My Way, Your Way, Our Way

After watching the Som Sabadell flashmob in the public square at Placa de Sant Roc on YouTube video at "The Stuff That Memories Are Made Of" blog , I found another YouTube video of "My Way" by Andre Rieu on his violin in New York. This magnificient performance at Radio City Music Hall, New York.

Please watch it. Its awesome!



"My Way" is a song popularized by Frank Sinatra. Its lyrics were written by Paul Anka and set to music based on the French song "Comme d'habitude" composed in 1967 by Claude Francois and Jacques Revaux, with lyrics by Claude Francois and Gilles Thibault.

"My Way" is often quoted as the most covered song in history.

The lyrics of "My Way" tell the story of a man who, having grown old, reflects on his life as death approaches. He is comfortable with his mortality and takes responsibility for how he dealt with all the challenges of life while maintaining a respectable degree of integrity.

American immigration history can be viewed in four epochs: the colonial period, the mid-nineteenth century, the turn of the twentieth century, and post-1965. Each period brought distinct national groups, races and ethnicities to the United States. During the seventeenth century, approximately 175,000 Englishmen migrated to Colonial America..

Over half of all European immigrants to Colonial America during the 17th and 18th centuries arrived as indentured servants.

The mid-nineteenth century saw mainly an influx from northern Europe; the early twentieth-century mainly from Southern and Eastern Europe; post-1965 mostly from Latin America and Asia.

Most of the European refugees fleeing the Nazis and World War II, similar to the immigrants from China during the civil war to Singapore and South-east Asia in the 1940s.

Throughout its history, America has served as the destination point for a steady flow of immigrants. During the colonial era most migrants came from northern European countries. Their numbers declined with the onset of the Revolutionary War during the 1770s, but immigration later picked up strongly again during the 1840s and 1850s.

New arrivals came from several European countries during this period, but most came from Ireland and Germany, where devastating crop failures forced many residents to leave their homelands. Many settled in New York City, where the population increased from 200,000 residents in 1830 to 515,000 in 1850. By 1860, New York was home to over one million residents. More than half of the city's population at that time were immigrants and their American-born children.

Albeit a country many times bigger than Singapore, the United States of America is also a country of immigrants.

Like Singapore, the United States of America is a One Nation, Many Peoples.

There is a scene in this video of early immigrants to USA looking at the Statue of Liberty in New York.

Imagine that of the early immigrants to Singapore in a boat on the Singapore River and looking at the statue of Merlion (but built in Singapore many decades later).

Every country in the world, big or small, is lived by every individual for centuries, generations with the life of my way, your way and our way together. 

Frank Sinatra's own way to grow up in America as his immigrant father from Italy is very different from every Singaporean to live it his way and the way of the forefathers to migrate to Singapore in the early days.

We are Singaporeans.  We are the "Singapore Way" based on the way of the "Singapore Pledge", different from the ways of other countries in the world.

Happy 47th National Day Singapore!  Majullah Singapore!