Wan of a Kind V2.0

Last Saturday, I attended a Thanksgiving Service to honour the work of my college mate, the Rev Dr. Kang Ho Soon. After serving continuously as a pastor for 42 years, he is due for retirement. The sanctuary was filled with more than a thousand family members, colleagues and friends, including members of the Inter-Religious Organization in their religious garbs. It speaks volumes for the man who was all things to all people who, moving forward, seeks only to be there for all and sundry who need a pair of listening ears. In sharing his vision for life, he quoted Robert Byrne, who reputed to have said, “The purpose of life is a life of purpose.” The idea that life should or ought to have a purpose resonates with many. In 2002, Pastor Rick Warren wrote a devotional book The Purpose Driven Life . The book resonated with so many that it stayed on the New York Times Best Seller list a very long time. It also topped the Wall Street Journal and the Publishers Weekly be...

“And real talk, like, seeing these ants and studying them and respecting them, it’s like, man, they’re in their own community too. They’re trying to survive. They love. They fight. They’re telling themselves something. We can’t understand, but one day we will.” Brandon McCartney  “Go to the ants, you sluggard, learn how to be wise.” A Proverb. A well-known proverb commends the ants for their prudence, cooperation and industry. These social characteristics of ants are often used in fables and children’s stories as in Aesop’s The Ant and the Grasshopper. No less than Mark Twain wrote about them in his A Tramp Abroad.  The social nature of ants has also led other famous literati to use them as a commentary on the relationship between society and the individual. Among this genre are American poet Robert Frost’s Departmental and novelist T H White’s The Once and Future King. More recently, computer-animated cartoons and 3D movies feature these fascinating insects in ver...

"A good laugh overcomes more difficulties and dissipates more dark clouds than any other one thing." - Laura Ingalls Wilder Recently, I texted a friend to forward an email address to me. She promptly replied that her PC crashed. “I am sorry,” I responded, tongue-in-cheek. “I hope you are not hurt!” In a jiffy, she replied, “You misunderstood me; there is no physical crash. I mean to say that I cannot email you because the system is not functioning.” Some of us are very intense. We take everything rather too seriously and we often miss a jocular moment. We can be very hard on ourselves and we go about life with a perpetual frown as we struggle along with an albatross around our neck. The good book says, “Laughter is good medicine.” In fact, there is enough evidence to suggest that to bolster immunity, relieve stress, and alleviate pain, we need to laugh a little. As Laura Wilder says, "A good laugh overcomes more difficulties and dissipates more dark clouds ...

I am privileged to chair an ethics committee of a hospital and it reinforced in me that in order to determine what is or is not ethical we do have to do some critical thinking. In watching TV documentaries about animals, I am constantly made aware that there are certain intrinsic similarities between humans and the rest of living things. A good example is found in the way motherly instincts are expressed in both worlds. That said, however, there are many behavioural differences that transcend the power of instincts. I can’t imagine a pack of hungry lions deciding not to attack a stray buffalo simply because they feel sorry for the off-springs of its prospective prey. In our effort to think ethically, I am reminded of the statement “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The claim that an unexamined life is not worth living, often attributed to Socrates, a critical philosopher of the 5th Century, is subject to many varied interpretations. Whatever the interpretation, it ass...

When Cheryl Faith Wee of the Sunday Times interviewed me in February this year to celebrate Facebook’s 10th anniversary, I had to admit that my posts were erratic, though I had opened an account since 2008. Since then, I had rediscovered the Facebook as a platform for positive messaging. I am now a much more avid user of the social network and am quite enjoying it. My renewed interest in active participation coincided with my discovery of the PhotoGrid Apps. By putting together a number of photos into a single frame with some variations, I found that I could make my Facebook posts a lot more visually interesting. I also found that my text becomes more interesting when I have something positive to say. In the months since the interview, I have increased the number of Facebook friends though I am still rather selective. In February the highest number of likes was 49 and that has increased several fold to some 200 in some of my posts. I thought it is instructive to find out what ...

I grew up in a kampung in the 50s when I started school. In our community we had Chinese, Malays and Indians for neighbours. We had no running water and our homes were lighted up by a common generator. Kerosene lamps were quite common. We shared a common kitchen for several households, a common well and common toilet facilities. We were a ‘commonwealth’ for we share some common wealth of simple necessities of life. One of our neighbours was a Malay teacher. He was single and he lived alone. I used to visit him and he taught me Malay and Jawi. I learned to write Jawi script which is constructed from right to left. It was much later in life that I learnt Hebrew and Arabic at college level, and realized how these languages are inter-related. My Malay neighbour was very kind to me. Not only did he teach me bahasa he also taught me Malay folk songs and stories, some of which I still remember. Songs like Chan Mali Chan and Ikan Kekek still ring in my ears. My favourite s...

Today, Lucas, my grandson started his internship with the Singapore Kindness Movement (SKM). I am very glad that he chose to come all the way from Canada to intern here. And it leads me to reflect on the notion of internship. Internship is an effective programme for anyone interested in learning hands-on what a particular job entails. It can be a temporary position with an emphasis on on-the-job training, similar to an apprenticeship. For people who are not sure about what they want to do, and it serves as a trial. It can also be for students who are looking at the prospect of entering a course of study in a particular discipline and wants to know what it is like to be in that industry. Or it can be a time for students to be exposed to the working world in a realistic environment. From the employers’ perspective, internship can provide them with cheap or free labour for low-level tasks. Stereotypically, interns had been treated no better than “tea and office boys” in the...