Chronicles of A Quiet Voice

The Incident Thirty four years ago, on 26 September 1983, at a time when diplomatic relations between the US and the Soviet Union were very edgy and overwrought with deep paranoia; and both sides had fortified themselves with nuclear WMDs; a man born forty four years earlier on 7 September 1939 near Vladivostock in the Soviet Union was just at the right place and the right time to make a nuclear war happen. Or not. Because today we live in a world where that war never happened. On that day, the Soviet Union’s ballistic missile detection system beeped up to five times; the system’s indication that missiles had been fired from the US. Stanislav Petrov was the one tasked with presiding over the system’s 200 computers and his report and recommendation to his superiors could trigger the Soviet Union’s standard compulsory response of swift retaliation before the enemy’s missiles hit their territory and incapacitated their ability to retaliate. Stanislav kept his cool and in the fac...

Preamble For very personal reasons, I have sifted down this Life on Earth to one simple belief. For political correctness, I state it is strictly my opinion which I have had to formulate over the course of my simple existence. It is my radar on this journey to the grave. Here it is. This Life serves only one purpose; to get to the next one, which is everlasting. This belief gives me vision and mission. I lose the plot most times, yes, straying into lethargy and deep indifference and into all sorts of muck and mire, but at the back of my mind, always, this belief is ever-present. A Brilliant Man Dr Stephen William Hawking died on 14 March 2018, at the age of 76. For most of his life, he was a man who was confined to a wheelchair, paralysed by a degenerative motor neurone disease mouthfully called amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and he was only able to communicate through a speech generating device. What he lacked in physical mobility, however, he more than astonis...

O how I love you, my child, with a love that yanks the rhythmic beating of my heart, pumping a bitter taste into my mouth. I do not want to leave you, the Lord knows. And I fight back my wrinkled tears for my love is feeble and useless to fight our Enemy, who, now, is knocking at the door of my Life. You can see, child, Death is coming. Ever insatiable, ever ravenous, ever unappeasable, ever yawning, it seeks to gobble us all into its endless abyss. It seeks to gather me now as my days run out like sink-water down a perfect drain. Would I that it were clogged! So my heart breaks when I see you live like it is not coming. Yet I understand. I also was the same when I was full of Life. But I see now that it is a mystery. Why do we live like Death is not for us? Like Death is discriminatory? Would I that it were! Maybe we would then have been some of the lucky ones, you and I, my child... But... Death is incapable of discrimination. This I know, child. Only One is eternal. Yet ...