www.Go To The Mountain - Musings of a Potential Guru

Toa Payoh Toa Payoh was the most wonderful place for me. It was the place where I grew up and spent most of the days as a child, the days of youthful exuberance and as an young adult. There is no place like Toa Payoh as it was the first satellite town in Singapore and those of you who were living there at the same time would remember vividly and with fondness. How often in a lifetime would you experience living here in the 60s to 70s (1966 to 1970) when the first flats were built. Gradually everything was added as a satellite town. We have our own stadium, swimming pool, theatre, cinema, library, big fountain, schools, garden, hawker centres, hospital, places of worship, HDB office and even coffee houses. We have everything. Everywhere you went, every facility you used, they were all new. Everyone seemed to also moved in to the neighbourhood together at the same time. Everything looked and smelled new.  We mostly have homecooked food and only eat out occasionally when mum was busy. The

I have always been intrigued by martial arts since young. In those days, we only have two TV channels - channels 5 and 8. Channels 3 and 10 were Malaysian channels. Most of our TV programmes were imported TV drama series mostly from Hong Kong, sometimes there were others like Japanese but by and large they have the same old formulas. They were either very sad stories of guys struggling to make a living, women being married and getting trampled or despised by other families and the rest were all sword fighting and about revenge.  The sword fighting genre were always about revenge where the main character's master or family were murdered and he would train very hard in order to seek revenge later. The most popular was Jimmy Wang Yu, most famous especially in the "One Armed Swordsman" ( 独臂刀) - Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quEHEaNsSKA  There were others Yueh Hua (Drunken Swordsman /  大醉俠 / Come Drink With Me)  and later Ti Lung and David Chiang among others. (I actu