Colin Goh and Woo Yen Yen

The following was published in the Sunday Times on 1 June 2008, with the mention of TalkingCock.com omitted:

Wanted and Unwanted
by Colin Goh

The Wife and I zipped into Singapore last week for a very short business trip, and we were surprised to find that a little bit of New York had preceded us.

The bit was a feature I always took note of whenever I had to mail something – a very common item in U.S. post offices, but completely alien to Singaporeans, at least until now.

I’m talking about a ‘Wanted’ poster.

Whenever I’d step into the post offices in New York, the Wanted posters tacked to the bulletin board would always pique my curiosity: a simple letter-sized sheet of paper, bearing a mugshot of the fugitive and sometimes a still from a security camera, together with brief details of his offence (“wire fraud”, “possession of child pornography”, “mailing an explosive device with intent to kill”) and a line or two of “miscellaneous information” such as “works as a butler at casinos” or “flight risk, known to travel to Europe, Israel and Caribbean Islands. Subject may have fled to another country. Please refer to INTERPOL.”

They were snapshots of an exciting Hollywood blockbuster that was taking place for real, but which brushed against my mundane life only when I was buying stamps.

Occasionally, when browsing them, I’d imagine myself as some FBI agent in a Kevlar jacket with a shoulder-holstered pistol, flipping down my aviator sunglasses and addressing my similarly macho team-mates with Tommy Lee Jones’ Oscar-winning schpiel in the 1993 movie, The Fugitive: “What I want from each and every one of you is a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in that area. Checkpoints go up at fifteen miles… Go get him.”

So seeing the posters of Mas Selamat Kastari everywhere in Singapore was an eye opener. I mean, I knew that keeping a lookout for him was a national priority. I could gather that from how the ‘Escaped Terrorist Spotter’ cartoon I did for TalkingCock.com, featuring MSK in a variety of disguises, has already exceeded 80,000 downloads and even been picked up by the international newswires. But I really didn’t anticipate the ubiquity of his official ‘Wanted’ poster on the ground.

They were everywhere. Tacked to the tree outside my parents’ place. Pasted in shopping centres. Pinned two to a board at Ghim Moh Hawker Centre in what I can only call “4D” configuration: one big, one small. While re-entering Singapore after a visit to Johor, I saw several displayed at the immigration checkpoint, perhaps on the off-chance that he’d escaped the country and now wanted to come back.

We also didn’t expect to hear so many MSK jokes, but they were present in virtually every conversation we had. People were referring to him as “Mat Alamak” and “Masi Lemak”, and a friend told us that she’d met a child who’d renamed her lost hamster after Singapore’s most wanted man.

His escape is clearly a grave national security crisis, but it had also, perhaps inevitably, become a cultural phenomenon. Was the ubiquity of his image somehow undermining the seriousness of looking for him?

Things were put in perspective for me at, of all places, the National Library. I was there to do some research at the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library on the 7th Floor, and the security guard was checking my bag. On his table was a little slanted plastic signboard. On its outer face was a series of rules for what could and could not be brought into the Library. On its inner face, visible only to the guard, was the mugshot of You-Know-Who.

“Uncle,” I couldn’t help myself from asking. “Do you really think Mas Selamat is going to come to the Library to borrow books?”

“Well, maybe he needs to check email and here got free internet,” the Wife chipped in.

The guard’s previously serious face broke into a grin. “This is not just for the Library lah,” he replied. “It’s to help me remember even outside. Like that sure catch him, one.”

“Well, if anyone can do it, it’s you, Uncle,” I smiled, giving him a thumbs up. “You’re very focused!” He nodded, switched back to his game face, then waved us in.

From a publicity point of view, I guess the campaign is fulfilling its objective; awareness is awareness, no matter how it manifests. So I don’t think we should get our knickers in a twist over all the levity. In fact, it may actually be performing a valuable function: dampening any potential paranoia or panic.

In other words, it’s good the campaign is giving us more than we’d wanted.

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