S. Rajaratnam rarely talked about himself unless probed. He would rather talk about ideas, and the idea he loved most was Singapore. Talk about Singapore and he would be in good form, his eyes alive, his hands gesticulating. Once, over a casual dinner with me in the late 1980s, he became so passionate about his message — the need to stir a love of meaningful ideas among the young (as opposed to meaningless) — that he knocked over his glass of red wine on the table. He picked it up, set it upright, and continued talking about the classical tradition of Socrates and Plato.

That is one of the most enduring images of S. Rajaratnam in my memory.

Since that evening, I had become a visitor to his house in Chancery Lane until some months after his death in 2006. When I first met him, I was a senior political correspondent with The New Paper, which reached out to younger readers. I believe he saw in me an opportunity to shape young minds, including mine. He was always ready to provide me with quotes for my articles, whatever the topic — from ASEAN, local politics and history to his Saturday nights. Later, in 1998, I rejoined The Straits Times — I had started my career as a journalist in The Straits Times in 1986 — and continued tapping his brain.

Over the years, as I witnessed how he deteriorated after a series of minor strokes, the visits became more difficult. He began to lose his memory and was visibly alarmed at this. He tried to fight it by writing down all he could remember, such as the name of his wife Piroska on her portrait photographs on the wall, and copying entire passages from the various books in his vast library, by hand, into notebooks. His scrawls reveal his abiding preoccupation with ideas relating to race, religion, national identity and Singapore's future as a united nation, just as it was when he became the country's first Culture Minister in 1959. Then the day came when he could no longer read or write. By this time, in November 2001, I had joined the People's Action Party (PAP) and politics.