<TABLE border=0 cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%"><TBODY><TR>Bound together by Singapore songs abroad
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<!-- START OF : div id="storytext"--><!-- more than 4 paragraphs -->LAST Friday's story on national songs ('National songs are 'symbols of identity' for Singaporeans') took me back to 1997, when some university girlfriends and I travelled to Bangladesh to see our Singaporean classmate Farhana get married.
We were a fun bunch of Chinese, Malay and Indian Singaporean friends, and that week we celebrated the most colourful and exuberant wedding rituals I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing.
There were rich processions of gifts, daises flowing with fresh marigolds, an elephant or two ambling around, ritual pelting of anyone in sight with turmeric and riotous music and dancing everywhere till the wee hours each morning.
At the end of the main wedding reception, tired from the dancing, we crawled into a van taking us back to our lodgings and waited inside sleepily for other members of the party to catch up.
Suddenly, someone started to sing the opening lines of Count On Me, Singapore. Before we knew it, we, and everyone else in the van who had schooled or lived in Singapore (which included first- to third-generation Singaporeans, primary school cousins to housewife aunties) joined in with great gusto and jubilation.
We sang Singapore song after Singapore song and we found that between us we knew enough songs (even the Courtesy song made an appearance, I recall) to last more than half an hour.
There, in Dhaka, in the middle of the night, dressed in our wedding party finery of saris, kebayas and cheong sams in a van, we laughed and cried and sang our hearts out because we knew all the words and we all felt like one big crazy Singapore family. It is one of my favourite memories.
Lyn Lee (Ms)
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<!-- START OF : div id="storytext"--><!-- more than 4 paragraphs -->LAST Friday's story on national songs ('National songs are 'symbols of identity' for Singaporeans') took me back to 1997, when some university girlfriends and I travelled to Bangladesh to see our Singaporean classmate Farhana get married.
We were a fun bunch of Chinese, Malay and Indian Singaporean friends, and that week we celebrated the most colourful and exuberant wedding rituals I have ever had the pleasure of experiencing.
There were rich processions of gifts, daises flowing with fresh marigolds, an elephant or two ambling around, ritual pelting of anyone in sight with turmeric and riotous music and dancing everywhere till the wee hours each morning.
At the end of the main wedding reception, tired from the dancing, we crawled into a van taking us back to our lodgings and waited inside sleepily for other members of the party to catch up.
Suddenly, someone started to sing the opening lines of Count On Me, Singapore. Before we knew it, we, and everyone else in the van who had schooled or lived in Singapore (which included first- to third-generation Singaporeans, primary school cousins to housewife aunties) joined in with great gusto and jubilation.
We sang Singapore song after Singapore song and we found that between us we knew enough songs (even the Courtesy song made an appearance, I recall) to last more than half an hour.
There, in Dhaka, in the middle of the night, dressed in our wedding party finery of saris, kebayas and cheong sams in a van, we laughed and cried and sang our hearts out because we knew all the words and we all felt like one big crazy Singapore family. It is one of my favourite memories.
Lyn Lee (Ms)
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