Organic-Ally

In this episode my attention was drawn most to Richard the working-class boy made good on a journey discovering that good intention and even stellar motivation alone does not eradicate poverty. His point was that -- because he has done so -- anyone could make a better life for himself. All you need is an education. Go to night school if necessary. I think it is good for this nation that young people can have role models like Richard: I was poor, I worked hard, now I am doing well. I, too, was poor. I grew up with five other siblings sleeping on thin mattresses on the floor in a one-bedroomed flat. We were then allocated a two-bedroomed flat elsewhere. We still slept on the floor. We had one table which was used for food preparation, meals and then homework. We had no wardrobes and clothes were kept in boxes (old wooden fruit crates), etc. As for clothes I wore discards all the time. When I made it to university (thank God Singapore had a meritocratic system then) there were times when ...

I was ironing a shirt and I thought, hmm, the colour is a bit faded. I've had some of these shirts for so long. They are cotton, but not organic, with pretty lace on the collars and sleeves. I bought these years ago before I knew that conventional cotton was harming the environment. B are still sending me catalogues and I have studiously avoided their cotton and polyester clothes in recent years. I must confess that some (not all) of their styles appeal to me. More importantly they do clothes in my size. Recently, having not bought any clothes for more than a year, I succumbed and picked out a couple of wool numbers. The company -- like most companies these days -- claims to have an "eco and ethical" policy. (You could read on their site.) They claim fair trade policies, re-plant trees, etc. I wonder what other pro-organic folk think. Back to Organic-Ally .

This was my gripe of the day. I came across this comment: A world of hemp lingerie? No thanks ( Timesonline , 21st April 2008) and felt outraged that the writer implied that it is not worth sewing a button back on an item of clothing, or that doing so (sew) is akin to slave labour. If Melanie Reid wants to know what slave labour really is, I would suggest that she reads Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace by Pun Ngai. Pun (pronounced 'Poon') and I crossed paths while doing our PhDs in London. I read some of her original writing for our thesis-writing workshops. Let us just say that after reading her harrowing ethnographic accounts of what these dagongmei (girls who leave their villages to work in the cities for a few years to earn as much money as they can) go through in their factories and dormitories, I could not sleep that night. I think I became sensitized to the possible abuse involved in anything 'Made in China' after that. I don't kn...

Sadly I only learned about this programme a few hours before the first episode was aired, and so did not have time to flag this up on my other websites. What can I say? The factory scenes brought back vivid memories of my own stints in garment factories. Between my O and A Levels I found a 'finishing' job in a garment factory. That made me the lowest of the low in the hierarchy, short of the tea lady. So when the tea lady was not around, the supervisor made me serve tea to visitors. The rest of my time was spent cutting the loose ends of thread, ironing the finished products, folding, packing, and so on. My most painful memory at this factory was the tea lady hovering around the office, refusing to go home, waiting for the boss to come back to the factory to hand out that week's wages. The boss had left the factory earlier on for a meeting. She didn't come back that evening and we never got paid. The tea lady moaned that she didn't have the money to pay her children...

Interesting headline and report this: Exposed: the great GM crops myth "Last week the biggest study of its kind ever conducted – the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development – concluded that GM was not the answer to world hunger. "Professor Bob Watson, the director of the study and chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, when asked if GM could solve world hunger, said: "The simple answer is no."" Do read some of the stories related to this report. Compare with The city-dwellers who are becoming front garden farmers Back to Organic-Ally .

Last night I watched a taped programme of 'Child Genius'. Let's just say I felt really uneasy -- perhaps 'disturbed' is a more accurate description -- after that. There is a three-year-old girl who fell asleep while being tested for her IQ (at 152) and was re-tested. Her IQ was found to be so high they could not properly score her, so 'suka-suka' as we say in Malay/Hokkien or 'chin-chai-la' (in Cantonese), they call it 170. Girl's mother wanted her tested to prove she had 'special needs' so she could go to a good state school. She was devastated (the mother) to find that the school had rejected her. Well, obviously the mother is not very intelligent, because which state school would want a child with an IQ of 170? She will be no end of trouble. The school will have to pay for extra resources just to keep her occupied, etc, etc. The mother should have played down her intelligence and left it at 152-maybe. So she is NOT A PUSHY PARENT -- c...

Last week I agonised over a nine-year-old in the UK here . The news over the weekend is still about a certain Maths genius who has adopted my surname (yes!) and is making a rather tidy sum (taxed or untaxed, who knows?) being a high class 'social escort'. My husband pointed me to the article: Pushy parents: the naked truth . As we've been told that our son is highly gifted, any article about geniuses (genuii?) is of great interest to us. Anyway, said genius's pictures are plastered all over the media, helping to sell newspapers, no doubt, and thousands of column inches and blog posts must have been written. I add my own. There are dysfunctional families amongst the illiterate and lowly-educated, and there are dysfunctional families amongst the highly-educated. And the media already well know there are dysfunctional families amongst the most well-heeled and well-educated. Genius's mum has also started a blog, further muddying the waters. There have been claims and co...

I've been trying to write up an abstract for a conference paper on the need for (in)visibility of the business owner and the customer. So what do I see in the Saturday 'papers' (online)? " Tesco to monitor millions of consumers around the world ". It's all about how the Club Card tracks your buying habits. Bascially this one supermarket chain has more information on you than the Inland Revenue. I remember the day the Club Card started. I loved it. You had to spend more than £5 to gain a few points. Single and on a very low salary then I had often to compute mentally whether my shopping basket amounted to that minimum £5 limit. I also didn't have a car or freezer so could not benefit from bulk buying. Then I got married and had a child, and what became quite disturbing was that they kept sending us coupons for the items we often do need to buy, and with the tempting offers off other items we don't wish to buy. Clearly our shopping habits were being ...

O dear! It is happening. Riots because people cannot get their staple foods at prices they can afford: Starving Haitians riot as food prices soar The other global crisis: rush to biofuels is driving up price of food According to the latter report: "All across the world, cereals, meat, eggs and dairy products are becoming dearer. "Food prices are now rising at rates that few of us can ever have seen before in our lifetimes," said John Powell of the World Food Programme. Prices are likely to remain high for at least 10 years, the Food and Agriculture Organisation is projecting." ... "Government policies do not help: the rich world subsidises agriculture not to feed the world but to enrich its farmers." Environmentalists have long warned about food shortages when farms and resources are diverted to produce fuel, which is hardly carbon-neutral. Meanwhile in Singapore, we are told that there is enough rice. A government minister insists that for as long as Sin...

Is this the conclusion to this sad story? ============= I am still feeling low from yesterday's news that a boy from my son's Form has been diagnosed with leukaemia. I've known this young boy since he was a few weeks old. His mum and I were in the same ante-natal group. We had visited each other, the boys have played together, and it was after long discussions with me that they decided to move JD to our school. Then today we learn that a certain mother has been charged in court for neglecting her child and perverting the course of justice. Do I feel sorry for the mother or the child? I am not sure. A young woman of 32 with six plus one (according to her sister, she had forgotten she had seven) children with different fathers. How does this developed nation manage to breed families like this? By tweaking the 'survival of the fittest' principle seems to be a most likely answer. In a typical non-welfare state, young girls will look for mates that they can be sure wou...

I was very amused, tickled, chuffed when, over the weekend, I discovered that something I wrote about pl-st-c bags has become required course reading for a university writing course at a North American university. As I said to my friends at SOAg (Sociologists Outside Academia Group, we even have our own very stylish logo), it was painful not to be able to remain in academia. So I indulged in writing, as well as started this Organic-Ally business. Now I'm sort of more established and comfortable taking on my business-woman persona, and I find that an 'output' meant for industry has found its way back to academia. Irony? But I am not complaining. Back to Organic-Ally .

One of my most indelible memories of my Sociology Honours Class was a statement made by SH Heng. We talked about hairstyles and were possibly looking at magazines. Then she said, "When we asked the hairdresser to 'perm that hair-style', we really mean to 'perm that face'." Let me explain. Us Chinese girls in Singapore normally have straight, straight hair. We spend hideous amounts of money to have our hair 'permed' into all sorts of curly styles. Or we have a 'body perm' after which the hairdresser teases our hair into a shape similar to the picture we'd shown him/her. However, our hair never looks like the way we walked out of the hairdressing salon again. No amount of gooey hair product and hair-dryer would get it back to the shape at the hairdresser. SH hit the nail on the head though with her shrewd observation that we really want to have not just the hairstyle, but the face (and figure) of the model we were staring at. Fast forward to ...