Once a Jolly Hangman Read Online Free PDF

hanged, finally claimed the moral high ground. Singapore was now getting the same kind of treatment and they didn't like it one bit.

3
    Looking For Mr Singh
     
     
    Woodlands. It seemed an unlikely part of Singapore to find the home of the hangman. But there I was driving along Upper Bukit Timah Road hoping that the address I had found was the right one. Or more to the point the man who lived there really was Singapore's chief executioner, Darshan Singh. I wanted to meet this unknown but much-feared gentleman who was about to hang the Australian drug trafficker Nguyen Van Tuong on death row in Changi Prison. Named after the vast acres of rubber trees planted by the British during early colonial days when Singapore was a mosquito-infested mango swamp, Woodlands lies just across the border at the southernmost tip of the Malaysian peninsula. The name was on every signpost starting from my home near Bukit Timah Nature Reserve where monkeys leap from trees and sit on rails waiting for unwitting humans to give them food who risk being fined if they do or attacked if they don't.
    When Sir Stamford Raffles 'discovered' the tiny island in the early 1800s for the East India Company it was, according to the records, populated by no more than 158 Malay fishermen and their families in tiny hamlets dotted along the coastline. Within a year or two of Raffles's arrival, immigrants had swelled the numbers by more than 5,000. Business was beginning to boom with the British presence and the East India Company moving cargo to China and back. But no one at that time would ever have predicted the population of the Little Red Dot - Singapore's nickname - would soar to almost five million in less than 200 years. The People's Action Party government hopes to push that total to 6.5 million before 2020 by encouraging couples to have more
    babies and relaxing immigration rules, especially for highly qualified men and women in the fields of finance, medicine, science, technology and just good old entrepreneurship.
    The government is following the tradition established during the days of empire when Singapore became one of the world's major trading crossroads. The population grew by leaps and bounds as Chinese, Malays and Indians were encouraged to migrate to provide skilled workers, enterprising businessmen and, of course, cheap labour. Since independence in 1965, Singapore has undergone a dramatic change from green to concrete. It is now packed to the gills with high- rise apartment blocks, factories and shopping malls, intricate road and rail systems all neatly interspersed with or camouflaged by remnants of the rain forest the island once was. All this is the direct consequence of the massive industrial modernisation programme initiated and driven by the pre-eminent political personality of the past six decades, Lee Kuan Yew. He also foresaw the need for good public housing, education and hospitals, to support and foster all this modernisation. Huge blocks of low-rent government flats and factory estates sprang up as fast as the rain forest disappeared or was depleted. Of course, all this progress was, arguably, helped by the British legacy: a basic infrastructure of legal, governmental, educational and economic systems designed primarily, of course, to maintain its colonial and military power base and just as importantly the status of the colonial elites.
    Although the legal system was based on English law it was soon fine-tuned to ensure that Lee Kuan Yew and his People's Action Party remained in power in perpetuity by silencing all political opposition through fear of being jailed as 'communists' or financially ruined. Lee also adapted some other methods acquired from the former rulers. Ominously, one of these included the British way of hanging. If Singapore can boast one of the highest standards of living and growth rates in Southeast Asia there is another statistic that it prefers not to talk about except in the abstract. It has the highest