up to the original survey had been published and according to the figures, Singapore had apparently cheered up quite a lot.
But all I could see was a massive compassion deficit. Or were my fellow passengers that day just unusually uncaring?
“Oh no, I am not surprised at all,” said a Singaporean friend later that day. “My sister is seven months pregnant and she fell down a packed escalator the other day and had to crawl to the nearest railing to heave herself up. Nobody helped.”
Another Singaporean friend was equally unsurprised. “I slipped down a drain last year and cut my leg,” she said. “It was bleeding badly but nobody stopped to help. Perhaps they were all in a rush.”
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*Article first appeared on http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26546169