By Tan Hui Yee
Correspondent
tanhy@sph.com.sg

 

THE scene opens to the strains of a saccharine song. A little girl wearing a big bow in her hair emerges from her slumber on the beach. She is in the mood to explore. The camera follows her as she wanders through the city. There off-centre glimpses of a colonial building here, a patch of green there, and lots of shiny skyscrapers to behold.

She pokes around art pieces in a museum, and finally meets her doppelganger wearing an equally large hairpiece while travelling down a long escalator.

Singaporean viewers get enough clues in the video to figure out that this is showcasing their home country. Foreigners have to wait till the end of the two-minute clip to learn that the images are from Singapore, “where worlds meet”.

It’s a sweet and simple clip, screened to participants during last year’s Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting held in Singapore last year. But there’s a shiny, scrubbed and almost anaesthetic feel about the images that make Singapore fade into anonymity. There are no other people in the clip, apart from the faceless office crowd at Raffles Place and a fleeting glimpse of children at the National Day Parade.

There is no nation pulse to tap. Singapore is, as it says, is a meeting place for the world.

As the Republic adopts a new branding strategy to keep ahead of competition, it’s time to take stock of what it actually wants to tell the world. If Singapore’s National Marketing Action Committee wants the country to be known for daring to dream, for its collaborative and nurturing attitude, and ultimately its transformative quality, it could do no better than let people tell their stories.

Real stories, like that of the nine Singapore residents captured in video clips screened at the Singapore Pavilion at this year’s World Expo in Shanghai. They featured residents like pint-sized drumming prodigy Ethan Ong, who started busking in Orchard Road at the age of five and pipped other junior drummers to the top spot in China last year. He doesn’t mean to be loud, he tells the camera sheepishly. His dream is “to be the best drummer I can be”.

And Ms Alejandra Grobet, a single mother of two from Mexico who lives in a Housing Board flat and sends her children to neighbourhood schools. The Spanish teacher revels in Singapore’s Botanic Gardens. “The university of life is travel,” she says.

And then there is Mrs Santha Bhaskar, the Kerala-born Cultural Medallion award winner who helms Bhaskar’s Academy of Dance with her husband K. P. Bhaskar. She migrated to Singapore in 1955 when she married Mr Bhaskar. She didn’t miss home then, she says, as people in Singapore were warm.

It’s hard not to find the nine videos endearing, compared to the clean, smart and almost too perfect Apec clip. Yet the nine individuals told the same story of Singapore - of worlds meeting - through their own life stories.

In this digital age, where fakes can be flagged in a heartbeat, there’s an easier way to the convince audiences of the heart they can find in this country.

Simply find the right person, and let him speak. Then watch the magic unfold.

Read Tan Hui Yee's Saturday Special Report on 'Brand New Singapore' here.