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By Mihar Dias March 2026
Only in Singapore — that gleaming utopia of efficiency, order, and immaculate void decks where even chewing gum is treated like contraband. A place where trains run on time, fines arrive faster than Grab rides, and neighbours can identify the exact brand of cooking oil you use purely from the smell leaking under your door.
And yet, from this antiseptic paradise comes a story so gloriously human, so stubbornly absurd, that it feels like a cockroach scuttling across a Michelin-starred restaurant table.
A 61-year-old man quietly pilfering women’s undergarments for five years.
Three hundred and twenty items.
Not cash. Not jewellery. Not electronics.
If Freud were alive, he would have cancelled all future lectures and simply said: “Gentlemen, I rest my case.”
Let us first appreciate the sheer logistics of this enterprise. Three hundred and twenty pieces over five years is not a crime of impulse. This is not your amateur opportunist. This is a man with a spreadsheet in his soul.
Think about it — that’s roughly one successful operation every six days. Rain or shine. Public holidays included. Probably even during haze season.
This wasn’t petty theft.
This was a hobby.
A lifestyle choice.
Possibly even a retirement project.
Now, Singaporeans will insist this has nothing to do with HDB living. They will tell you their public housing is world-class, award-winning, architecturally brilliant, and superior to most Western cities.
All true.
But let us not pretend that living stacked vertically in concrete pigeonholes for decades does not do something… subtle… to the human psyche.
Imagine a lifetime of:
• Hearing your neighbour sneeze through the wall
• Knowing exactly when the upstairs family flushes
• Sharing corridors with drying laundry flapping like territorial flags
• Watching strangers walk past your front door 200 times a day
Privacy becomes a myth. Silence becomes a luxury. Personal space shrinks to the size of a shoebox.
And when human beings lose space, they don’t become enlightened monks.
They become… peculiar.
Psychologists might call it “compression behaviour.”
Like chickens in overcrowded coops that start pecking each other out of sheer existential boredom.
Or office workers trapped in cubicles who develop passionate opinions about stapler alignment.
In dense urban environments, people seek control wherever they can find it. Some collect plants. Some hoard newspapers. Some monitor corridor CCTV like amateur intelligence agencies.
And some, tragically, become connoisseurs of unattended laundry.
There is also something profoundly Singaporean about the way this saga unfolded.
Five years of stealth.
Hundreds of items missing.
And nobody noticed until one early-morning resident spotted suspicious loitering at 4:20am.
Of course it was 4:20am.
In Singapore, crime does not happen in dramatic Hollywood fashion. It happens quietly, politely, and usually under fluorescent lighting.
Even the confrontation likely sounded like this:
“Excuse me, sir… may I ask what you are doing?”
“Nothing, just… walking.”
“With a bag full of bras?”
“Ah.”
The legal charge is equally poetic: a violation under the Miscellaneous Offences (Public Order and Nuisance) Act.
“Public nuisance” feels almost charmingly understated.
Like describing a five-year underwear heist as “mild inconvenience.”
But beneath the humour lies a slightly unsettling truth about hyper-ordered societies.
When everything is controlled — behaviour, speech, chewing gum, jaywalking, littering — the human urge to rebel doesn’t disappear.
It simply finds… creative outlets.
In freer societies, rebellion might look like protest marches or political activism.
In highly regulated environments, rebellion sometimes emerges in stranger forms:
Obsessive hobbies.
Secret hoarding.
Bizarre compulsions.
Or, apparently, nocturnal lingerie collection.
Perhaps the real lesson here is not about crime, but about human nature under pressure.
You can build perfect infrastructure.
You can enforce immaculate order.
You can design the most efficient housing system in the world.
But you cannot zone human weirdness out of existence.
It will seep through the cracks like moisture in concrete.
Quietly.
Persistently.
Often at 4:20 in the morning.
And so, somewhere in Bukit Batok, residents now walk their corridors with a new awareness.
Laundry racks feel less innocent.
Neighbours glance at each other with subtle suspicion.
And one elderly man’s peculiar hobby has reminded an entire nation of an uncomfortable truth:
You can regulate behaviour.
You can police cleanliness.
You can fine people into obedience.
But you can never fully sanitise the strange, messy, deeply irrational creature called the human being.
Even in a city that prides itself on being spotless.
Because sometimes, the most stubborn stain is not on the floor.
It’s inside the mind.
Mihar Dias (mihardias@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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