Wednesday, November 06, 2013

S. Rajaratnam, on Preserving History

I saw this on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sosbukitbrown

"A sense of history is what provides the links to hold together a people who came from the four corners of the earth. Because our history is short and because what is worth preserving from the past are not all that plentiful, we should try to save what is worthwhile from the past from the vandalism of the speculator and the developer, from a government and a bureaucracy which believes that anything that cannot be translated into cold cash is not worth investing in.”

- S. Rajaratnam, “The Uses and the Abuses of the Past”, Seminar on Adaptive Re-use: Integrating Traditional Areas into the Modern | Urban Fabric, (Singapore, April 1984)

S. Rajaratnam was the man who wrote our National Pledge. I wonder what he would say, to how blatantly we are destroying Bukit Brown.

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