Monday, December 09, 2013

Excuse me, what just happened?

So I woke up to a bunch of text messages asking me if I'd lived through the riot that broke out in my area last night.

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Apparently, a bus driver had run down a Bangladeshi worker around 9.23 p.m. last night and killed him. Then a mob of 400-odd people went batshit crazy and started flipping over police cars and burning an ambulance and slugging it out with the policemen who arrived at the scene. Ghurka soldiers had to be deployed to break up the riot. It was nuts.

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Get the full story here and here.

I went home around 10 p.m. last night, after meeting up with the gang, and didn't notice anything amiss except that there seemed to be more people in my area, which is near to where the furore broke out. I just scowled at everyone on my way home, as I usually do, in case they try anything funny. It's just something you cultivate after twenty years of living in an area swarmed with male labourer workers.

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That's some scary shit right there - the riot, not my death stare (or Diana Agron's).

Honestly, though, after hearing what my dad told me about these foreign labourers and their partying ways, a part of me isn't surprised something like this happened. It was some time around Deepavali, and the place gets really rowdy on public holidays - the roads are deadlocked with foreign workers partying and shit. My dad was sending his female colleague home and had to drive through the Little India stretch. This bunch of drunk foreign workers just leaped in front of his car and started doing this lewd dance.

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My dad locked the car doors and barrelled through. Good thing they had the bird sense to get out of the way.

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Let me just state that I am not against foreign workers in general, and their nationality isn't the point of contention here. It's their behaviour that pisses me off.

Maybe it's all the pent-up rage against us, the locals, or the government and their rules, or their shitty lives in general that made them act out like that. And I know there are honest, non-trouble making foreign workers out there who helped to clean up the place after the riot and that I shouldn't condemn the entire forest because of a few trees blah blah blah. But come on, they went nuts in a country that hasn't gone nuts since the 1960s. They set stuff on fire and killed someone (a man was crushed under the bus) and injured our local police. Call me small-town, but this kind of violence just isn't the norm in Singapore.

I'm not going to let up on my death stare, though. And I really hope no one was hurt too badly, especially the policemen, firefighters and innocent civilians. The press must be having a field day with this, as are the various ministry departments. I guess we know what's going to come up as a bone of contention at the next election.

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