Singapore, 1505 And How We Go
Ravi Perera
For a Sri Lankan to fly to Singapore is to become aware of human possibilities. However unhopeful the circumstances; in space, resources and even cultural attributes, a people can still rise to world standards. This small island with just 5.4 million people is an economy of US $ 281 Billion while the visitor’s much larger island, with its 21 million on board, has barely reached a modest US $ 68 Billion economy. Possibilities that stand before a Singaporean today are good as any in a First World country. Whether it be education, health, career opportunities, entertainment to travel he has choices which are second to none. For the Sri Lankan mind-set which lays great store by “history”, here is a country which came into existence only in 1965.When Stamford Raffles arrived in these parts in 1819 what is now Singapore was a rocky little island with a population of about 1000 Malays and perhaps a few dozen Chinese.
Five centuries ago, in 1505, when the Portuguese moored somewhere near the shores of where Colombo is now situated, the excited subjects reported to the King “There is in our harbor a race of people fair of skin and comely withal. They don jackets of iron and hats of iron; they rest not a minute in one place; they walk here and there; they eat hunks of stone and drink blood; they give two or three pieces of gold and silver for one fish or lime…”
The strangers also brought a new awareness of other and different possibilities to the natives. Standing before them were a small band of men, neither tied to their place of birth nor family line of business. From the Iberian peninsula in Europe they had sailed against the winds , around the cape to the Asian shoreline, a distance which would have been incomprehensible to a people living a life in which they hardly moved more than twenty miles from their place of birth. To the natives, Anuradhapura or Kataragama, if they were aware of the existence of these places, were excitingly distant. The former had by then receded into an uncertain legend while Kataragama , even when Leonard Woolf wrote about that part of the country four centuries later was jungle territory, rough and primitive. Much later, after the Motor car and sealed roads changed the paradigm of internal travel in the island, they still remained distant places, now mainly due to poor road conditions.
