So what’s new? The hungry ghosts have come and left. The ang moh version of it, Halloween Horrors, was to haunt the Night Safari on the 30th of September. But the Wildlife Reserves Singapore (WRS) management decided to scrap the whole thing just 2 weeks before its launch.
The reason given was this.
-
A decision was made to cancel the Halloween Horrors event because of the negative feedback received from corporations, friends of the zoo, the public and the media about the event, especially over the relevance in relation to conservation.
Going forward, WRS parks will hold more family-centric activities, which will include new youth engagement and interactive activities and events throughout the calendar year.
Huh? Yao mo gao chor ah? That’s like leaving the bride on the aisle! Did the zoo manage to receive so much negative feedback just 2 weeks before the event? Look. The event has been very popular for the last 6 years. It was run by students from Singapore Polytechnic’s Diploma in Events and Project Management as their final year project. Seven months of hard work, almost $1 million dollars spent, 1000 tickets sold, all down the longkang. I’m sure apart from the students (who were advised not to talk to the media), everyone kaypoh enough would want to know why.
So why could they not just let the show go on for one last time? We can have our family-oriented programmes AND this event on separate days. Why cancel the latter last minute when all systems have been checked and everyone involved was ready to go? Why the urgency to stop it unless it somehow threatened our national security?
I doubt we can get to the bottom of this and it probably won’t bother too many people busy catching up with another episode of Love. But all this reeks of authoritarianism. If WRS had done this to a real events company, they would certainly have been sued. I can only think of worse things that can happen to WRS if they have an angry bride to deal with. Fortunately for them, these are just students and having been a student before myself, we know better than to raise any “challenging” issues before our report cards were filled up.
Halloween is a mix of ancient Celtic practices, Catholic, ancient Roman religious rituals and European folk traditions that blended together over time to create the holiday we know today. Halloween is a time of celebration and ritual. It has has long been thought of as a day when the dead can return to the earth and ancient Celts would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off these roaming ghosts.
Doesn’t that sound like some local festival we celebrate here every lunar 7th month? In America today, Halloween is more an excuse to have some ghoulish fun than anything else. Strangely, our learned folks at the helm even gave devil-worshipping as a reason to cancel the event. Again, it was last minute – as if they had a last minute “revelation” that Halloween is about devil-worshipping.
But toothfully, Halloween does have something to do with ghosts and spirits. Even Christmas has its fair share of ghosts in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. We must not fail to take into account the many folks among us who fear these things. It could be due to guilt, culture, upbringing or just being Ebenezer Scrooge.
Nobody welcomes death or tragedies, but sometimes in life, we learn a lot more from tragedies than happy endings. A recent tragedy at home made me realise what would happen to me after my last breath. Having done human dissections in anatomy class in school, there is nothing frightening about dead bodies apart from their looks and smell.
I might be a little afraid of the dead bodies of some highly vocal people I know, coming back to life to say their last words, but seriously if it’s a dead body of someone close to me, the last thing I fear would be their ghost haunting my home or even possessing the people around me. The sad fact is that dead people are inactive. No matter how much we wish we could talk to them, they will not listen. No matter how much we yearn for their answers to our questions, they will remain silent forever. Mandai Columbarium is probably one of the most peaceful places in Singapore that I know of. As a final resting place, it lives up to its name. The staff here seem so relaxed and friendly. I wouldn’t mind being their colleagues after retirement.
Even the most powerful words will not move the dead. The tears from a hundred men will not bring back the body’s warmth. We talk and we sob nonetheless, before the lid is shut one final time. When you’re truly in love, you would not worry too much about not gaining from the relationship. If you are truly mourning, you don’t fear looking at a deceased loved one. Nevertheless, the fear of ghosts and the repugnant attitude towards the dead that some people demonstrate at a funeral is an indication of how I would be treated when it’s my turn to lie in the coffin.
