BOOK REVIEW : Naadu Kattiya Nayagan (The story of Lee-Kuan-Yew)

Author: Mukhil
Price: 60 INR
The title ‘Naadu Kattiya Nayagan’ means ‘The hero who built his country’ and it is all about Lee-Kuan-Yew who built Singapore from scratch. In 1960s Singapore was considered as a ‘Third world’ country and it had no address in the world arena. But in a matter of forty years Singapore has emerged one of the ‘Giants’ in the world and surpassed all its limitations. This remarkable ‘Nation building’ was achieved because of a single person’s vision and his consistent action towards that vision. That single person is no other than Lee-Kuan-Yew.
Basically Singapore was a part of Malaysia and became a separate country in 1959. During that time Lee-Kuan-Yew formed his People-Action-Party (PAP) and became the prime minister of Singapore. From then he ruled Singapore for close to four decades and completely transformed the country. Starting with good governance he went on achieving excellence in Economy, Education, and Tourism which made Singapore as a ‘developed’ country. This book explains the whole story of this ‘Journey towards excellence’ and it is truly mind blowing.

Singapore achieved this excellence not by magic but because of hard work. They don’t have any natural resources and even today they even import drinking water from Malaysia. Apart from this they also have diversified Chinese, Indian and Malay speaking people and bringing all of them under single umbrella is really a difficult task. Singapore has achieved all these things in a very short span of time and we Indians have loads of things to learn from them.

When I speak about Singapore people say ‘Na! Its so small country and it is not a big deal to achieve these things’. But I feel it is not the question of big or small but it is all about what we achieved. The psychology says ‘Emotions leads to actions and reasons leads to conclusions’. As long as we are not getting emotional towards our country, we simply end up giving reasons which will lead only to conclusions. When will we march ahead?

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