The good ol' days were really horrible

Holly Jean, a Singapore blogger, just discovered that "the Internet is Killing Relationships!"

She writes that a part of her would have been happier if she were born a few generations earlier... before mobile phones and the internet.

In those days, relationships used to so much more stable and concrete, she says. "I look at my grandparents and my parents' generation and I see couples who stick together through thick and thin. There wasn't a question of quitting or wandering... there were much less distractions... you loved someone, you got married and that was your life."

Hooray for the good ol' days except that I would rather call it the bad ol' days. Take just one example: As a little kid growing up in Amoy Street, Chinatown in the 1950s, one thing that remains clear in my memory was the toilet system. We didn't have any flushing, all the shit deposited each day was collected in a metal bucket and taken away by labourers known as "night soil carriers".

Relationships were stable but could be brutal. My uncle -- highly educated, articulate, enlightened and intelligent -- had two wives and whenever he lost his temper, he would beat both of them equally. Most women had a raw deal and lived in a kind of information blackhole. They didn't know what was going on around them, and the only social connections they had were with their siblings, close relatives and 2-3 former school mates, and their immediate neighbours.

Men went out to work, and though there were no Internet to link them to everyone else from Timbuctoo to Tioman, they were pretty savvy in finding their own distractions -- cabarets at Great World Amusement Park, brothels at Keong Saik Street, dirty bars along Joo Chiat Road, and gambling and opium dens in every nook and cranny of Chinatown.

Diseases were rampant, from syphillis to TB, and fire broke out regularly in the overcrowded squatter areas.

When I visited the Chinatown areas of Jakarta or Kuala Lumpur, I was reminded of old Singapore, and was thankful that the island today is somewhat cleaner, more hygenic, and above all, the toilets can be flushed (except of course those found in kopitiams).

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