Singapore erupted in excited chatter when Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam announced on June 8 that he was resigning from his post as Senior Minister to run for president.
“But you contribute because you want to see things change for the better for others, rather than contribute because you’re hankering for a certain position in life. And I’ve never had that ambition throughout,” says Mr Tharman whose father is the late Professor Kanagaratnam Shanmugaratnam, Singapore’s “father of pathology” who set up the Singapore Cancer Registry.
The time, he believes, is right to step up to help the country navigate a rapidly changing world as president. Weathering the vicissitudes of geopolitics and an increasingly fractured world as a small country worries him more. That is why he is standing for president; he believes his own standing from various international leadership roles will be an asset.
Mr Tharman is sitting in a shipping container which has been converted into an office at the Tasek Jurong Youth Hub in Taman Jurong, where he and his wife Jane Yumiko Ittogi have spent the last 22 years trying to better the lives of its denizens, especially disadvantaged children and youth. He smiles when asked how else luck and circumstance have changed his life.
Meeting his wife – a former lawyer now focused on arts education and community work – in London was also engineered by serendipity. Now in her late 60s, she had just completed her master’s in law while he was about to start his undergraduate studies at the London School of Economics . It probably explains why he loves Space Oddity, one of the biggest hits of singer-songwriter David Bowie.Can you hear me, Major Tom?”
“There was no radical alternative to that basic social democratic construct. But the moral case for doing more to help ordinary people, and particularly poorer people, remains strong, and we have to find good solutions for that, and it was important for me all the way through. I’ve never changed in that regard.”
“...although I had no access to state intelligence, from what I knew of them, most were social activists but were not out to subvert the system.”
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