Daily Lessons from Life 18 July 2009

There were 2 bombing incidents in Jakarta, Indonesia, yesterday at 2 luxurious hotels. This resulted in 8 confirmed deaths and 50+ injuries. Some of the injured were evacuated to Singapore for further advance medical care.

This is a sad and mindless slaughtering of the innocents. I never will understand why someone will commit suicide to kill innocent people to have their causes heard!

It will be a life long study for me to understand this phenomenon! Maybe for another day ...

Lessons for me are:

1. suicide bombing by extremists and terrorists are most prevalent among the Muslims in recent years. As I mentioned many a times, only religion can be so powerful as to ask someone to lay down their lives for a cause as the rewards mentioned are not something any lay person can possible promised or any non-religious people can possibly imagined!;

2. religion invoked extremely powerful emotion that will steam-roll rationality anytime anywhere and in any culture! Hence, I can fully appreciate in multi-religious and multi-racial Singapore our government never waver, and I want them never to waver, on such issues! Once the crack appeared by the most innocent of comments, those who want to explore the emotion and issue can do great damage in the shortest time like mercury pouring through every crack on earth to get down to the core and poisoned the earth! We simply cannot afford that!;

3. overheard on the radio that the security head of one of the hotels commented the security check and procedures were fairly sophisticated and comprehensive. Yet, at least one of the suicide bombers managed to disguise and check-in as guest with one undetonated bomb found in one of the hotel room! This shows that we can never let down our guards and everyone must be fully alert to such possibilities in certain hot spots. People who manned the machines and execute the procedures simply have to be extra careful. At the same time, there is no need to point fingers if the people have done all they could and the crime still get committed. It simply means we cannot lock-down on our daily life just so we can avoid another attack. It is a price we have to be prepared to pay!

May the Indonesian security forces quickly find out who are behind the attacks and swift actions taken to apprehend the perpetrators and their mastermind behind the whole senseless killing!