So, revolution Singapore-style is in the air again.

Earlier this month saw a gathering of some 700 of the country's sports gurus and activists, and four government ministers, including Sports Minister Abdullah Tarmugi. They met in a seven-hour seminar to plot a reversal of sporting misfortunes in the island republic. It is the biggest push so far in post-independence Singapore's history to make sports matter in the nation's psyche.

Singapore's golden sporting years were in the colonial era in the 1950s when it produced world champions in badminton and weight lifting and ruled Asia in water polo. But things got progressively worse as time went by, until even in a sport such as soccer, in which Singapore had at least won regional competitions, it now struggles to compete with its regional rivals, none of whom are exactly powerhouses in their own right.

Two years or so after liberalizing various sectors of the economy by opening them up to the world as far as possible without affecting local initiatives, the power brokers now have their minds focussed firmly on the sporting arena. On the drawing board is a blueprint to enable Singapore to qualify for soccer's 2010 World Cup, for instance.

But skepticism with the authorities' sporting philistinism die hard. "Lip service" was never far from seminar participants' utterances. And who can blame them their cynicism? Sporting rejuvenation was dangled before Singaporean's eyes well before Viagra hit the scene.

More than two decades ago, the authorities started to promise huge payouts for Olympics and regional Games winners, with roughly a cool US$1 million the reward for Olympic gold. But sports development at the grass-roots level remains half-hearted, although the roads to sports arenas here are at least paved with good intentions. Even now - as with most discussions in Singapore - the seminar stopped short of addressing primary principles, although a great deal was said about changing society's fundamental misconceptions about sports. Here, the prevailing mentality is that sports is all about brawn and irrelevant to the nation's all-important gross domestic production. The seminar did reach an important consensus though: Sports is not just about money, career, respect, honor or the guarantees of such for athletes.

But typically it left unanswered the question: Why in the first place has a thriving nation like Singapore had to go out of it way to expend so many resources over the years, such as organizing ministerial level debates, on a common-sense subject like the promotion of sports? What brought this on?

Like other areas of Singapore life, its people have been subjected for far too long to a top-down regimen. When the government de-emphasized sports in the first flush of independence in the mid-1960s, the credo was that sports was meant only for people's recreation, implying it was so that they could work even harder the next day. Excellence in sports was then seen as a luxury Singapore could not afford. Consequently, social and sporting clubs became gambling haunts for the most part.

The "rot" continued for so long that these days what is happening is tantamount to importing a sports culture via a heavy reliance on foreign players, coaches and sports administrators. The country's top three badminton players are Indonesian imports and in Singapore's soccer S-League each team is allowed to register a hefty five imports.

It is clear then that it is crucial to encourage local initiative in order to reverse the slide. But that is a tall order in a highly top-down society. Be that as it may, what Singapore has going for her is her experience with building a citizens' armed forces against great cultural odds upon gaining full independence in 1965. The cultural impediment those days was a prejudice against military service among parents, just like the prejudice they have against sports these days.

"Good irons don't make nails, so good people don't make soldiers," goes an ancient Chinese saying, which had a great sway on the Singapore mind those days. But the Singapore government, to its credit, overcame that, just as it wiped out from the cultural and physical landscape the unhygienic habit of spitting in public places.

It does appear that if Singapore can overcome such negative cultural traits, then there is no reason why it cannot do the same for sports now - except no lasting solution will be found unless a good measure of a bottom-up approach is first encouraged and then grasped by Singaporeans themselves.

Already, led by Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore wants to be known for not only inventing the best system of government but also for reinventing itself. Last year the National Day message via Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong was that Singapore needed to reinvent itself by producing corporate revolutionaries. "In the next decade, we need to think and act like revolutionaries. We have to innovate, not merely imitate. We will succeed not by following the footsteps of the incumbent, but by introducing new dimensions into play," said Goh.

With so many good intentions to liberate mindsets, motivating people to accept the sporting ethos should not be such a chore as Singapore authorities are finding it to be. "What will take time is the larger picture of a cultural shift," admits Abdullah, even as he recommended the usual establishment of a sports school, a new sports complex, dynamic grass-roots support for athletes and state-of-art science and sports medicine facilities.

As in corporate inventiveness, sporting flair and values must come from a sense of self-worth and greater room for self-expressions. The snag is: In a state where it is well acknowledged - rightly or wrongly - that it is best to keep close to mere money-making activities because it is dangerous to venture out, then the result is the soulless state that Singapore naturally finds itself in.

Author James Minchin (No Man is an Island) expressed the Singapore dilemma succinctly in a 1997 radio interview: "If you deny people a participation in the shaping of their future, other than rabid money-making, but say you have to be inventive in every other area of your life, you are imposing a fundamental contradiction. You can't compartmentalize life in that way."

In a country without a sports culture, parents are extremely particular about what they perceive as their children "wasting their time and risking injury" representing their respective schools in sports when a sense of belonging is generally low and crass materialism and naked individualism is what mostly awaits their kids when they leave school in the increasingly dog-eat-dog Singapore society.

Singapore's parents need be convinced that under the prevailing social climate they would not regret imbuing their children with the sporting ethos of fair play and equality under the laws of the game, rather than simply preparing their charges to survive and prosper in the law-of-the-jungle conditions which currently prevail.