FASS Awards Ceremony 2007

I was part of the audience for this ceremony on 17 Aug 2007. The ceremony started punctually at 7 pm with the Dean, Prof Tan Tai Yong giving the welcome address and congratulating all the prize winners. First up was the giving away of the Long Service Awards medals - from EL department was A/P Anne Pakir. The host was A/P Paulin Straughan. what I liked about her hosting of the ceremony was that of the light-hearted way she conducted the ceremony through "comedic acts". For example, she announced her own name and went to collect her own award from the Dean in a humourous manner which made the audience laughed. There was a new category of winners this year which is the undergraduate research prize category that was different from past year's award ceremonies. This was the next category of prizes given out. Finally came the book prize winners. This was also different from previous years in that a more personalised approach where the department heads gave out the prizes to the winners instead of the dean. With that came the performance firstly by Dikir Barat, a kind of "Malaysian" style of vocal singing performance where the performers were seen to be able to interact with the audience. Some of the performers were from NTU as interviewed by the host. The second performance was by the KR Harmonica group. I feel that the performances were much shorter than last year's performance. The final prize category was the Dean's List recepients. First up was the 2006 cohort. This was the biggest group and the students had to be divided up into 2 separate groups for the photo taking. Followed by the 2005, 2004 and finally 2003 cohorts. The ceremony ended at around 8.30 pm with a reception outside the LT.

Death

I have several dreams about death. It might be a side effect from the life threatening injury and operation that I had many years ago. The feeling about death is a sensation of emptiness, hollowness, voidness, and timelessness whereby I felt that a million years had passed without me noticing it.

An appropriate quote about death is from an anime character from Inuyasha. In the anime episode 115, Bankotsu, the leader of the Band of Seven stated in front of the graves of Kyokotsu and Mukotsu that "Once you are dead that's it, there's no afterlife!"