With respect to my above comment, it looks like the Kent Ridge Common did sloppy reporting, taking the number of people who merely clicked "I'm attending" on FB as indicative of how many people would actually take part. The actual turnout was 40 students, just over a quarter of the projected 154 students. So much for being "one of the most popular student movements NUS has ever witnessed".

IT WAS a much subdued affair at the National University of Singapore's (NUS) Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences canteen yesterday as a student-run campaign to dispel the stigma of eating alone was held.

Over the course of the four-hour event, about 40 people turned up at the canteen wearing a T-shirt imprinted with the words 'I dare to eat alone', sitting at various parts of the canteen to have lunch alone. http://www.straitstimes.com/BreakingNews/Singapor...

Bernard Chen should avoid such activism. Or he might end being gazetted as a political association.

"Some 154 undergraduate students have signed up for the event. If so, this makes the campaign one of the most popular student movements NUS has ever witnessed in its history."

Was this based on the number of people who clicked "I'm attending" on the NUS event Facebook page? I ask this because this number appears to be from the FB event and it looks like it's open to anyone to click, and there's no guarantee or obligation for those who do so to actually participate. If so then isn't it entirely possible that that people may be clicking on this for fun when they have no intention of participating in the event?

Sorry for being the first critic of this article. I think you guys are taking a campaign which should be considered a joke too seriously. Is a defence such as that written above really necessary? The counter-campaign is nothing more than a humorous response. It doesn't deserve to be rebutted at all.