ANYONE who tells you that in Singapore spitting is a crime should be reported immediately to the Singapore authorities for bringing that city-state into disrepute.

With almost 10 per cent of its population already over the age of 65 years, could any Asian city be expected to ensure such unnatural levels of hygienic perfection?

One can understand why such an image of ‘spitlessness’ should have been cultivated. Singapore was a former British colony and at one time, like other such colonies, believed in its enforced innocence that the streets of London were so clean that one could eat off its pavements.

Today’s Londoners eat on the pavements, not off them, and spitting is as local an art-form as pavement artistry.

Modern Singapore — a collage of 63 islands glued together by seawater — has become the Far East’s answer to the Gulf states. It is Dubai swathed in a green sarong.

When Singapore and Dubai came into existence within a decade of each other, they were too small to be truly independent, and too fiercely independent to surrender their individuality to their neighbours. Each had little to offer the world: Dubai had sand and below that, finite reserves of crude oil and gas; Singapore had mosquito-infested marshland and above that, finite manpower.

Their future lay in offering themselves to the world as an entrepôt of goods and services. Today, Singapore is the world’s fourth-largest financial services centre, the world’s third-largest oil-refining centre and the world’s second-biggest casino gambling market. And Dubai has become the eighth-most visited city in the world, a shopper’s Mecca, each of its numberless malls a shrine to self-gratification.

To open a morning newspaper in Dubai or in Singapore is to shrink from the cares of a global village to the level of domestics. Dubai’s concerns are about the abuse of migrant maids; Singapore worries about the high casualties of domestics who fall to their deaths while cleaning the windows of high-rise apartments. Dubai’s Burj Al Khalifa — the tallest building in the world — cannily anticipated this hazard. Its heaven-directed windows will always be cleaned mechanically.

Singapore’s pretensions are on a subtler scale. Its new tourist attraction — Marina Bay Sands complex — is a three-tower stack building connected at their crown with a massive elongated cross bar that looks like a Noah’s Ark, stranded 76 floors above sea level.

This Ark though carries its supply of own water. It has a huge swimming pool spread across its roof. As if to emphasise the irony, Marina Bay Sands has staged an exhibition to commemorate the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic and recreated in its basement saloons and cabins of that ill-fated luxury liner.

Is that exhibition simply a tourist attraction? Or is it a sage lesson by senior Singaporeans to a younger generation of the hazards of Dubai’s hubris?

If the residual impression one has on leaving Singapore is one of mechanical efficiency — everything works! — an equivalent after staying in Bangkok is one of benignity.

Everything in Thailand is benign. The expression on the face of every statue of Lord Buddha is benign. The smile on the face of the ailing but revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej is benign. The humility of saffron-robed monks of every age (and some were still in their teens) is benign. Benign too is the excruciating, self-effacing humility of Thais towards strangers.

This mask begins to crack though on the face of a Thai shop assistant if one haggles but does not buy. It crumbles when a Thai taxi-driver is outwitted by a canny tourist. And it disintegrates on the face of the Thai airhostess the moment the plane lands at Lahore’s Allama Iqbal airport and the Pakistani passengers revert to their natural state of anarchy.

To nations like ours which are older by decades, once wiser (PIA taught Emirates Airlines how to fly), equally industrious (the productivity of Pakistani migrants anywhere in the world is legendary), these states — Singapore, Dubai and Thailand — would appear to offer tempting recipes for success.

Experience has shown that identical ingredients cannot be guaranteed to produce the same results. Our wok is of a different shape. We stir in different directions.

That said, one should concede that Thai politics is a shadow of our own. A visiting Thai opening a Pakistani newspaper would not feel as if he is reading science fiction about aliens from another planet, but watching a performance enacted by political puppets controlled by unseen hands.

He would understand the recent utterances of the Pakistani chief of army staff warning civilians to operate within given norms, for the Thais too have an army that rules while the king reigns, and parliament governs. That explains why a Thai prime minister should feel it necessary to call formally with members of her cabinet on the president of the king’s privy council.

The prime minister is Yingluck Shinawara (the younger sister of the ousted prime minister Thaksin who is negotiating a political comeback) and the elder privy councillor Gen (retd) Prem Tinsulanonda who was prime minister from 1980 to 1988.

All Pakistani rulers since the 1980s — from Ziaul Haq to Asif Zardari — have looked not towards Thailand the country but to Singapore (a city-state no larger than Karachi) as the success story they want to emulate. Each has sought the advice of Lee Kuan Yew.

Mr Yew’s trenchant comments on each of them in his memoirs make interesting if uncomfortable reading. He writes about one: “He was an ebullient and outgoing wheeler-dealer, with no inhibitions in telling me that he was ready to consider any deal in anything — cutting a good deal was what life was about for him. He was in fruit and other export business, in real estate and everything else.”

What Mr Lee Kuan Yew did not disclose in his memoirs was his profound sadness that of all the countries he had visited in the world, he regretted that “Pakistan was the one country determined to commit suicide”.

The writer is an author.