Saturday, August 16, 2008

The Meanings of a Day...


The sun rises, the sun sets, and a day ends. The night is another chapter, supposed to be a time of rest, of recollection, of planning. To make ends meet some continue to work to and through the night.
Nakamora was out and about the other day when he noticed a man having lunch of only a plate of rice and gravy and a glass of plain water. There was no meat, no fish, no vegetable either. Could he be someone on the way to amass a lot money to become a rich man, even a millionaire, by being thrifty to a fault? or honestly he is minimizing his cost of living expenses to finance the needs of his family. The man looked like the latter to Nakamora, and he both pity and respect that man for his sense of sacrifice and responsibility.
A day means different things to different people. For Nakamora, that particular day was for walking around and get connected with life outside his study. To others it could have been a hectic day at the corporate boardroom, in the laboratory, or traveling on the road. To others, particularly some teens seen loitering around, it could just be another day; without meaning whatsoever. Being able to meet friends, be together and have fun is all what a day means. They do no have any ends to join.
Everybody else are going their own way. Making their own ends meet. Some are concerned not just to make the ends meet, but to overlap, many times over.
Some of that overlaps perhaps belong to that man having lunch with a plate of rice and gravy and a glass of plain water... or for setting the meaning of a day, and of life, to those loitering aimlessly...

Friday, August 08, 2008

Forget the Engine, Let's Ride a Bike...


It's already more than 60 years ago. It is something that we should forget, others are beginning to forget that too; or are they? It happened so far away, not here. Why should we bother having anything that day, like some sort of commemoration?
Nakamora is not alone in asking those questions. Many others wonder the same too, but he got it cleared after the event. He followed the whole program of the Hiroshima & Nagasaki commemoration day, or H&N08, as the organizer, the Malaysian Nuclear Society (MNS) dubbed it. It was on Wednesday, 6 August, at USIM campus, Bandar Baru Nilai.
He took note of the officiating speech of the university's vice chancellor on the importance of tempering knowledge with morality and having good moral values, of using using knowledge only for the good of mankind, and the environment. The program showed that there are many ways of using the technology to benefit mankind. Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened, but that should not be reasons to abandon the many other benefits of the technology.
That was the message he got, and he could not agree more. After all, he thought, the engine that powers his car uses the same principle as the one that moves tanks used in battlefields. To be consistent, we should hate the engine too; let's ride a bike. But of course, he rationalizes, human is not always rationale, is not always logical, is not always consistent...