Singapore

The general response to the news of my appointment as High Commissioner to Singapore was that I would have a very intensive tenure in a well-connected business centre. Certainly to many in India and no doubt elsewhere, that is how Singapore appears: wired, gleaming, a perfectly tuned ecosystem where pragmatism rules and the past is another country. My tenure was however most enjoyable because these impressions were also supplemented with a greater acquaintance with Singapore's layers of identity and how these layers were deeply influenced by regional and international forces through history. As a diplomat and an outsider, I am accustomed to observing the formation of identities and how history bears down on the present wherever you are. In Singapore I was delighted to find — perhaps as a consequence of the breakneck speed of its development in the past fifty years — that many Singaporeans were themselves engaged in this task: trying to engage with their history to understand their own layers of identity.