interdire

I, obedient S'porean that i am, usually am quite a stickler when it comes to following the rules. The theory behind it being God's call for us to submit to the governing authorities that have been put in place. To that end, whenever I fly i grudgingly adhere to the flight attendants' request that you leave your footwear on during takeoff and landing, as uncomfortable as that may be. As a student, i almost never skipped classes or other school-sanctioned events (which incidentally left me rather miffed by the end of the moe induction programme earlier in the year, but that's another story). And now whenever i have to cross the road, jaywalking is almost always out of the question, unless it's legal (i.e. cross on the correct side of the signs demarcating 50m from the nearest pedestrian crossing) or if i succumb to peer pressure.

So imagine my shock when it finally dawned on me after more than a decade of riding the mrt that when that lady with the contrived accent cautioned in an ascending register that "eating or drinking is not allowed in stations and trains", she meant every bit of it. I'm hardly like one of those toots who open a tarpow container of wanton mee and slurp it up happily on the train. Rather, i am guilty of the apparently equally illegal offence of drinking water on the train. When i read that they were now going to enforce an immediate fine for offenders i thought i was safe as, after all, it's only water. It seems though that even water drinkers are not immune, which strikes me as a bit much. I mean, even in the library, while eating and drinking were no-nos, at least they still did allow water-drinking. I thought it was a given exception to the no eating and drinking rule wherever you went in S'pore.

While i definitely understand the preventive rationale behind the rule, in that they don't want to inconvenience other passengers and risk messy spills, i wonder why (some) trains in other places have no rule against eating or drinking, yet remain comparably clean as our own mrt trains. While granted that a lot of these foreign metro trains are not air-conditioned, and so may not facillitate the spread of foul food odours as much as on an mrt train, there are other longer-distance trains of say the intercity variety which are air-conditioned and have no qualms about letting passengers eat whatever they want. Heck, some trains even have dining/snack cars. Which begs the question, is it just that S'poreans just can't be trusted with such liberties? I'd tend towards answering in the affirmative...