Never had I been so thankful to America as I was on Thursday, February 12, 2009. At 1:34 am local time, a powerful tectonic earthquake measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale shook Talaud Islands, the northernmost part of Indonesia, where I originally come from. In Jakarta, 2500 km down Southwest, I was soundly asleep. A cousin called not long after that but I had already had my mobile silenced before going to bed. Six hours later, when I saw the unanswered call, I called him back but couldn’t get through. Unaware of the situation, I dialed my sister and asked perhaps she knew why my cousin called me at such hour. [More...]
Archive for the 'Essays' Category
“In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes” Benjamin Franklin once famously said this line.
But why humans expect to die if the body has self-healing mechanism? True, the body gets sick from time to time but eventually it recovers itself. Biology tells that when a cell dies, another cell substitutes. By this mechanism then, theoretically, humans can live forever. [More...]
He came into the room so suddenly. At least that was I thought. I didn’t know when he arrived: a little boy, perhaps about nine or ten years old. It wasn’t the mess and the smell that he carried with him that had attracted my attention although, quite frankly, I was disturbed and annoyed by his presence. [More...]
The morning Garuda GA-200 burst into flames at 07.00am on Wednesday, March 07, 2007 was the morning I was scheduled to fly to Medan, the provincial capital of North Sumatera; from the same airport the fateful flight took-off from and with the same airlines. My flight number was GA-186. I could be on board of the ill-fated jetliner. Perhaps, in my frequent flying, using always the same flag carrier, I have flown with it. [More...]
To A.F.P.:
It was very early of a certain Friday morning. Several minutes before that, I had risen from my bed and it just happened that when I saw my desk clock, the time was displayed exactly in three digits of digit 3: 3.33.
I have a confession to make: I am not a morning a person. And even by now and then I was able to make it at certain acceptable hours, surely it was not that early. [More...]
