-8: Prison Rant

They're installing Exceedingly Ugly Metal Fences all around NTU. I positively loathe it. The beautiful trees and grass and walkways are lined with fences about eight feet high, with barbed wire on top. It is horrible. Simply italicizing the word horrible can't express the magnitude of it. I first saw it around Graduate Hall, and I thought that it was to keep students out of the military area which is just by our campus. Apparently, red signs every 15metres depicting people being shot wasn't enough.

But like a cancerous tumour, the monstrosity grew. I take the shuttle bus sometimes, and to my horror, the metal fences started to crawl further and further. Away from the residential halls, and slowly towards the academic buildings, like poisonous vines, and I am powerless to stop it. Our campus is starting to look like a prison. Eight feet high metal fences with barbed wire on top. Some areas they are planting creeper plants to mask the hideosity of the cold, metallic sheen of the new prison bars. But most other places it is just the bars. Just like in a zoo.

I wonder if they are going to have security gates for each and every academic building, or else this exercise is completely futile, in terms of trying to restrict access. At least that's what I assume the barbed wires are for. I can only speculate that the security is for the upcoming Youth Olympic Games. My university is hosting the kids. I suppose a prison theme is what Singapore is going for.

And I fervently, fervently hope that after the games, this madness will be reversed and my beautiful campus will return to its former fenceless and green glory. I didn't realize it before, but I have actually grown to like my campus. One thing I miss about staying on campus is jogging at night, and then lying on the dewy grass, breathless, with Coldplay blasting in my ears. Guess what. I can't do that anymore. The fences have separated the walkway and the grass. I'd have to risk severing a limb to do something as simple as lie on a patch of grass alongside a walkway.

Sometimes I really, really hate living in Singapore. This is one of those times. Oh yes it's safe. But only because they cane graffiti artists and keep students behind bars.