Who wears the (smarty) pants?

Have always liked reading Sumiko Tan's weekly column, though it is rarely the happy-ecstatic prototype.Despite the initial cynism, it does give the impression of a jaded high-flyer seeking good in the little positivities in life. Something like the rainbow after the rain. This week her column had hit home, an issue which is central to the way our society is structured. She had illustrated its construct-- onioned layers of the social web where it seems to divided, subdivide, sectioned, splitted, therein reaching the bud of elitism. Well, the system works as such right. So much so that if you belong to this side of the social web per se, you don't really have much interaction with the other side. And in this case, this lack of interaction doesn't necessarily give birth to the classic theory of the-grass-is-greener-on-the-other-side. Instead, it is the perfect breeding ground of a bigoted mindset.

Like for example, a preference to want to know individuals belonging to a certain category, say the over-achieving intellects(yes, elitist!), or the farty dramatist, or only the members from the christian youth group. Everyone has their their right to a preference, but if this preference is enough for us to keep away a certain groupie not because they are bad, just because we don't like them, surely we are missing on some exposure.

Speaking about exposure, I suspect S'pore has this thing about putting the brains in the beauty, and then the summation of that two, in a bikini. Cause lately the papers has been hawking and trumpeting the glorious intellects of this year's Ms Singapore Universe finalists. Pretty they are of course. In fact, one of the contestent was my tutor from last semester, pretty interesting. Well, the thing is here on our sunny island, you better get an decent education or get your asses tanned. Even something you would think of as a superficial beauty pageant cannot escape the clutches of see-our-girls-have-got-degrees. Do they actually turned down girls whom they feel are not members of smartclub? Or that pretty girls are discerning enough not to sign up for the pageant unless they have a degree? Its warped really, cause in Real pageants they show the vital statistics of the girls in string bikinis but here they show statistics of the other kind, i dunno, lets try mensa average?? Anyways, they really shed new light to the word universe(-ity?) in this context. Suddenly the casting call for contestents will look like a something from the classifiedjobs. And thats the executive appointments mind you. =)

Of course, this aint enough. Elections are like a smidge bit away. The Straits has been running articles of late on the backgrounds of the political candidates. Then there is the necessary strutting of the academic showing. In a way, that is needed, cause impressive degrees are stand-alone accolades that speaks volumes by themselves. More credible i guess. It seems that everybody is getting so immensely educated. What good is a university degree when almost everyone i know will get one in a couple of years time. We are back on square one? So what now, go get a masters? We just up each other with every move we make!

This reminds me of the prisoner's dilemma from econs. Why not we just all stay at status quo. Cause you move i move everyone moves in the end all of us are worse off right? We waste money waste time trying to make human pyramids out of each other. Haha, i digressed aplentiful, when actually what i intended to say was that we have to make a conscious effort to not be racist (oops), sexists..et cetera. Argh..is this the case of the pot(belly) calling the kettle black? Just got to remove the nasty speck from my eye. Its pretty much enough the way the MOE has divided us into EM1's and 2's, and specialexpressnormal, jcpolyite, and what else...Just love the masses laa. =)

Got to go cram for exams. Cause nobody wants to go be my prisoner partner in Ntu, and i also don't want to be human tee-lam, not study and get a D for that.