TR EMERITUS

By Bhaskaran Kunju, Political Correspondent

On September 29 after a deluge of media coverage, Ms Ris Low, the beleaguered Miss Singapore World relinquished her title, and depending on which version you believe, she either did so on her own accord or was requested to.

I have to admit that just like a majority of Singaporeans I too had my fair share of laughs when I first came across her now infamous interview segment on RazorTV. Her inability to form coherent sentences was shocking, even more so than her diction.

There are people working in the frontline in the media industry who still lack perfect diction so Ms Low wasn’t exactly a poor exception. It was a surprise to me that a contestant in the Miss Singapore World pageant had such poor command of the English language. But as the matter escalated and more personal details of her life became public it just stopped being funny.

My opinion changed when it was revealed that she had pre-existing psychiatric conditions. That’s just not something to find hilarious since her actions are influenced by her condition, which in her words, she had no control of.

I am aware that a large portion of the public has called out her lies and deception. In her latest interview with Razor TV she even openly admits she shared her recorded phone conversation with runner up Claire Lee with the media as revenge and has a hard time explaining the discrepancies over her grades and other previous statements. But I don’t think she’s a malicious person at all and there’s a need to put this into context.

Given her medical condition how much of a control does she really have in her words and actions? She may appear lucid and well groomed given her pageantry background, but that’s deceptive, as her behaviour has been incongruent. She still believes that the attention she’s getting is equitable to fame and seems to show a lack of connection with public perception and her own.

From what it appears she doesn’t seem to be at full grasp at the reality of the situation. During the latest interview, when posed a question by a member of the public on how she sleeps at night and if she can look at herself in the mirror, she seemed to not be able to decipher the sarcasm behind the question and gave a straightforward answer on her sleeping habits.

The interview to be fair was done tastefully and the interviewer did an admirably good job at keeping Ms Low at ease and afforded her respect even when her answers strayed. But it is in a way exploitative and I’m not taking a moral high ground here. It is hard to deny that Ms Low isn’t newsworthy.

Going by public response, she’s easily the most sought after news item in Singapore at the moment. In short Ris Low sells. But at some point in the past, there should have been a buffer between Ms Low and the media to prevent her from becoming an object of ridicule, and that should have come in the form of ERM World Marketing.

I wrote in to the Straits Times over this matter on Tuesday September 29 upon reading about Ms Low stepping down and my letter was subsequently published on Friday October 2 in the Forum pages.

It was a shortened version of my original but it did capture the gist of my sentiments to an extent. I believe that the organisers who in all honesty have shown some of the poorest organising and public relation skills should have shared a large portion of the blame.

As an organiser it was their responsibility to step in and defend their contestant instead of letting her face the media and public on her own. That only served to exacerbate the problem providing both the media and public more fodder to feed on.

The obvious question will be how someone as incapable as Ms Low could be chosen as a contestant let alone as a winner. While Ms Low has taken much of the flak, the capabilities of the rest of the contestants seem to be just as abysmal as well. There is another less circulated video of the other contestants who are posed simple questions such as, “When did the merlion become extinct?” and “When did Singapore get its independence?” The responses were far more shocking than Ms Low’s communication skills.

In general the contest seems to have been poorly organised. While the excuse has always been on the poor public perception of beauty pageants, I’ve found that hard to believe given the success of the New Face pageant. The difference as mentioned in my letter was transparency.

While the New Face contest is filmed every step of the way right from the audition process, the Miss Singapore World pageant seems to be run on it’s own terms. I do not even recall seeing a single advertisement for the pageant while the New Face contest is highly publicized.

Of course, given that it is an SPH organised event, resources are far more readily accessible for advertising but the very process of recruitment isn’t any easier if there does exist an unfavourable bias against beauty pageants. In this aspect, ERM is still largely accountable to the public for its recruitment process.

Should there be a problem of financial constriction to adequately market and advertise then perhaps it is only appropriate another organisation be given a chance to run the competition, instead of trying to establish a virtual monopoly of the beauty pageant industry in Singapore. If there is a poor public perception of pageants, then it is one that is self-inflicted due to incidents like this.

In their public statement, issued after Ms Low had stepped down, ERM blamed a malicious Youtube user for making Ms Low’s English seem worse than it is. However the interview in question had already been circulated extensively unedited and as it appeared on RazorTV.

The video speaks for itself. I really don’t think it’s fair that a 19-year-old girl has taken so much vitriol from the public while the organisers have stayed in the background to protect themselves from scrutiny. Instead of ERM providing the buffer it’s Ms Ris Low who’s inadvertently reversed the roles.

Language and communication skills alone should have put Ms Low out of contention in the first place and based on that it would have been a bad idea to have her as a representative of the country on an international stage.

It’s not that she’s not good; it’s just that she’s not even good enough. Was she really the best? But it surprised me that the idea of having someone with a probation record to represent Singapore in a beauty pageant seemed so outrageous and offensive to so many people. Her punishment had been meted out so what is so wrong about her getting on with her life? Furthermore her actions had been influenced by her psychiatric condition, which on it’s own accord is harsh to be judged on.

After all, in case the public has forgotten, we do have a Minister with a prior conviction. Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam was convicted and fined for breach of the Official Secrets Act in 1994. If we could accept and elect Mr Tharman to the highest financial post of our country then why can’t Ms Low represent Singapore in a frivolous competition?

I think some of the backlash, even from the part of the organisers, is rooted to Ms Low’s failure to share her prior conviction. I personally don’t see why that would be of any importance.

In the case of Mr Tharman, his conviction was only revealed by the Worker’s Party in the run up to the 2001 General Elections. Even if the PAP were aware of it, the electorate, the most important proponent of the electoral system, was never formally informed. Her past isn’t a criteria for judgment in the Miss World pageant but language and communication skills are.

A friend of mine, Sam Ho, writing at his thinkingbetterthinkmeta blog, suggested a lot of the public ridicule was stemming from a societal bias towards a certain group. Specifically one that is at the lower end of the societal strata, disadvantaged and away from the mainstream. I don’t particularly agree with that entirely. It may be true for some who have a high opinion of their own capabilities to sneer at Ms Low but that’s just one of the reasons.

I think a lot of the criticism on her is to an extent justified, given her poor language skills in a domain where it is an essential. But the repeated prodding of her personal details and public backlash stems from our morbid fascination for deviancy.

It is quite simple entertaining and newsworthy however morally wrong it is to indulge in it. A look through Asiaone.com suggests the top stories are those of sexual and or violent connotations, however obscure or irrelevant the content is in Singapore. It is simply what the public craves. For those who have surpassed being passive and turned malicious I think there lies an underlying problem on insecurity on their part.

She’s an easy target and a manifestation of everything that we have deemed to be negative in our society. She’s a reflection of everything we have grown to loathe of ourselves as Singaporeans; self-absorbed, petty, shallow, poor command of the English language, ‘kiasu’ (given the exorbitant amount she had spent in the competition) and even anti-social in some aspects. In other words she is the ‘Us’ we read and hear about in the news of ‘Ugly Singaporeans”. We aren’t resenting her, we’re resenting ourselves.

It was the Nobel Laureate Herman Hesse who once said, “If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us”.

That’s probably why there’s so much controversy over her representing the country. We fear we’re airing our own dirty laundry. It’s seeing our negative image in her that makes us despise her so and it’s been easy to take it out on her given the fact that she’s been pretty much a sitting duck, clueless as to how serious a hit her reputation has taken. I think for the brief period of time when she slips up, it makes us feel better of ourselves albeit delusionally. But that’s human nature, looking for things to make us feel we’re better than someone else. This would explain why there’s a large segment of the public still fascinated with her misfortunes.

It’s one thing to object to her representing the country based on ability and another to make her the brunt of public vitriol and ridicule. I personally feel sorry for her predicament and I hope someone close to her will be able to shield her from further public scrutiny. Is anyone else confident and willing to stand up and open his or her lives and let it be scrutinised the way Ms Low’s life has? She is still young and should be allowed to carry on with her endeavours whatever her past maybe. After all she is a product of our own society.

Other articles by Bhaskaran Kunju:

>> Is there room for more foreigners in Singapore?

>> Why social cohesion is at the forefront of the Prime Minister’s National Day Rally

>> Changes in political system to allow more alternative voices

>> The untimely departure of Chip Goodyear

>> Should universities be re-politicized?

About Author:

Bhaskaran Kunju is a political science undergraduate in a local varsity. He is a regular contributor to the Straits Times Forum and TODAY Voices.

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