Basket.

I abhor the team-building activities that are from time to time a feature of every Singaporean student's life. When I was a student, I usually stood by the sidelines trying my best to look invisible, or observed grimly as more enthusiastic schoolmates rushed to get themselves dipped in fresh mud.

You have to question how much these activities really achieve. Singaporean teenage life is, unfortunately, utterly dominated by cliques, closed groups of friends amongst which inside jokes are created and shared. An individual might belong to more than one or freely move about several, but the vast majority are tightly closed to outsiders. How would activities that usually require getting really, really wet/muddy/sweaty/tired/unnecessarily intimate with members of the opposite sex help in this regard?

Loners will always remain loners, and the (so-called) socialites will simply keep gathering more and more companions around them. It isn't a situation that can be changed by an afternoon of fun and station games. The loners take part because they have to, but they are never truly welcomed, and end their school days with only the most mundane of memories.

It is this group that is the most difficult to help. Loners can also be divided into two categories: those who are loners by choice, and those who are simply left behind, too quiet and too shy to make friends with anyone. It hardly needs be said that the latter group is the more unfortunate. The former are usually strong enough to survive on their own, to strike out and flourish and be known to history as great individualists; or at the very least carve out a comfortable existence. They simply prefer to go it alone, and do, with success.

The latter, however, usually greatly desire companionship - but lack the means to obtain it on their own. They may be painfully shy, or sharing different interests from the majority of their peers, or merely poor at the art of conversation. Either way they get left behind - when asking a class to split up for groupwork, you can usually easily observe it form up into cliques, and just as easily see who gets left behind, confused and looking lost. Sometimes they end up doing individual projects, while everyone else is having fun with their group discussions. It leaves one with a distinctly uneasy feeling.

But what can we do? Human emotions are a kaleidoscope of unpredictability, a swirling whirlwind of the ever-changing. There is nothing that can be forced on something so potent and volatile, least of all friendship. If two people don't get along, they just don't. There isn't always a reason, and they can't be forced to just get along and be friends and do all the things that friends do together.

It is a cruel world, and an uncertain one. Taking loners into the fold is easier said than done. As heartless as it might sound, they are better off sourcing for a way of their own rather than trusting in the artificiality of station games.