SINGAPORE - After 25 years as a practising lawyer, Indranee Rajah is bidding goodbye to the legal profession. A new dawn awaits her as Senior Minister of State for Law and Education, a post she takes up on Nov 1.

When tabla! caught up with the trim and immaculately dressed MP from Tanjong Pagar GRC at her Drew and Napier office, she looked relaxed and was in the midst of handing over her work and settling logistics and administrative matters.

Will she miss the profession?

"I will certainly miss practising law. It is something I've done for the last 25 years but at least being at the Ministry of Law will keep me in touch, which is good, and I won't be cut off completely," she says.

However, the seasoned MP, who made her way to Parliament in 2001 and rose to become the Deputy Speaker in 2006 - a post she gave up last year - is not daunted by the task ahead.

When asked if she has done any preparation, she laughed and said: "I'm not sure that being a minister is the sort of job that you can prepare for in advance. It's not like studying for exams, with pre-set questions and model answers.

The nature of the job is dynamic and every day will throw up new challenges. So this is very much a leap of faith for me - trusting that the skill sets I've acquired so far in the private sector will stand me in good stead and that I will learn the new ropes quickly. It's like going into free fall. Now I know exactly how that skydiver felt when he recently stepped out into space to jump to earth! Let's hope I land safely on my feet too!"

She added: "I think the best preparation is to go in with an open mind, rather than any preconceived ideas. Sometimes you go in with a certain fixed idea but when you get to know the facts and certain policy rationale etc, you may have to adjust your position."

She is aware of the PSLE debate making news in recent days and gave her take.

"A lot of it has been on stress - stress on the parents, stress on the children, stress on the teachers. But at the same time there is also the question of how we keep up our standards in the face of global competition. We can relax our standards but the global competition doesn't go away. But, on the other hand, if we go to the other extreme and stress everybody out, it becomes counterproductive. So I am going in mindful of some of the public sentiments," she says, adding that for law it is more familiar territory since she would have encountered many of the areas that the Ministry of Law covers while in practice.

Indranee, however, is not in favour of doing away with the PSLE. She feels we need an exam, whatever be its name, to gauge the standard of the students, because if we pretend that everybody is the same and that all are doing well then we will be in trouble.

Even diluting the standards can cause problems.

She pointed to the situation in the UK, where the exam system was revised, making it easier for students. There have been many complaints of standards dropping and the British authorities are now in the process of revamping their exam system yet again to re-introduce more rigour into their system.

"We don't want to go into these pendulum swings. If something is fundamentally sound and has gone a little off track or is unbalanced because there is just too much pressure, then we can scale back on that but I don't think you can do away with the need to have an exam that will allow us to objectively assess our students' academic performance," says Indranee.

On the question of school rankings, she feels there will always be some form of ranking, even if it's not official, because parents will want to know if the school they choose for their child has a particular strength in something. The school's academic performance matters to them and the child, though she acknowledges that this is not the only factor.

"I went to Marymount Convent and I remember that when we moved to a distant area my mum asked me whether I would like to change schools because otherwise I would have to travel longer by bus. I refused because my friends were there, my teachers were there and I felt that the school was good and and I liked it. The distance was immaterial to me. I didn't choose it for the commonly accepted 'rational' reasons. I chose it because I was happy there. And I think students nowadays likewise make choices based on a variety of factors," she says looking back on her school-going days.

It is not just in education that change is taking place. She points to the Singapore Conversation which is a new way by which the Government is engaging the people. If you go back 30 years, it was very much the Government saying "this is what we are going to do and that's that". Ten to 15 years ago the way the Government engaged the people became more consultative, but was overall still regarded as quite didactic. Today the consultative approach has stepped up. Things have changed since the last election. She feels there is a definite sense that Singapore is at the crossroads.

"The Singapore Conversation is an example of the Government's approach in trying to get as many soundings as possible from different groups to see what kind of Singapore we want and what kind of people we want to be," she says, adding that not everybody may agree on everything but you certainly want a sense of common destiny.

Singapore has come a long way since Independence but the starting base was low, in her words.

But while the people are better off economically today, the question arises whether they are happier. This situation, she says, is what most developed countries face today.

"I guess we are a society in transition and we are finding our way," says Indranee, asking me to take a look at history books. They will show you that civilisations or countries start off small, reach a peak and then decline. The successful ones are the ones that are able to rise again and repeat the cycle.

"We should do our best to avoid being in the category where people don't hear about us anymore in a hundred years! The key is how to weather the ups and downs. You are never going to have a situation where you start at zero and are always climbing. It's more like you hit a peak and plateau for a while but after that you have to strive for the next peak," she says, summing up Singapore's challenge.

The topic then moved to integration. A recent comment by India's high commissioner to Singapore that integration between Indian expatriates and Indian Singaporeans takes time started a debate in the media. Does one really need to integrate?

Indranee feels that, in a multicultural place like Singapore, you want to make sure that even as you have people gravitating towards their own group they must also see themselves as part of a bigger whole, because if they don't we cannot move forward.

In Singapore, she says, the authorities have tried very hard to have that overall binding glue which is that sense of being Singaporean.

It has been impressed on Singaporeans from childhood that there is a need for national identity and the sense of oneness and the sense of making sure that wherever you go and whatever you do, we think in terms of Singapore first and what is best for Singapore.

"But somebody who has come from overseas is more likely to be thinking in terms of 'I am coming here to make a better life for myself' and what they do revolves around that. Their first thought is not necessarily 'what is best for Singapore?'. That's understandable, given that they have not grown up here and their starting point is different. But then you can start to bump up against each other. You may look alike and speak the same language but culturally and socially you are not the same. And if one side feels that you are looking down on them or the other side feels that they are not being appreciated, there is lot of scope for misunderstanding. And this is not just about the Indians. The local and foreign Chinese have the same issues too," says Indranee on the need for foreigners to integrate, adding that it is important for them to feel that this is home to them as well.

She is one who makes extra efforts to attend functions that various Indian ethnic groups hold, to try and understand them better. And when she attends such functions, she is often seen in Indian ethnic wear. She has a keen sense of style which marks her out in a crowd. Indranee says she chooses her attire with care, depending on the occasion and place and also gets involved in the design.

Her trim figure adds to what she wears. The 49-year-old keeps herself fit by running regularly at the East Coast Park in the mornings and working out in the gym thrice a week.

She is known to put in long hours, juggling her work as an MP and lawyer. Now that she has quit the legal profession, she says with a laugh that she gets an extra hour or so to sleep. That probably explains that relaxed look.

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