Keeping fit, Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s way

Mr Lee Kuan Yew loves to eat, puts on weight easily and used to smoke 20 cigarettes a day. Now 68, he feels fitter than at 50, exercises daily, eats carefully, and has learnt to reduce stress.

MAY 10, 1992
Friday, 6.40 pm, and the sun is setting at Seri Temasek, the official residence at the Istana. The pre-war building overlooks a huge sweep of lawn. Bushy pines line the surrounding roads. In the distance, a squirrel scurries up a tree. There is greenery everywhere.

A car drives up the front porch and Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew alights, trailed by his security officers. He heads for the building and changes into a plain white T-shirt, blue shorts and Nike running shoes before starting his exercise routine: 20 minutes of cycling on a stationary bicycle; five to 10 minutes on a rowing machine; a 10-minute jog. Sometimes, if he is in the mood, he hops onto a bicycle and breezes through the grounds of the Istana.

At 68, Mr Lee feels fitter than he did at 50. His weight is lower, his heart stronger and his muscles more toned. This is a result of a concerted effort to make aerobics a way of his life, and to change his eating habits. At 1.78 m tall, he weighs between 74 and 76.5 kg, and averages 74.5 kg. “I tend to put on weight very quickly, so I have got to watch it,” he says in an interview at his office earlier that afternoon.

He became health conscious after taking office in 1959. “The pressures became very great and I knew that if my health is poor, then my work suffers. When you are under heavy stresses you must be in good health or you are in trouble. I began to be careful about how much I ate and how much I drank.”

Exercise

Exercise has always been part of his life, although it was only 15 years ago that he took up aerobics seriously. “Even when I was a young boy in school, when I was staying in Siglap, I used to swim, cycle and play games,” he says. “I find that if I am inactive I get slothful, I get slow.”

In the 1950s, 60s and 70s, his exercise was mostly golf and sometimes swimming and cycling. Golf was an antidote to the smokey conference rooms, and more a form of recreation than an exercise. “You go out to get fresh air, birds, wind, sun, green grass, green trees … The exercise was at the practice tee. If you hit a hundred balls, you can really work up a sweat, especially if you have to tee the balls up. But not the game itself.”

After the 1976 General Election, when he was in his mid-50s, he stumbled on aerobics. “I could feel that I was feeling sluggish. So after the elections, I took a holiday. It was winter, and we (his family) went to Hongkong, Taipei for the cold. But I was still feeling sluggish. So I started taking deep breathing exercises.

“My daughter, who was then a medical student, asked me what I was doing. I said I was feeling sluggish and breathing deeply. She said: ‘No, you will never get better that way. What you want is to get your heart pumping.’ ”

She lent him a book on aerobics. “I wasn’t very convinced,” recalls Mr Lee. “It was all very scientific.” But he decided to give aerobics a try. “In between my golf shots, I walked fast to work up a sweat. I felt I was getting better by fast walking. So at the end of the golf game, I decided to run one or two fairways. I found that that was better still.

“I really was convinced by my own experience. The sluggishness was countered. Then I took up aerobics seriously. I took up jogging 10 minutes, 15 minutes and eventually I even jogged half an hour … when I had eaten a heavy meal that day.”

Because of joint problems, he has cut down on jogging and does more stationary cycling, with stationary rowing to keep his upper limbs in shape.

He makes it a point to exercise daily. “If I don’t, I would feel sluggish. I find that the aerobics makes me feel better. I eat better, I sleep better.”

Even on overseas trips, he squeezes in his exercise routine, either before he starts the day, or in the evening before dinner.

His foldable stationary bicycle accompanies him if there are no gymnasium facilities in the places he is visiting.

By all accounts, exercising runs in his family. In an interview in 1988, Mr Lee’s father, Mr Lee Chin Koon, then 85, said that he swam every night and loved ballroom dancing.

Food

Mr Lee says that like the rest of his family, he lives to eat. His late mother, Madam Chua Jim Neo, who died in 1980 at the age of 75, was well-known in culinary circles and an expert Nonya cook whose cookbook is still on sale in bookshops. “I can eat anything and enjoy it, if it is good to eat,” he says. But he avoids foods which are oily and sweet.

His diet has changed with age, as his metabolic rate slowed down and his body could not burn up calories as quickly as before. “It is just silly to eat more than you can burn up … With time and age you must change, otherwise you are just overloading your system.”

While he once used to eat sirloin steak and many good things without any qualms, these days he eats very little meat.

He eats more fish and soya bean curd, plenty of vegetables and fruits, wholemeal bread and cereals.

He likes his fish grilled or fried, but not poached or steamed unless it is very fresh. He takes ikan kurau, pomfret or garoupa. “I also like ikan billis when it is nicely fried crisp.”

He admits to a soft spot for deep fried food. “I would like a well-fried chicken, drumstick or a wing, fried crisp. But these days I would take the skin and strip it off,” he says.

Breakfast is usually sugar-less soya bean milk and a small bowl of soya bean curd. If he is travelling to a country where there is no soya bean, he takes cereal and milk.

At lunch, he has fish or a small portion of meat, steamed green vegetables and lots of fruits such as pineapple and pomelo. He keeps his lunch light to avoid feeling heavy during the afternoon. Dinner is his biggest meal.

Because he puts on weight easily, travelling can sometimes be a problem. For instance, when he was on an official trip to Pakistan for a week recently, he put on 1.8 kg. He adds, rather ruefully: “And that was in spite of the gym there. But the food was different … all the Pakistani foods were good to eat but I got heavier.”

Mr Lee drinks plenty of water throughout the day. At social functions, he sticks to low-alcohol beer, which has between 0.1 to 0.5 per cent alcohol content, compared to the nearly 4 per cent of average beers. “If I drink full-strength beer and drink four, five bottles, which I can easily do in the course of an evening, the next day … my mouth tastes sour and I dont like the taste. I take low alcohol beer and the next day I am fine.”

Stress and relaxation

Since stepping down as Prime Minister, Mr Lee feels less stressed as he no longer has to make quick decisions. “My job is to reflect on problems which may arise,” he says.

“The stress comes when you have three or four tricky decisions to make and they are weighing on you. You know that once you have made it, things will start moving, you can’t retrieve it, so you have got to be very careful that you have made the right decision. Once you have made it, I find the stress is not so great because you have thought over all your alternatives and this is the best, you move.”

Before he was 55, golf and swimming were his main stress releasers. Then his doctor recommended a physiotherapist to teach him how to relax. The physiotherapist advised him to lie down and relax for 20 minutes after lunch.

Mr Lee was sceptical as he had, when younger, tried to rest after lunch without any success. But the physiotherapist urged him to lie down, relax his muscles and try not to think about work so that his mind could also rest. “I tried it. I found it was of some help,” he says.

At about the same time, his daughter, Wei Ling, a medical student, was doing meditation. Mr Lee also tried to meditate but could not do it. “But in the process, I learnt through reading books on meditation how to control my breathing and slow it down.

“When you are working on high pressure, your adrenalin flows. And you must have your adrenalin flowing or else you would not be working at a pitch … I learnt how to slow down my breathing and bring my metabolic rate down so that my heart beat will go down. That made the rest of the day much easier.

“It is like an electric shaver. When the battery is running out and if you switch off and you cool it down, and switch it on again, the current seems to be stronger. And that was what I was able to do for the second half of the day.”

With such a healthy lifestyle, one positive by-product has been that he always feels fresh. “I get six and a half, seven hours of sleep. I sleep late, I wake up late, I work late. I have no trouble sleeping.”


FROM 20 CIGARETTES A DAY TO NONE

Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew does not smoke and his dislike of cigarette smoke is well known today, but up to 1957 he was smoking 20 cigarettes a day.

He picked up smoking as a student at Raffles College in the early 1940s. “We were all growing up and it was a sign of manhood,” he recalls.

“I started to smoke in a serious way during the Japanese Occupation because life was a lot of blank spaces. You did your work, dull, miserable work, and you sat around and you smoked lousy cigarettes. It was a kind of recreation. Then it became a real habit.”

He tried to stop smoking several times but failed. The turning point came after the City Council elections in 1957. He recalls: “During the course of the election campaign, I made two or three speeches each night. I would go up on a platform and watch and feel the crowd first before I spoke.

“In that 20 minutes to half an hour, I could smoke seven, eight sticks, watching the crowd, getting the feel of the crowd and deciding how I should say what I wanted to say. At the end of the campaign, at the counting station at Victoria Concert Hall, there was a microphone at the balcony. I could not speak. I had burnt my throat dry.

“I decided that this was stupid. I was not enjoying my food, I was losing my voice, so I gave it up.”

The next two weeks were very “painful and uncomfortable. It was terrible because immediately after a meal, the sweetest thing would be the puff of a cigarette. It sort of caps it … a cigarette gives you a sensation of well-being.”

“I used to wake up dreaming that I had started smoking again and feeling very sad about it when I found out that it was just a dream. But I have never touched another cigarette.” Now he says that people should be warned about the dangers of smoking even before they start, because it is difficult for heavy smokers to quit.

After he gave up smoking, he made smoking colleagues like Mr S. Rajaratnam, Mr Lim Kim San and Mr E. W. Barker smoke outside the Cabinet conference room. “I told them smoking was no good for them, they never believed me,” he says.

Mr Lim finally stopped smoking after he had angina. Mr Rajaratnam gave up before undergoing a heart by-pass operation. But Mr Barker still smokes. “I’m quite sure he has read what the medical journals say, what the popular magazines say, but it is an addiction, so he carries on,” says Mr Lee.

He notes that whenever he has dinner with Dr Albert Winsemius, a long-time economic adviser to the Singapore Government, the economist refrains from smoking. A man of dry humour, Dr Winsemius once consoled himself by noting to Mr Lee that “all smoked things last longer – smoked meat, smoked fish”.

Adds Mr Lee: “When I told this joke in Cabinet, Goh Chok Tong said, yes, but they are all dead!”

Concludes Mr Lee: “My advice to someone who has not smoked is just stay that way. It is stupid, it is addictive, it is no good for you, and it will harm not only you but everyone else around you.”

Lim Siong Guan shares his experience as Lee Kuan Yew’s first Principal Private Secretary

He recounts how staff learnt to meet Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s demand for perfection, the latter’s view of the role of the civil service and the core values which were important to him.

The Group President of the Government Investment Corporation, Mr Lim was previously the Head of the Singapore Civil Service, and the Permanent Secretary at various ministries. He was also the first Principal Private Secretary to Mr Lee.

DEMAND FOR PERFECTION

He told Channel NewsAsia about how staff learnt to meet Mr Lee’s demand for perfection. Mr Lim said: “He had me sit in for lunches and dinners which he gave ever so often, most particularly to foreign visitors. He had me sit in at the lunches and dinners as part of my education, and also to take notes of the conversation.

“One thing I noticed was that the menus for lunches and dinners were the same all the time. So I asked the Secretary to the Cabinet, who has since passed away many years ago, why were the menus just so unchangeable, and he said ‘we had experimented in the past with different dishes, and they always had one criticism or other from Mr Lee, and here they came to this menu, and Mr Lee appeared quite satisfied with it. He no longer had any complaint about it.’ So they just stuck with it.

“The funny thing is on some of our overseas trips, Mrs Lee was the one who would urge Mr Lee to try out some other things, and one time he remarked, he wondered why he was always served the same thing in Singapore and never something else. The reason for that was that people in Singapore, they thought … having come to a formula that was satisfactory to him, they would stay with something that was satisfying enough, if not perfect.”
Continue reading “Lim Siong Guan shares his experience as Lee Kuan Yew’s first Principal Private Secretary”

Remembering Lee Kuan Yew: Tender side that not many see

Ng Kok Song, 67, is the former chief investment officer of Government of Singapore Investment Corporation
MAR 24, 2015

When my wife Patricia was diagnosed with stage four stomach cancer in July 2003, I saw a side of Mr Lee Kuan Yew that not many see.

Two weeks after the diagnosis, Patricia told me she was going to write a letter to Mr Lee, who was then Senior Minister. It had nothing to do with my job, she said, but my job was to deliver it. This is what she wrote:

“Dear SM Lee,

When National Day approaches each year, I feel fortunate and blessed to live in Singapore. And I’ve always wanted to express my deep gratitude to you, but lacked the courage to do so. Now I feel a sense of urgency as this may be my last National Day, as I have recently been diagnosed with advanced stomach cancer.

On this auspicious occasion of the 38th birthday of Singapore, I thank God that we have been blessed with a leader who has a gifted vision, and the courage, will and ability to make his dream a reality. I have the deepest respect and admiration for you and regard you as truly the Father of our Nation.

My husband Kok Song and I raised three children in our 31 years of married life, and we are all proud to be Singaporeans. Happy National Day.

Yours respectfully,

Patricia.”

Four days later, Mr Lee replied, thanked her for her letter and said:

“I am grateful and deeply moved that you wrote this letter at a time when you are burdened with the thought of leaving your loved ones behind. I have heard from my son Hsien Loong that Kok Song’s wife had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. Three children, two grown up, and one still a minor. I am sad at this cruel act of fate.

“I understand how you and your family must feel. My family experienced it when we were told that Hsien Loong himself was diagnosed with cancer of the lymphatic glands. It was a traumatic blow. It is so unfair. One small consolation is that modern medicine can make your suffering less unbearable. My wife and I send you and your family our sympathy, understanding and support. Kok Song will need them most of all.

I have no words to describe our sadness, or to comfort him, your family, your daughters and you.”

He wrote once more to Patricia, saying: “Many things in life can make or unmake a person. But the single most important factor is that someone who shares your life with you. In that respect, my wife and I have been very fortunate. We are happy for you, Patricia, that you have a soulmate in your husband Kok Song. It is a relationship that evolves with time and circumstance, and grows with age.”

I am sharing this exchange of letters because I think the way Patricia felt is probably how my generation, and maybe the older generation, felt about Mr Lee.

We are proud to be Singaporeans because of what he did for Singapore. He gave us hope when the future was bleak. When we separated from Malaysia, he inspired us to believe in ourselves, to defy the odds to prosper economically as an independent country.

But another thing that came out from those letters is that while Mr Lee can come across as a stern person, you can feel from the way he responded to Patricia’s letter that he is a man with a tender heart.

Soon after, Mrs Lee had a stroke and was bedridden. Patricia lived on for another 19 months.

During that time, he always asked about Patricia, telling me to tell her: “Don’t give up. Soldier on.”

Once he said to me: “Now we are in the same boat. You are looking after your wife and I am looking after my wife.”

I had begun meditating with him. One evening in 2011, after our session, I asked him about rumours swirling that he was very ill, when he was actually perfectly all right.

“Don’t you think the Government should put out a statement to rebut the rumours that you are seriously ill in hospital?” I asked.

He looked at me and said: “No, no, Kok Song, there’s no point. Because one day it is going to happen.”

Then he added: “I have lived such a long life. I hope that I can live on for maybe another five to seven years. By then, the Marina Bay developments would be completed, the water barrage would be operating, the whole Tanjong Rhu area and the reservoir will be finished. And our entire landscape will be changed. The city is going to be so beautiful.”

He was always looking forward to Singapore’s future progress.

It was as though he had captured all this in his imagination, and just hoped he would be able to see it before he passed on.

The Padres – November 91

Tonight we see another face
Another broken gaze
By the light that barely burns on
She’s held by electric wire
Delivered a crying baby
A youth so what
You bring her home
Wherever she wants to
November 91
I thought it rained… forever… forever

Did you see her
She steal your heart by chance?
I like to know your crime
When you hear your heartbeat sleeping
Bit by bit good night
She floats across the dance hall
Towards that exit door
She’s wasting every moment
November 91
I thought it rained… forever… forever

End of CD era


Gramophone was famed for its huge selections of music as well as secondhand CD’s and DVD’s. –PHOTO: ST/CAROLINE CHIA


Local music retailer Gramophone, finally pulled down its shutters for the last time on Sept 18 2013. –PHOTO: ST/JASON QUAH

BY IGNATIUS LOW

It seems to be the season for saying goodbye.

Two weeks ago, we said goodbye to Nokia mobile phones after the Finnish telecoms giant sold the business to Microsoft.

This week, a different sort of player made its exit – one much closer to home but, for me at least, no less loved.

After struggling the past few years with huge changes to the music industry that have decimated its business, local music retailer Gramophone finally pulled down its shutters for the last time last Wednesday.
Continue reading “End of CD era”

Tales of a taxi ‘Uncle’

ST manpower correspondent Toh Yong Chuan steps into the shoes of a Singapore taxi driver
From the surly to the genial, it is passengers who make or break your day. But the pressure sure piles up

DEC 1, 2014
BY TOH YONG CHUAN MANPOWER CORRESPONDENT

On my fourth day as a taxi driver, I drove for six hours at night with just one five-minute toilet break.

It was past midnight when I headed home and absent-mindedly got into the wrong lane at the junction of Bishan Road and Ang Mo Kio Avenue 1. The traffic lights turned green and I took off, almost hitting another taxi.

When I got home, my wife greeted me with a hug and said: “You have the taxi driver smell.”

“It is the smell of hard work,” I said. It was the odour of being cooped up for hours in stale air. I didn’t mention my near accident.
I have always been fascinated by cabbies. As a manpower reporter, I have interviewed numerous drivers, yet there remained so much I did not know about them. Topmost on my mind as I embarked on a two-week stint as a cabby were these questions: How hard is it to be a cabby? And how much can a cabby earn?

So my SMRT cab, a Toyota Prius with the registration number SHC4123S, became my second home for 10 to 12 hours a day. I split a typical day into two, plying the roads from 6.30am to 11am, and from 5pm until I was too tired to go on.

Every morning I would head first to Serangoon North or Ang Mo Kio housing estate, near my home. There are always passengers going to work from Housing Board estates.

After that, there was no telling where I would end up.

I thought I knew Singapore well, but my stint as a cabby took me to places I never knew existed. I picked up passengers from obscure spots like a sprawling offshore marine base in Loyang, and Punggol Seventeenth Avenue in an area that somehow doesn’t have Avenues One to Sixteen.

I discovered that Tampines housing estate is so huge it is sandwiched between Tampines Expressway and the Pan Island Expressway, and is accessible via no fewer than seven expressway entrances and exits. I found myself in Tampines almost every other day during my cab driving stint.

Lessons from passengers

On Day 1, my first passenger was a man in his 30s, dressed in a blue long-sleeved shirt and black trousers.

He got into my cab at 6.50am along Ang Mo Kio Avenue 9 and said: “Pandan Crescent, go by Upper Thomson, Lornie, Farrer, AYE.”

Those were the only words he uttered and he kept his eyes locked on his smartphone for the rest of the journey. He did not notice that in my excitement at picking up my first fare, I had forgotten to start the meter until about seven minutes into the trip. His fare was $23.73 and I must have saved him about $2.

He gave me a hint of what was to come – that most passengers prefer to be left alone.

The rest of that day took me to Changi Airport, Bedok, Pickering Street, Alexandra Road, Amoy Street and Upper Bukit Timah Road in the morning. That evening, I went to Serangoon Road, Mount Vernon Road, Yishun, Woodlands, Sembawang Road, Tampines, Bedok, Bishan and Paya Lebar.

All my passengers were people who flagged me on the street. I was not confident enough to respond to radio bookings, which would have needed me to reach the pick-up point within five, seven or nine minutes of a call. So I ended up cruising empty most of that day, with the longest stretch of over an hour in Woodlands.

My best passenger was a woman in her early 40s who got into my cab along Alexandra Road. I chatted with her and eventually revealed that I was driving the cab for charity. She handed me $12 for her fare of $11.18 when she reached her Amoy Street office and said: “Keep the change.”

The worst experience was after I picked up a woman at Khoo Teck Puat Hospital in the evening. She wanted to go to a condominium in Jalan Mata Ayer, off Sembawang Road, which I was unfamiliar with. She was from Myanmar, and I misunderstood her directions, given in halting English. When I took a wrong turn, she let fly with a rebuke in Myanmarese. The taxi meter showed $9.44 but I said she could pay just $8. That pacified her a little.

My first day ended at midnight when I pulled into my regular Caltex petrol station in Lorong Chuan to refuel and wash the cab. My usual car washer Zainal did not recognise me until I waved at him – twice. “Times are bad huh? You started driving taxi part-time?” he asked.

I was too tired to explain. I had driven 246km and taken 14 people on 13 trips. My takings, after deducting petrol cost, taxi rental and $4 for washing the cab, came to just $29.66 for 12 hours’ work.

Thankfully, things got better over the following days. I kept to the same work routine except on weekends, when I drove from noon to midnight.

By the end of Day 2, I had fine-tuned my greetings to these:

“Good morning, Sir!”

“Good evening, Madam!”

“Heading to work, Sir?”

“Going shopping, Madam?”

“You’re going to work early, Sir!”

“Long day at work, Madam?”

If the passenger did not reply or uttered only a monosyllabic answer, I took it as my cue to be quiet and to just drive.

Passengers travelling in groups tend to ignore the cabby, talking among themselves as if you are not there. So I couldn’t help overhearing people complaining about the Government, and workers complaining about their bosses. A young couple having a tiff complained about each other all the way from Sembawang Shopping Centre to Toa Payoh Lorong 1. “I am breaking off with you,” yelled the woman as she stormed off.

There were some passengers who, literally, made me feel sick.

Like the young woman I picked up in Jurong East who coughed and sneezed all the way to Choa Chu Kang. When it came time for her to pay, I hesitated when she handed me the money. After she left, I sprayed the cab generously with the Lysol disinfectant I kept in the cab’s glove compartment.

Then there was the man who sounded like he was from China. Getting into my cab near Bugis Junction, he burped. And burped. And burped. It was obvious that he had just eaten “ma la huo guo”, or spicy steamboat, for dinner.

An elderly man who got into my cab in Coleman Lane, at the Grand Park City Hall hotel, wanted me to reverse about two car lengths back into Coleman Street to avoid going round the block so he would save 30 cents.

In Chinatown, a man heading for South Bridge Road told me to take a “short cut” through Temple Street from New Bridge Road. I did, only to find traffic at a standstill along Temple Street – and that was when he paid up and jumped out, leaving me stuck for 15 minutes.

I have to say something about people who eat in taxis. While drivers cannot stop people from eating in their cabs, most dislike it because of the smell and the mess left behind. Thankfully I met only one passenger who ate on the go. The young mother insisted on feeding her toddler biscuits despite my asking her not to eat in the cab.

“The boy is hungry,” she insisted.

They left such a mess that I had to spend 30 minutes and more than half their $8.30 fare to have the cab cleaned at a petrol station.

My most unpleasant ride of all was with a woman in her 50s who complained non-stop about my driving from Tagore Industrial Park to Yishun Avenue 3. Her beef was that I drove too slowly and braked too hard.

“You are a new driver and it is my bad luck getting into your cab,” she ranted. “I was planning to buy 4D but I will not, because it is bad luck meeting you.”

I just bit my tongue.

But my worst passengers were the ones I never met. They were the people who made taxi bookings, then failed to show up.

On a rainy Wednesday morning I was in Telok Blangah Way when I accepted a call booking for Delta Avenue, and headed there rightaway. It took five minutes and I passed more than five passengers trying to hail cabs in the rain. When I got to the pick-up point, the passenger was nowhere to be found.

It was one of three “no shows” I encountered during my stint. Taxi drivers are helpless when this happens.

Each day, however, I would meet at least one or two passengers who stood out by being pleasant, saying “please” or “thank you”, or making conversation that helped to make a lonely job less monotonous.

I took three British Airways pilots from Mandarin Hotel in Orchard Road to the Esplanade, where they were going to have supper at Makansutra Gluttons Bay. When we got there, they invited me to join them. “C’mon, take a break,” one of them said, and he meant it. I declined because I was just too tired.

A teacher and an architect who spoke with me long enough to learn I was a reporter on assignment and that all my earnings would go to charity paid me in $50 notes and told me to keep the change – which added up to $43.

A passenger I took from the Botanic Gardens to Battery Road sent SMRT an e-mail complimenting me, saying: “I feel that he really went the extra mile to provide a comfortable journey for all his customers and I am really impressed. Thank you, Uncle!”

It made my day.

As my days of being a cabby progressed, I found that my earnings were decent, if not very high.

The most I earned in a single day – after driving 12 hours and deducting what a cabby usually pays for taxi rental and fuel – was $141. It would mean a monthly income of more than $4,000 if every day was like that and I worked a full month. My typical daily takings were between $90 and $100, or about $3,000 a month, and even that would call for driving 10 to 12 hours a day, with no day off.

The median gross monthly income of Singaporeans and permanent residents in June this year, excluding employers’ CPF contributions, was $3,276.

My stint was too short for me to befriend other cabbies at coffeeshops, but I managed to pick up some secrets of the trade.

It’s easy to get passengers in the morning when people are heading to work from HDB estates.
To earn $3 more in the evening, go into the CBD and pick up passengers while the CBD surcharge applies from 5pm to midnight. Sorry, but people waiting just outside the CBD will have to just keep waiting. Even inside the CBD, cabs will be scarce just before the surcharge hours begin.
Heartland towns like Woodlands and Sembawang offer slim pickings in the evenings, because residents hardly go out then. But hospitals everywhere are good places to find passengers, especially after evening visiting hours.
Overall, demand for taxis far exceeds supply during the morning and evening peak hours, so a cabby who is disciplined about driving during these periods can earn a decent living.
There are downsides as well.

The long hours on the road affected my sleep, and most nights I slept barely six hours. By Day 3, I was resorting to taking two Panadols before hitting the road.

Backaches were a frequent bother, from sitting so long.

Cabbies need toilet breaks, and the most convenient stops are at petrol stations. I found that many do not have soap, and at a Geylang petrol station, the toilet has no door.

There are simply no convenient public toilets in the Orchard Road area for taxi drivers, but I discovered that the Ba’alwie Mosque off Dunearn Road lets cabbies use its toilet. I blessed the good people of the mosque when I needed to go desperately one night.

My cab-driving days ended on Day 11 of my stint. It wasn’t a good day for me.

Early that morning the 16-year-old schoolboy in my cab was late for school and begged me to drive faster. I relented, stepped on the gas and ran a red light at 6.47am. Instantly, there were two camera flashes and I knew I had been caught by the traffic light camera. That meant $200 gone in less than a second – my earnings from about 18 hours of work!

But that wasn’t why I stopped driving. The trouble had begun two days earlier, when I discovered I’d developed a haemorrhoid from nine days of sitting for hours. I learnt that haemorrhoids are a common ailment among cabbies, along with backaches and high blood pressure.

The pain had become unbearable, so I decided to end my cab-driving experiment three days earlier than planned.

A month later, the traffic summons arrived. I hoped the Traffic Police would be sympathetic, but my appeal drew a swift rejection and a chiding: “Make a conscious effort to comply with traffic rules and regulations which are made for your own safety and that of other road users.”

Looking back, I still wonder why even passengers much older than me called me “Uncle”. It seems that if you drive a taxi in Singapore, you’re everyone’s Uncle or Auntie.

I returned the cab to SMRT after clocking 2,739km, having earned $2,294.60 for charity and gaining a newfound respect for taxi drivers.

Koh Boon Hwee couldn’t kill a rabbit

That’s why he decided not to be a doctor and became a corporate head honcho instead

Straits Times Aug 10, 2014
Over a two-hour chat with Koh Boon Hwee, one learns three key things about the corporate titan.

One, he does not like to give up on what he has started.

Two, he does not look back.

Three, he believes education is the key to changing one’s life.

These attributes have helped him navigate through life more than just niftily.

Just look at his curriculum vitae. A respected investor who co-founded private equity firm Credence Partners, the 63-year-old has chaired some of the country’s biggest and most successful organisations including SingTel, Singapore Airlines and DBS Bank.

He serves on the board of several public and private companies, both locally and in the United States and Hong Kong. He also chairs the board of trustees of Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and is credited for overseeing its growth into an internationally recognised research university.

“I’m just lucky,” he says, trying to downplay his achievements. Several good mentors and some astute decisions at critical junctures, he suggests, are responsible for who, what and where he is.

Breaking out into a hearty laugh, he adds: “You know, being lucky is better than being smart.”

Perhaps so but Mr Koh – who has a first-class honours degree in mechanical engineering from Imperial College London and an MBA (Distinction) from Harvard Business School – also has one heck of a brain.

Almost sheepishly, the eldest of three children of a trader and a homemaker says: “Studies came very easily to me.” He breezed through his years at St Andrew’s and was Singapore’s top boy in the O-level and A-level examinations.

At St Andrew’s, he met Ms Lenn Mei Ling, a teacher who was to have a lasting influence on his life.

As one of the school’s brightest, he was sent to the pre-medicine stream for his A levels. A couple of months into his first year, he started having doubts if he was suited to be a doctor. “I hated the idea of gassing rabbits and guinea pigs; I just hated the idea of having to kill them,” he says. “So I thought to myself, if I have some difficulty with animals, I may have problems with humans.”

“Obviously, not because I’d have to gas them,” he adds with a chortle. “But if I was not successful in treating them, I might find that difficult to deal with.”

Engineering, he decided, was a good fallback except for one snag: mathematics – a requisite for engineering studies – was not part of the pre-med syllabus.

So he decided to do maths as a private candidate and approached Ms Lenn for help to catch up, even though she was not his teacher. It turned out that he did not need her help that much, but she became a respected mentor.

She died a few years later from leukaemia, in her early 30s.

“The problem with the world is that you have many people who profess to be a lot of things but don’t live according to what they profess to be. She was an exception,” he says. “The way she lived her life, the fortitude she showed, the faith that she had… I’ve not seen that in many people.”

Teachers like her were a reason why Mr Koh – who has sat on NTU’s board of trustees for more than 20 years – is such a strong champion of education. It is a social leveller and can help anyone make his way through the world as long as he is diligent.

Four years ago, he donated $2.5 million to NTU to help deserving students and honour teaching excellence. He has also given generously to his alma mater and other educational causes.

Earlier this year, Imperial College London conferred an honorary doctorate on him for his contributions to education in Singapore. “I believe the award is not because of my personal achievements, rather it is a reflection of the tremendous accomplishments of NTU – how it has gone from a teaching university in Singapore to being an internationally recognised research-intensive university in such a short time,” he says modestly.

It was shortly after sitting the A levels that he met another person who helped to shape his life. With nine months to kill before beginning his degree course in London, he found a job as a computer card puncher with consulting firm Arthur Young for $180 a month.

“But I found card punching very boring. After just two weeks, I was the department’s fastest and most accurate card puncher,” he recalls.

The precocious 17-year-old then approached the firm’s director William Schroeder one Friday evening and told him he wanted to be a programmer instead. “He asked me, ‘What do you know about programming?’ I said, ‘Nothing, but I can learn.'”

Mr Schroeder gave him three books on programming which he read from cover to cover over the weekend.

“On Monday morning, I went to Bill and told him I was ready to write programs,” recalls the skilled raconteur. His sceptical boss decided to test his claims and asked him to write a program calculating mortgage payments, and was stupefied when the young man did just that in a few hours.

“On the spot, he said, ‘Well, you are no longer in the card punching department, you are in the programming department and I’m doubling your pay.'”

Over the next couple of months, Mr Schroeder threw all sorts of programming challenges at the young man.

“One day, he asked me, ‘What would your parents say if you moved to Hong Kong to work for a few months?'”

It turned out that the programming tasks he had been doing were for Hong Kong’s first private housing project – the Mei Fu Sun Chuen – by oil giant Mobil. The 99-tower complex built between 1965 and 1978 was considered the largest private housing development in the world then, home to nearly 80,000 people.

The teenager was made leader of the project to handle computerised billing for the estate’s residents and put up in a suite at Hong Kong’s most expensive and exclusive hotel, The Peninsula.

“Bill introduced me to the head of Mobil who asked, ‘Are you sure this kid knows how to do anything?’ Bill’s response was, ‘I’m telling you, he’s the best.’ After that, I just couldn’t let the man down,” says Mr Koh, adding that Mr Schroeder taught him a lot about mentoring and spotting talent.

At Imperial, he did so well that he won a scholarship to complete his tertiary education. The British government also offered him a scholarship to do his PhD.

“My claim to fame was getting a computer to draw an ellipse with just the definition of the two focal points and the radius. In those days, everyone thought it was a big deal,” he says with a laugh.

But he had to return to Singapore for national service. And that was when his life took another turn.

While in the army, he developed an interest in the stock market. “I had no background in economics but every day, I’d read in the newspapers all these reports of stocks going up and down. Based on what I was reading, I put two and two together, the same thing as I’m doing now,” he says, adding that he and three of his army mates would pool their monthly allowance of $90 to play the market.

To better his understanding of business and economics, he decided he needed to learn how to read accounts. He took up a professional accounting course, completing four of five modules on his own. An engineering PhD no longer appealed to him; he applied for and got into Harvard to do his MBA instead.

Upon graduating, he was hired by Hewlett-Packard in 1977. He started as cash manager, got promoted to accounting manager, and after two years was posted to the multinational corporation’s cost accounting division in the United States. After seven years, he was made managing director of HP in Singapore.

Although sterling, his 14 years at the company had its fair share of bumps. In steering HP from a manufacturing company to a research and development one, he launched two projects, one to develop an oscilloscope and another a disk drive. Both projects bombed spectacularly and cost the company more than $1 million each.

But he did not get fired because his bosses encouraged risk-taking and did not punish failures. It is a philosophy he holds close to his heart, especially since he invests in many technological start-ups and steers NTU, which is very research-based.

By definition, he says, research is a little messy and results are not always immediately tangible.

“It’s not a good idea to pull a tree up by its roots every day to see if it’s healthy. I’d rather have my people try and fail because they would learn from it than not to try. If you don’t try, you are not pushing the envelope and will not make progress,” he says.

After HP, he continued making strides in the corporate world. He was executive chairman of the Wuthelam Group from 1991 to 2000, guided SingTel’s transformation from statutory board to telco giant in 1993, steered Singapore Airlines through a tumultuous time after the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the US, and shepherded DBS through the financial crisis after the Lehman collapse in 2008.

Asked how he holds his own in the corporate jungle, Mr Koh, who is married to a former banker and has four children and one grandchild, says: “I don’t look back. Looking back takes a lot of negative energy. There are bound to be setbacks, ups and downs, betrayals. You just have to move along and move on.”

He believes he is lucky to love what he is doing.

“A lot of people in today’s world decide what they want to do based on what they think they are going to get compensated for. And some of them grow to love the job, which is fine. A lot of them don’t, and then they’re actually not very happy.

“I think that’s a tragedy. Life is too short for that sort of stuff.”

Background story

Mentor’s wise words

“One day, I jokingly asked Bill if I should give up the idea of university and continue working for Arthur Young. He looked at me and said: ‘You are fired. No matter how attractive it is, you have to go to college.’ He did not promise me a job after I completed my studies either. He said if I went back, people would say he favoured me. He told me it was important for me to see what was out there and learn to make it on my own. We became friends for life.”

MR KOH BOON HWEE on his mentor William Schroeder, who died a couple of years ago


Don’t try to keep up with the Joneses

“We shouldn’t get caught up with wanting to make sure that whatever we do in life, we want to have the approval and adulation of other people. There is always someone better. If you are famous, there is someone more famous, with a bigger Twitter following. If you are good-looking, there will be someone better-looking. You will never be happy. The important thing is to be happy with what you have. If you wake up every day measuring and comparing, life can’t be much fun.”

MR KOH on contentment