As the saying goes, “every cloud has a silver lining”. However, in this case, is the silver lining enough to overshadow the cloud?

I remember that this incident was published on several local newspapers a few years back, grabbing many attention throughout the nation. However, I was too young then to fully comprehend the gist of the issue. Now thinking back, I decided to do a blog post on it.

It was a about a family, a poor family. The parents had no job and there was not enough money to support the entire family. They have several children and they were too much a burden for them to cope. The father went out into the streets to ask for help from people but to no avail. Everybody refuses to help him and thus he has no choice but to go to the extreme. He committed suicide. He jumped down from the Mass Rapid Transit(MRT) platform and the train went over him. This sparked mass media coverage and many people came to know about this tragedy with a tragic story behind it. This evoked sympathy from the general public and many people feel pity for the family and donated money to them. (this is only a rough idea of the incident according to what I can remember and some facts might be inaccurate)

Did the man really have to die so as to gain sympathy from the general public? Could this tragedy be avoided?

Firstly, those people whom the man approached shouldn’t have ignored him and they will definitely feel guilty when they heard of the death of the innocent man. However, I can understand those people since the reality of the world is cruel and no one or few would give money willingly to others just because they ask for it. This is also partly because people lost faith in donating money resulting form the NKF incident.

Secondly, the man should not take his own life as that would not really solve anything. Although it cause quite a number of people to donate money to his family, but donation is only temporary. What happens when all the money run out? Him committing suicide also cause much harm and pain to his family especially his wife. The wife will be overcome with grief and she would bear the burden of supporting the family alone. He should have approached any charity organization to seek help.

The charity organization can try their best to help him. For example, they can help him find a suitable job so as to have a stable income to support his family. With this he could be prevented from committing suicide.

Although I have said earlier that no one or few would be willing to give money to people just because they ask for it, but employers can be more sympathetic about this man’s plight and can employ him, providing him with a stable income. In this way, the employers will not be giving out money but will be giving him money for his contribution to the company instead.

Lastly, if the parents have trouble supporting the family, they should have made some family planning first before they gave birth more kids than they could handle. In this way, there would be less burden for the family and they would be able to cope better.

Now the mother is left to fend for herself and become the sole bread-winner of the family.

Lets just hope that the family is doing well now……

This is a website of the SOS organization which offer helps for those people who are feeling troubled and are planning to commit suicide: http://www.samaritans.org.sg/index1.html