Wan of a Kind V2.0

On Wednesday 18 th of February, more than a billion Chinese around the world welcomed the dawn of another lunar new year. In traditional Chinese astrology, different animals symbolize the character of the year in a twelve-year cycle. This New Year happens to be the Year of the Goat. Some prefers to call it the Year of the Ram, and yet others, the year of the Sheep. In Mongolia, they prefer their gazelle! There are people who debate about which is the correct animal. According to an official Xinhua news agency, some scholars argue goat is a better option for the traditional Han Chinese holiday, as it is a more commonly kept farm animal for the dominant ethnic group in China. But many Chinese folklorists think that the debate misses the point. What is important is the connotations of the sign rather than the specific nature of the animal. The symbol 羊 (yang) can refer to any member of the caprine family. For example, a goat is a "mountain yang", a...

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo tragedy, many have commented on the episode in our newspapers. Most of it is focused on the question of the extent of freedom of expression, and responsible journalism, especially when the discourse has to do with religion in the context of our own multi-religious ethos. Not surprisingly, of course, there is an outright condemnation of the terrorist attacks. Even on social media discussion, there is overwhelming agreement that the attacks cannot be condoned, let alone justified, and that the perpetrators must be brought to justice. A far more divisive discussion, is whether or not Charlie Hebdo had somewhat provoked the situation by its disrespectful satire of religion. Many seem to follow the line of thinking that freedom of speech isn’t freedom from consequence or freedom from responsibility, and that if one decides to pull the tiger’s tail often enough, at some point in time, the tiger is bound to bite back. Having said t...

“The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul... Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.” - G. K. Chesterton. It is often said that New Year’s resolutions are made to be broken. I certainly hope that is not true of us. I do believe that it is a good time to make some simple resolutions. Since people do not care about what we know until they know that we care, it is good to resolve to walk the talk. It is cheap to talk about values without practising them. This New Year I resolved to practice good neighbourliness even as we promote it as a movement. A friend of mine who manages a cleaning company created a calendar for 2015 with a series of cartoons. It is titled “Kindness and Consideration” . It occurs to me that that is precisely how we can practically show care to our neighbours....

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” - Mahatma Gandhi. In an internet article, The Fallen Stars: Regret or Relief? , co-authors Tan Wei Yuan and Loh Chuan Junn posed the sobering questions, “Why do celebrities choose to end their lives when it seems like they have everything in their grasp?” They highlighted a number of young performing artistes who have chosen to make their own lives. In chronological order, these include: Marilyn Monroe (1926 – 1962) Age: 36  Kurt Cobain (1967 – 1994): Age: 27  Leslie Cheung (1956 – 2003) Age: 47  Heath Ledger (1979 – 2008) Age: 29  Ai Iijima (1972 – 2008) Age: 36  Choi Jin-sil (1968 – 2008) Age: 40  Jang Ja Yun (1982 – 2009) Age: 27  Park Yong Ha (1977 – 2010) Age: 33  Each and every one of them possessed looks and talents worth dying for! All were extremely successful in every material sense. Yet not of all of them lived past 47 years of age for all c...

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 ...