LIFE

Lighting a way forward

Life, Brian Curtin, Published on 28/03/2012

» Whenever I visit Singapore I think of a line from a novel I read years ago: this is a city with no past and no future, only the present. Singapore's architectural heritage is so freshly preserved that it appears brand new. And given the city's general tendency towards streamlined perfection, one gains little sense of how major changes could occur. The Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk wrote that the defining essence of his native Istanbul is melancholia; I wonder what Singaporeans think is the defining essence of their homeland.