Mr President, Mr Prime Minister, Members of the Cabinet, Honoured Guests, Friends:
1 On behalf of my family, I would like to thank Mr Lim Boon Heng and the NTUC Central Committee for organising this Memorial. The NTUC was the institution with which Devan Nair was most closely linked. He always looked back with pride and satisfaction on his work in the unions. He would have been deeply touched by this Memorial.
2 My earliest memories of my father consist of visiting him in prison. I was two years old when he was arrested for a second time in 1956, and my brother Janamitra was six months old. About once a fortnight, my mother would take us to Changi Prison. I hugely enjoyed those visits, for I got to see my father, though of course, as is usual with children, there were tears and temper tantrums when I had to leave. I must be among the few people around who actually felt happier going into Changi Prison instead of coming out of it.
3 Prison was even more fun when my father was transferred for a brief period to St. John’s Island. For visiting him then meant a ride on a police boat.
4 It was only later that I learnt that prison wasn’t a happy experience for my father. Apart from its discomforts, there were the incessant debates with his fellow detainees as well as the debates within himself. He was torn between his heart, still tied to his friends in the Anti-British League, and his head, convinced that the policies of the Malayan Communist Party would lead to disaster. The intellectual and emotional ferment went beyond politics, as I discovered decades later. Among his surviving papers from that time, there are a bunch of letters and drafts of essays on political matters, but many more exercise books filled with excerpts from his readings in philosophy and religion. He was 33 years old when he was arrested in 1956, and 35 when he was released in 1959, after Mr Lee Kuan Yew refused to take office unless the detainees were released. The man who came out of Changi Prison was different from the man who went in: More inward, more concentrated, more refined. Prison had steeled and tempered him.
5 The political tempest, however, didn’t cease with his release. It got more ferocious. Appointed political secretaries to various ministers, the former detainees lived together at Nassim Road. The disagreements among them became so intense, the only united front left in the household consisted of the friendly relations my mother and her children had with both factions in the PAP. Soon, my father got fed up with the arguments, moved out of the house, resigned his post as Political Secretary to the Minister of Education, and went back to teaching for a brief period.
6 When the PAP split in 1961, we were living at Youngberg Terrace. Our neighbour was a close associate of my father’s – before the split. After the split, he crossed over to the other side. The NTUC was a miserable rump when it was founded. Most of the unions were on the other side. My mother would plead with us children often not to disturb my father in the mornings because he had suffered yet another defeat the previous day. “Lost another branch,” she would say in Tamil – so frequently, day after day, I thought my father’s job consisted of losing union branches.
7 My father never forgot those days. Many years later, he recalled with great emotion Mr Ho See Beng telling him, “Devan, we are going to lose”. Knowing as he did the strength of the cadres on the other side, he believed so too. Yet this small and determined group persevered – Mr Ho, Joseph Tan, Seah Mui Kok, and in the NTUC’s Research Unit, its brains trust, Mr S.R.Nathan and Hsu Tze Kwang. Only President Nathan and Uncle Ho remain with us. To his dying day, my father kept on the wall of his study the honorary membership that the Singapore Traction Company Employees Union had awarded him in 1962. The STCEU was one of the few unions he didn’t lose in 1961.
8 For three-and-a-half years, between 1965 and 1969, my father was in Malaysia. The decision to remain behind after separation was his. He was like an astronaut marooned in outer space, a friend reflected sadly. He was perhaps the last among Singapore’s Old Guard to accept that the separation from Malaysia was permanent. He resigned as the DAP’s Secretary-General, and announced he would not re-contest his seat in the Malaysian Parliament, after Mr Lee persuaded him to return to Singapore. He had remained NTUC’s Advisor during his Malaysia days, but obviously he couldn’t lead here while he was there.
9 His return inaugurated the next phase in NTUC’s evolution, with the 1969 Modernisation Seminar. Among the people who played key roles in the Seminar were Mr Nathan and T.H. Elliott. I can best illustrate their adventurous spirit by recalling a conversation I overheard between Tom Elliott and my father. My father was wondering how the NTUC was going to fund its modernisation drive. What if the NTUC pooled the resources of its affiliates, and bought a large number of Singapore Sweep lottery tickets, he asked Tom, half in jest, but curious. Could the NTUC fund its modernisation that way?
10 Tom, who was a professor of pharmacy at the University of Singapore and understood the laws of probability, did a quick calculation and told my father the truth: The chances of striking first prize in the Singapore Sweeps were far too slim to justify risking such an outlay of limited funds. We might have got to the casino thirty-five years before its time, but the NTUC would never have got its integrated resort, or anything resembling the Orchid Country Club.
11 It achieved that the old-fashioned way, through hard work and sacrifice. Dr Goh Keng Swee provided the seminal insight at the Modernisation Seminar in suggesting the NTUC begin first with an insurance cooperative. That was a good application of probability theory. After that came Comfort, the risky venture to organise paongchia (or pirate) taxi drivers into a cooperative. Few beside Mr Lee and my father believed it would succeed. But succeed it did, in no small part due to Mr Chin Harn Tong. And of course there was Welcome, now NTUC Fairprice. Mr Ong Pang Boon was Labour Minister for most of that period, and provided the NTUC invaluable assistance.
12 I have often wondered what motivated this immensely brave and generous man, Devan Nair. In many ways, he was an unusual father. He hardly ever corrected us firmly or harshly, except on questions of grammar. He spanked me only once, for being rude to a family maid – and then spent the rest of the day apologising to me. He was an even more indulgent grandfather. My siblings and I discovered only a month ago, after his death, that he had kept a secret stash of sweets in his study for his grandchildren.
13 An indifferent sportsman who couldn’t tell the difference between a football and a basketball, he didn’t participate much in our games. He was baffled by popular culture, and couldn’t understand our tastes. I recall on one occasion he took us to see a James Bond movie, thinking it was a children’s adventure story. Ten minutes into the movie, he realised his mistake and yanked us out of the theatre. We ended up watching The Sound of Music instead. To this day, every time I hear “Do, Re, Me, Fa, So, La, Ti, Do”, I think of James Bond.
14 But what he had to give us was so immensely rich, we never minded in the least that he didn’t resemble the fathers our friends had. He would read to us often from literature. He had a near concert-quality singing voice, and would entertain us with classical Hindi and Bengali songs. And then there were the conversations – far-ranging, informative, endlessly fascinating. He was a wonderful teacher. Never instructing, but pointing; never insisting, but suggesting; never enforcing, but showing.
15 One of the things he showed us was commitment. His attachment to my mother was deep and profound. She was the sister of his best friend from Primary One, and they had known each since she was five and he seven, a friendship and love that spanned 75 years. When she died in April last year, it was like an amputation. The centre of his life was gone, and he seemed ready to die himself.
16 What motivated this man? I’ll end with two stories. The first concerns an exchange my wife had with him about 25 year ago about “human nature”. “If you met a ferocious tiger, it would be human nature to run,” he told her. “But what if there was a baby between you and the tiger? It would be human nature then to rescue the baby, no matter what the consequences to you,” he said.
17 My wife was staggered by his conviction. It seemed obvious to her that human nature wasn’t as he had described it. You read in the newspapers every day of people sacrificing the equivalents of babies to save their own skins. My father, she concluded, thought it was human nature to rescue the baby because that was what he would have done. He had generalised his own intrinsic nature as applying to all humanity. That explained the strange uncalculating courage that he displayed so often in his life.
18 The second occurred when I was 14 or so. He had taken us to Raffles Lighthouse, where we stayed for a few days. There, among the rocks, he told us one afternoon about evolution: How natural selection worked. How species that adapted themselves to their environment survived; and how those that didn’t, didn’t. How the accumulation of random genetic variations, interacting with the environment, resulted in new species. And so on.
19 The lesson was conducted in a highly original fashion. Illustrations included quotations from poetry, especially Wordsworth. There were digressions. He told us of Shiva-Nataraja, the Lord of the Dance, holding in one hand the drum that summoned existence into being, and in the other, the fire that destroyed it – and how both, creation and destruction, were part of one universal process. And then he said something I’ll never forget, for it expressed his deepest belief. It was no longer science – it was religion.
20 “For life to have emerged from matter, matter must have had the potential for life” he said. “And for consciousness to have emerged from life, life must have had the potential for consciousness. And for human ideals to have emerged from consciousness, consciousness must have had the potential for those ideals. We wouldn’t dream unless those dreams are capable of fulfillment. It is not what you are that matters; it is what you can become. That process never ends.”
21 Why was he so effective a trade unionist – a mobiliser and inspirer of people? Because he was as passionately interested in what they could become, as he was moved by their present condition. He was convinced, so he convinced. He really believed ideals can be realized.
22 Bernard Shaw wrote: “You see things, and ask: Why? But I dream things that never were, and ask: Why not?”
23 Because Singapore’s founding generation and NTUC’s pioneers asked “Why not?” Singapore is what it is today. And that process – asking “Why not?” -- never ends.
