1 - Beginnings

Summary

The Pessimist and the Optimist were arguing about what it took to make a nation. The Pessimist said: “All we have are Malays, Chinese, Indians, Eurasians, Arabs, Ceylonese and the rest. They have one reason for living in the same place…They come to trade — and when their purpose here is served, they retreat each into their own exclusive world. How can such a hotchpotch of races become a nation?”

The Optimist was upbeat. He quoted a poem from Daniel Defoe which drew attention in an irreverent manner to the mixed ancestry of the British people. The Optimist emphasised: “Saxons — Celts — Romans — Normans — Danes. And the French who today consider themselves Cimbri, Gauls, Iberians, Latins and Germans. And the Germans — for all the screaming of Hitler about racial purity — are composed of Lapps and Finns, Slavs and Mongols. There's no such thing as a pure race. So all this talk of racial purity is nonsense.”

This conversation was part of a series of broadcast plays titled Nation in the Making written by Sinnathamby Rajaratnam, then a newspaper journalist and a freelance radio scriptwriter. It was aired over Radio Malaya in 1957, two years before the People's Action Party came into power in 1959.

It was a conversation that he had played and replayed in his mind for years since he was a young adult, and which he would conduct with the country for the rest of his life. Strains of it continue to echo in Singapore and many other multicultural societies seeking to forge a nation.

Raja personified the Optimist in Singapore. He believed in the ability of Singapore to create a nation out of its disparate peoples. For him, it was an act of will and of faith. A man of towering vision, he was one of the most inspiring political leaders ever to walk on this island. Without him, Singapore's pledge would not be the imaginative leap that it was, written in 1966 during one of the country's darkest periods after the trauma of two racial riots in 1964. Defying the evidence before his eyes, he imagined a nation pulsating as one united people, regardless of race, language or religion, and embedded this vision into the national pledge.