Silat World Champion and Sportsman of Year Award

Not just in sports, but also academia, architecture and the arts, the fetish for what constitutes "world class" and "global" has led to very narrow ethnocentric and bigoted notions of assessment according to Euro-American cultural biases, often in the hands of those technocrats and judges that are only keen on looking at again, simplistically calculated KPIs. In this case, once again it is very sad that our own national sportsmen like paralympian gold medalist Laurentia Tan and now Muhmmad Shakir Juanda have been spat upon by a system that is ashamed of its own culture and peoples anything local is typecast immediately as being parochial. Too many times, even in my line of work have I seen how the very ones who love our country, non-Singaporeans included, and wish to develop its identity and culture organically from the ground most are the ones who get penalized most harshly by those who claim to represent us. For this particular case, for the cosmopolitan elite like Jessie Phua to snub Silat of its legitimacy becomes a more hurtful blow to the already marginalized minority Malay-Muslim community. I find such a snub to be more insidious and offensive as the racist comments made impulsively by Amy Cheong, and I feel that not just Jessie Phua but the entire committee should resign over this decision.