Takziah and Prayers for Tsunami Victims

“Death smiles upon us all, all we can do is to smile at it back”

(this must be from one of the movies, but I can’t remember which one. Must be Lord of the Rings... although it doesn’t sound like Gandalf at all...)

How true.

In less than an hour more than hundreds of thousands of people lost their loved ones all across the world, almost instantaneously. The death toll in Malaysia alone is increasing by the hour, with authorities expecting more bodies to be discovered while rescue mission continues unabated.

To these people and all those who share their grief, our takziah and prayers – sometimes I nearly broke down in tears at the image on TV3 of a father who was himself already dead mentally, utterly at a lost after all his children were swept away in the tsunami. Most of the time it is in this hour of great tragedy that we witness the greatness and kindness of men – greatest and kindness people are often born out of greatest tragedies.

To all the victims and their families – our prayers and al-Fatihah, may your soul find peace in God’s Heaven and may those you leave behind continue in peace in remembrance of you and Allah’s greatness.

Men spent zillions of dollars and countless hours developing the most lethal and destructive weapons and zillions of dollars more trying to protect themselves from the very destruction they crave – yet with a small movement of the plateau beneath our feet, which doesn’t take rocket science or quantum physics (this is a figure of speech, I do not appreciate someone coming back to me to explain the tsunami phenomenon using quantum physics) at all, God unleashed a tiny reminder to us human being of how great He is.

A silly idiot at my office (and an old one at that) made a stupid joke how it would be wonderful to be in Acheh now, since there would be thousands of young jandas desperate for comforting – laughingly talking about this as if it’s a joke on David Letterman Show (even Mr Letterman has better taste than that!). Unfortunately there are many geezers like that around us, who never pause to reflect what things around us mean, if not to us, to others.

Mpro did ask for permission and concurrence to use some of the money raised (and still left) from the last reunion to buy rice for the victims. Since he is already doing something about it, Mpro (the best Batch Treasurer that we never had ha ha, luckily he did become KPKM’s Treasurer and is still as honest as he was to the bone) might as well volunteer himself to collect any donation from batch members for the victims and do the buying of rice and clothes needed. So if anyone has some spare change, please contact Mpro and transfer the money to his account (this is not my scam to swindle people’s donation and share it with Mpro ha ha).

I rarely have any good things to say about some of our top politicians in the government, but the whole tragedy and Pak Lah’s conduct so far endear him to me a bit (as if it matters).

Our prayers are for the deceased and the families affected.

* ps – The quotation was from Gladiator, by Maximus. Ada ke Gandalf....