The Pizzazzy

Lantern Festival is a mid-autumn festival also known as moon-cake festival. Its a showcase of beautiful arrays of lanterns. Every year in Singapore this festival is held in the Chinese Garden.

This festival started on the 5th September and will go on till 30th September. So this Sunday me and Anand went to the Chinese Garden. From the MRT we could see the beautiful seven storeyed Pagoda lit beautifully. In the backdrop of the twilight the lit lanterns presented a spectacular view. We decided to take a round of the whole garden, click snaps and then catch the shows at the center stage, and then after dark again do a round of clicking snaps and hit home.

This years theme is “Magical Ocean” and true to the theme we could see assortment of lanterns based on water: mermaid, lotus, polar bears, penguins, fishes, corals, sting rays, sea horses. Along with some mythological chinese characters and dragons etc. It was quite an eyeful.

I was most excited about the free lanterns that we collected at one of the counters. I lit them as suggested by the lady behind the counter and carried them around till the candles burnt out.

Now some facts and figures, there are around 5000 plus individual lanterns making up an array of 23 breath taking displays. The whole set up cost around 1.2 million SGD. 45 professional lantern makers from the Sichuan and Zighong provinces of China were in Singapore for the whole of August and they manually constructed each of the lanterns. This year’s festival also aims to enter the Singapore Book of Records for the most number of marine lanterns in an event. Troops and famous bands are performing and also there is fireworks display. I heard the deejay mentioning that Tuesday would be fireworks display at 9. Going to miss that.

The garden also houses some shops for some traditional paper lanterns etc and some food stalls where one can taste some chinese delights. Check out some snaps from the festival.

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After a $2000 holiday to Phuket, I indulged myself in another extravagant purchase. It was the COMEX fair in Singapore, City Hall. Since I was fed up of my three years old HP Compaq, which started taking ages to boot and giving a bad performance even under basic home usage and above all made lots of noise after every few minutes oooossshhhhh… oooossssshhhhh and my lap would start practically burning from the heat it generated.

The COMEX fair happens every three months or so. But I wasn’t sure that before the next one my laptop will not break down finally. I dragged Anand along. That Saturday we checked out all the stalls. The very first one was Apple. iMac was really impressive, but then I was looking for a laptop right, so I also checked out Macbooks. Since I wasn’t too sure that I would like to shift to Mac OS completely, we looked around further for other deals.

Next was Lenovo stall. I was really impressed by Thinkpad, but since Anand was insisting I went along with him for other brands like Dell, Fujitsu, Toshiba. I guess my mind was made up and it was stuck on the Thinkpad T61.

After a lot of stall hopping we left the COMEX for the day with a bag full of pamphlets with a plan to return the next day. The whole of Sunday morning went into checking out the COMEX deals over the net and comparing the features and reading reviews of the laptops that had made an entry into the final list. Now the competition was between Thinkpad and Dell. Anand was for Dell which was coming to $2100 and I was for Thinkpad which was coming to $2600.

By afternoon we went to the fair once again. After a good lunch in the Food Republic we once again checked out first Dell and then Thinkpad.

The Lenovo sales guy was happy to see us back and remembered us from the previous day. Since I was seriously considering whether to save $500 in the difference by buying Dell or go for the very professional and sleek Thinkpad, the sales guy started offering some freebies (the usual at such Fairs) as he didn’t want to lose a sale on the last day of the fair. I was also driving a hard bargain trying to make up the difference of $500 by getting more of them.

During this whole episode between the sales guy and myself the only person who was dead sure that I had made up my mind was Anand. So, he assuringly patted the sales guy and told him “Don’t worry man you’ve already got a deal. I know my wife”. That was when the sales guy stopped his sales pitch.

And finally we took home the Thinkpad T61 along with a Sonic Gear Speakers, an 80GB hard disk, an optical mouse, a good case and also a free upgrade to 2 GB RAM. Let me quickly run through the configuration : 2GHz speed, 2GB RAM, 120 GB Memory, Intel Centrino Dual processor, 14.1 inches wide screen, weighing around 2 kgs etc etc.

Now that I have got everything in place from my old laptop to this and have finished organising everything, it quietly sits on my lap even after hours of running while I am trying to do everything at once. And the most impressive feature is that it can keep its cool and only becomes slightly warm after a few hours. YES, this is one proud owner of a Thinkpad signing off. Adios till the next post.

Hungry Ghost Month is finally over. Hungry Ghost Month! Sounds strange right. It’s not so strange in the eastern culture. The 7th Lunar month according to Chinese calendar is known as the Hungry Ghost Month or simply ghost month. This month starts around mid August and goes on till mid September.

For the past one month I have been noticing some activities along the road from MRT station to my place and around the campus of our rented condo. I observed people burning some colored papers, and traditional chinese incense sticks and also some food offerings in a group or individually. Being an Indian I simply assumed that it was an offering to God. Then I gathered from my Chinese and local Indian friends that it was the Ghost Month.

Recently during our team lunch we had a good time talking on various topics, Chinese Ghost Month was one of them. Our team has 2 chinese, 3  Indians. So, the talk was very informative and intriguing. I asked my chinese colleague about this ghost month. He told us that this was homage paid to the ancestors. During this month the spirits are free to roam on earth. The Chinese believe that the deceased ancestors come out of their world to visit living people during this month. Through out the month they make offerings, burn joss sticks and pray for the spirits from the other world. On the last day of this period they specifically pray and make offerings to ensure that the ghosts do not linger past their welcome period.

One can see by the road side the empty coal barrels being used for burning something. I asked my colleague about the papers that were burned and could be seen all over the place. He replied “Money!!” And as me and my Indian freinds were clearly shocked (since it is too much to think that they are burning dollars) he further clarified that not the Singapore dollars, it is some colored papers which they buy from shops. Its called Hell money.

Two questions immediately struck me. One, why was it called Hell money since everyone would wish that their ancestors finally landed in Heaven and not Hell. And second, why would our ancestors need money wherever they are. The common Indian belief is that once a soul leaves the body, they are devoid of all worldy attachments and detached of all materialistic things. I know this belief is again questionalble since we do offer food through the medium of crow to our ancestors. Coming to Hell Money, these papers are printed like normal currency notes with outrageous denominators like 1 trillion etc.  The money is offered to the King of hell to ensure shorter stay for any ancestor who might be undergoing a punishment. Some Chinese believe this is for their ancestors for spending in the other world.

During this month, the Chinese avoid any auspicious and ceremonial activities such as as marriage, building work or beginning of concern or prospect and even postponing a surgery if possible. A curious fact is that out of the 131 properties put up for sale by auction during this year’s Hungry Ghost month, just 10 were sold - for a total value of $9.56 million - new data from property firm Colliers International shows. This figure is one of the lowest seen in the past 10 years. Apart from other economical reasons this was also attributed to buyers holding the purchases during the Hungry Ghost month. Home buyers seemed to brush aside the usual worries over buying property during the Chinese Hungry Ghost month - considered unlucky.

I found this quite similar to the Shraddh period of Hindus, the pitru-paksh. Where we also perform prayers usually near a temple or at river banks to collectively pay respect to all the known and unknown ancestors. These prayers are usually performed under a trained priest. We offer food in the name of our deceased ancestors. For the whole month nothing auspicious is discussed. During this month no marriage discussion, no future plans are made and even no purchases are done even of small items like clothes.

It was very interesting to draw the parellel between two vastly different cultures even though the food offered by Chinese are KFC chicken, Coke, Pepsi. Both the cultures respect the deceased ancestors in a similar fashion. The Chinese Ghost Month also sometimes coincides with Indian Pitru-Paksh.