" As someone originally from India, also a South Asian country, but where none of these bans ("litter, graffiti, spitting, expelling 'mucous from the nose' and urinating anywhere but in a toilet") are in place or being enforced -- I totally understand LKY's way of thinking, and agree with it.
In India, a lot of people chew tobacco and betelnut leaves, spit them out straight on the street. Litter? No problem, just chuck it out the window. I have seen supposedly educated people throwing their banana peels and empty potato chip bags straight out the window of a bus rather than waiting for the next stop. Want to take a leak? Go against the nearest wall, and pee in the stench of 20 people who have gone before you. People seem to have no concept of keeping public spaces clean. Literally exactly the behaviours described in the Singaporean rules are rampant in India.
All this leads to a fuck ton of garbage, filthy streets, and an image of being an unclean country. I wish we had had someone like LKY in the early 60s who could have prevented this from happening, and had given India an image of a modern country but with an ancient back-culture.
I have often wondered about the deeper reason behind this behaviour; and my hypothesis is that it is related to the concept of the family as the main social unit in South and East Asian culture, rather than the broader society as a whole. So people will keep their own house sparkling clean, but not hesitate to spit against the wall in the street two blocks away. The Singaporean solution ("ban the spitting and enforce it with steep fines") was, in my opinion, the quickest and most pragmatic way of solving this problem for a large, densely populated Asian city. Kudos to him."
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