Nubeals Reports

Since most of the student body in PGPR is done with exams, you can see the life in PGP phasing out. Even life on campus seems to be coming to a halt. Lesser and lesser people are now seen at the various study rooms all around campus.

For someone who finished their exams on the 5th of May or sooner, they must be back home already, enjoying their vacations. After all, they did have a smaller semester than those who end their exams later, which means they had to cram more information in less time, so they deserve the early rest they get.

For others who end as late as this Saturday on the 10th of May, people may feel bad for you, but they probably don’t realize you had so much extra time to study - but of course at the expense of being under exam stress for a longer duration.

Quite a few people can be seen wearing formal clothes in PGP. It must be internship and job interviews that they dress up for, or perhaps they have already started working.

An interesting thing that people should know if they don’t have accommodation for next academic year and are counting on the vacation stay for three months: You are only given two months of vacation stay. Early July onwards you will be evicted so that you have one month out on the streets to find yourself a house, a condo, an apartment, a sidewalk - whatever it takes.

And eviction isn’t pretty. They actually get campus security over if you refuse to move out and get the cleaning staff to pack all your stuff randomly into neat little boxes. Then they put those boxes at the foyer so that you are ready to taxi away. Actually, that is a very good option if you are too lazy to pack. They pack your stuff for you free of charge if you refuse to move out.

NUS as a university has its policies and it can’t just kick out USP students who are Singaporeans with cars and homes nearby, just to accommodate a financially needy foreign student. That is life. Suck it up.

The cyclone in Burma Myanmar is being seen by the locals as a God-willed retaliation against their totalitarian, lazy leaders. The government, they said, was more concerned with their constitutional referendum until it really hit them - literally and more adversely in their southern parts. Now the government has received its punishment and must work its ass off.

Calamities have lately been seen as God-sends in the recent years. The issue of increasing homosexuality in Northern Pakistan was cited as being the reason for the October 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. “God wanted to rid the world of those evil-doers.”

And for labelled-and-treated-as-terrorists Muslims at many parts around the world, the December 2004 Indian Ocean undersea earthquake was God’s punishment for ‘idol worshipers’.

Together, many religions take calamities as signs of Doomsday approaching. The Abrahamic religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam at least have a concept of heaven and hell, and for that concept to materialize, the world must come to an end soon sooner or later. With calamities becoming a common occurrence there is no doubt in a lot of Jews, Christians and Muslims alike that Doomsday is near.

I suppose, one day a major calamity will earth the entire planet. Maybe, like in the movie Armageddon, we will use science to survive and prevail. Or maybe, like the people of Lut, we will cease to exist and perhaps be preserved in some special way.

Lut was the nephew of Abrahim who went to the city of Sodom (now you know where ’sodomy’ comes from) which was on the western shore of the Dead Sea. The people of Lut engaged in homosexuality and other evil so they were apparently engulfed in burning lava by God’s will and the whole thing was so sudden that their entire town was preserved (and rediscovered centuries later according to a show on National Geographic).

The blog “Nubeals Reports” has been officially launched on May 9th, 2008. The people behind this news-blog hosted it on WordPress in hopes of using some funky layout design in the near future.

The reporters have no agenda but since they are mostly students situated in a small country in SouthEast Asia, their reports will have a limited scope and a reasonable delay. They hope they will still be able to make some impact, if not a considerable amount, one of them said.