Even as a child, I harboured very skeptical thoughts about the credibility of fortune-tellers, on the simple logic that if they could really predict the future, the one who should most benefit from this gift should be themselves. Yet fortune-tellers, like ordinary mortals, fall sick from illness, suffer accidents, suffer financial losses, are betrayed by people they trust, including even family members, etc. all of which misfortunes they could presumably have foreseen and avoided, or at least prepared for, to minimize the harmful consequences. Read more

Recently, many of us must have read about the wedding of the century, costing nearly US$80 million, of the daughter of one of the world’s richest men, a multibillionaire business tycoon in India. It was held over weeks, in different countries, with an opulence comparable only to some fabled wedding from the Arabian Nights. We must have gasped at the sheer scale of it all. Read more

Of all the social, moral and metaphysical issues now engaging us in these times of great flux and change—abortion, capital punishment, genetic engineering, cloning and euthanasia—it is the last that engrosses me most, simply because death is everyone’s destiny, and everyone wants a good death. Indeed, ‘euthanasia’, derived from the Greek eu meaning ‘well’ and thanatos meaning ‘death’, should have a positive connotation, but today, because of the surrounding controversies, it has become a repository of our greatest anxieties and perplexities, shown in the self-contradictory nature of its other name—’mercy-killing’—an impossible situation of an act of violence punishable by law, that is at the same time impelled by the motive of compassion, urged by all religions and moral systems. Read more

Oh, I see it’s you again. Don’t you have anything better to do?

What can be better than talking to you, God? It’s a privilege, an honour, a joy, an inexpressible—

Alright, no more of the flattery.

But God, every prayer that goes up to you, from churches all over the world, is pure, unqualified praise. If you don’t call that flattery— Read more

There was a brief period in my life when I felt the urge to see, with my own eyes, how those on the other side lived, especially those on the outermost fringes of our society, needing to be saved from the edge. There were the desperately poor, ill, deranged; there were the very young, scarred by years of brutality within the family itself; there were the orphans and the abandoned babies. I suspect I get these periodic bursts of altruistic fervour because of the secret guilt that comes from realizing that I have more than my share of good luck in this life. Read more