Being a minority means being an ambassador and representative of your entire community, whether you like it or not. You don’t have a choice in this. Your life is a battleground of collective worries and anxieties, both ingroup and outgrouphttps://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1044539603007356928?s=21 …
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If you want to mess with a child, an effective way to do it is to go through the parents. The child might not fully understand the complex and elaborate way you’re trying to shame him, but he’ll notice that his parents are anxious, angry and afraid
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Circling back - I didn’t notice this at the time, but this particular letter mentions two issues: internal motivation and poor study habits. I still have poor study habits
but internal motivation was never actually, properly addressed. I wonder why
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The cool thing about having had this experience and having spent over a decade reflecting on it is that I’ve gotten pretty sensitive to buried assumptions and derivative reasoning. So much of social reality is buried assumptions and derivative reasoningpic.twitter.com/Gm2XruZ9OD
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Visakan Veerasamy Retweeted B
Gd question! I think everyone was under pressure. I think the GEP teachers were under pressure to make sure their kids succeeded- it was a small class (13 kids?) and one kid flunking would’ve been a big smudge on both the teacher’s record, and the system’shttps://twitter.com/burgerrb/status/1058968312351080448?s=21 …
Visakan Veerasamy added,
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Interesting to consider then the sheer amount of weight that was on my 13-year-old back - my parents’, my teachers’, the Indian community’s, and arguably the GEP itself, at the time the crown jewel of Singapore’s education system. My failure would hurt *everyone*. Seemed like it!
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The year before that I was called up to the Ministry Of Education HQ and basically interrogated by education officers - and made to sign a “Personal Statement Of Commitment”. It was pretty Kafkaesquehttp://ricemedia.co/tortured-geniuses-gep-kids-on-the-burden-of-being-gifted/ …
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Visakan Veerasamy Retweeted Visakan Veerasamy
At the time it never really occurred to me that I could say no to any of this. My community needed it, right? I was a *child*. I just happened to like reading books, & got excited and curious about things in my own way. Which is still how I am now, reallyhttps://twitter.com/visakanv/status/986410861039271936?s=21 …
Visakan Veerasamy added,
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It’s hard to overstate how much this entire experience has shaped who I am as a person. A part of me still constantly needs to prove that I can be a valuable asset to my community - to any community - and not by jumping through hoops and passing tests, but by being who I am.
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To stand tall and look at society square in the eye, and say with confidence, with love, without anger or bitterness: you were wrong.
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Again with the height supremacism huh 
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Replying to @visakanv
Nice try we’re not buying it You can’t deny you tall people look down on the rest of us
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