Think Titans

It was perhaps three or four months ago on a Sunday afternoon and I was browsing in the huge Kinokuniya store, one of my favorite places in Singapore and a bookstore that has no equal in the world that I know of in terms of size, layout and feel.

I suddenly noticed a huge poster which struck me because of its title in large white letters superimposed on the photographs of famous people: "THINK TITANS".


"Think Titans" has a positive connotation. Who wouldn't want to be known as a "Think Titan"? It connotes extraordinary intelligence, drive, leadership, and the ability to use those advantages to achieve great things, that will remain as durable testimony of human ability. The poster had a wide-ranging scope for this label, which it explained further by listing categories as a frieze around the edges: Builders and Titans, Scientists and Thinkers, Leaders and Revolutionaries. The poster was attractive and it had a graphic quality fitting the subject which it was designed to honour.

But I was appalled to see Adolph Hitler on the second row. How can this man be labelled as a Think Titan? I was so outraged that I stopped one of the store's staff walking by me, a young Chinese woman, attracted her attention to the poster and asked her if she recognized that man and knew what he had done. She looked at the poster and gave me a puzzled look: she did not know. My respect for the Singaporean education system was suddenly diminished: how can any one old enough to have gone to high school not know about Adolph Hitler?

I asked for a manager so that I could lodge a protest against a poster designed as an ad for the store that glorifies such a man. No one could be found. I gave up but took a picture of the poster to protest against it in my blog.

Among the figures I recognize in this poster, there is another one whose presence I find highly questionable: Mao Tse Tung. His misguided policies resulted in at least as many millions of deaths as can be attributed to the monster next to him.

The others all merit, in their own ways, the label of this poster. On the first row Leo Tolstoy (it looks like him, but I am not sure), Albert Einstein, Spethen Hawkings and Sigmund Freud certainly are "Think Titans" in their own literary or scientific field.

The second row, marred by the presence of the two political leaders I already commented upon, is redeemed by Richard Feynman and Mahatma Gandhi.

Of the three men I recognize on the third row, Winston Churchill, Lee Kuan Yew and Nelson Mandela, I would only say that the second one was almost obligatory ... We are in Singapore after all. I would not, I think, call Lee Kuan Yew a "Think Titan", but he is the founder of Singapore, and the animating force of its success, and this is a great achievement. My main issue with him is his rejection of democracy's universal appeal. This is why he does not rank nearly as high in my Pantheon of Titans as his neighbour in this poster, Winston Churchill, who towers over him for his uncompromising stand against the two great political diseases of the 20th century, fascism and communism, which threatened the spread of democracy and were responsible for so much human misery.

I recognize only two men on the last row: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Think Titans? I believe that, on balance, they deserve the label, for having created two great high tech companies that have changed forever the way we work, think and play.