"Polytechnic 'reject' wins Harvard scholarship"
This is the headline in the Straits Times page A8 with a full colour photo of a young man named Kuriakin Zeng, an Indonesian from the island of Bintan who won a full Harvard scholarship on his own merit.
This is someone MM would call a "hungry" person - someone who came from a family that could not afford to send him to school in Singapore, who had to work several jobs for money to come to Singapore to do his O Levels in order to get into Singapore Polytechnic, and who went on to prove through his grades and his contributions to society how he DESERVED a scholarship to one of the most prestigious schools in the world.
Prestigious scholarships funded by taxpayers' money are not difficult to come by to the middle class Singaporean kid who has the good fortune of being raised by middle class parents and the support of schools that can devote any amount of resource to help him get those scholarships. You don't have to be that hungry, because you honestly don't have to overcome the kind of odds that Kuriakin Zeng had to overcome.
Who will "break" their bond? Who will place higher value on their Singapore PR-ship or citizenship? Who will demonstrate integrity of spirit and principle if the going ever gets rough?
Hungry or well-fed, both kids are in theory equally meritorious. But only one had to pay the full price for the scholarship ticket.
My money is on the hungry Indonesian kid.
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