Just busted an hour.
This set of 5 videos is a documentary about the relationship between Britain, the colonists, the new states and native people within the sphere of the Commonwealth in the 50s to the 70s.
Towards the end of the documentary the narrator talked about the positive and negative legacies of the Empire. I don't know how obvious this might be to some of you, but indeed we are still living in the shadows of the British Empire and inheriting its legacies. Although we do not see Britain as our 'motherland' anymore, neither do we feel that Britain would be the best place for us to be in - but without what the British had left behind, our lives would have been very different.
This may sound dreadfully wrong to those Chinese nationalists and fundamentalists (there are millions of those people especially online), but yes British colonial rule is part of our history, without which we would not have our current identity as Singaporeans or Hong Kongers but we would just be one of the 1.3 billion Chinese.
My view is no longer a popular one. Singaporeans don't talk about it, and Hong Kongers are increasingly identifying themselves with mainland China. There is nothing wrong with that though, and me having my views is probably also because of the kind of influence that I was placed under - interesting as it might seem, when I first set foot in Britain in summer 2007, there is this strange sense of familiarity about the things around me. The traffic signs, the telephone booths, the post boxes, the names of places, even the countryside - I have seen them somewhere, either in HK, in storybooks, in stamps, and even in those notebooks that my dad used to bring back for us to use.
Okay enough of Britain. Back to solving that 'meaning of life' question that is probably going to be one of my exam questions.
'If life has meaning, it must be possible for me to know that it does and further to know and understand to some significant extant what that meaning is.' Discuss.
This is the kind of stuff that I have to solve for the philosophy class that I took.
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