Daily Lesson from Life 06 October 2008

Today is my 51st birthday. I like to thank my parents for brining me to this world. It has been a heck of a journey. Thanks to my wife, Hawngee, for tolerating me (barely recently!), and my 3 kids who constantly challenged me to be a better father. I also thank my friends who made me feel wanted and useful despite all the stupid things I had done and more mistakes that I will probably make in the years to come!!

For this year, one of the 'To Do' is to complete the Singapore Marathon on 07 December 2008. I like to raise some money for the cancer society again. Probably for the Children Cancer patients. Will call on my supporters to raise that money for the 42.195km I will complete. Will be good to make it to S$5100!!


"Mon, Oct 06, 2008 AFP

China deploys dairy inspectors as more children sickened

BEIJING, Oct 6, 2008 - China has deployed more than 5,000 inspectors to its dairy factories to improve food safety, state media reported Monday, as authorities said more children had been sickened by contaminated milk.

The nation's food safety watchdog dispatched inspectors across the country to make sure dairy products complied with food safety standards, the People's Daily reported.

The measure is the latest in a series aimed at containing the scandal which began when Chinese milk powder was found tainted with melamine, an industrial chemical normally used to make plastic and fertilisers.


So far, the tainted milk has sickened more than 53,000 children and killed four in China as well as exposing the nation's lax food safety standards - leading to import curbs on some Chinese products as far away as South America.

Melamine, when added to watered-down milk, makes it look richer in protein than it really is."

I want to talk about 'Doing the Right Thing Right!' of Leaders. The tainted milk saga simply just refused to go away. Not even when at some stage the local government and the national government of PRC tried to contain it and performed major 'damage control' acts! You see, when, pardon the language, shit hits the fence, it splattered all over. Doing the right things right from the offset is FAR cheaper than damage control and recovery! It is easy to see but very very hard to execute. Most people have this 'this happened to them but will never happened to me!' attitude.

Lessons for me are:

1. do the right things is not easy. It will probably demand a lot of integrity from you. It will probably challenged your greed to make a profit. It will even invited some of the people dear to you to question your decision and actions! You just have to stick to your basic principle: Is it the right things to do? IF NOT, no amount of money, persuasion, temptations, etc will be entertained. Just shut them out and do the right thing immediately and consistently. In this way, you will not be swayed!;

2. damage control and recovery will always cause more money and efforts. To remind ourselves of the dire consequences of any 'this will not happened to me' attitude, we must COLLECT conscientiously large amount of the 'improbably but did happened' cases to remind us it is not really unthinkable for such dire result to happen if we are not conscientious about 'doing the right things!' e.g. this most recently blow up of tainted milk scandal, the previous case of initially trying to 'black out' the outbreak of SARS and the subsequent costs in money and human lives being sacrificed, the previous 'big headed babies' scandal, the poisonous children toys incidents, etc. They are aplenty! NONE of them managed to 'fool everyone all the time'! You will be FOUND OUT - eventually! You will have to PAY the price - eventually! So do not even try!!;

3. in this case, there is no finger to point to some outsiders. It is strictly the doing of Chinese to the Chinese. On top of that, exporting the poisonous stuffs to the world since PRC is the factories for almost all things cheap and good - from rice, to milk power, to toy, etc... This is good as when shit happened, we need to take a good look at ourselves before finding scapegoats. Leaders take responsibilities and FIXED the issues. It is nothing heroic. In fact, many mistaken the heroic recovery efforts while I am more interested in prevented such disasters from happening in the 1st place!

On my birthday, it is hard to see many infants were not given a chance to live their lives due to unscrupulous and blinded-by-greed merchants and business people not doing the right things!

May the world keep the faith that not all human beings behaved in that way. That there are ethical people producing ethically safe products for fellow human beings!