On Sadness and Happiness During Eid Mubarak

Today is the 28th Ramadan and insha'allah in two or three days, we will celebrate Eid Fitri of 1430H. At the office, many of my staff are already on leaves and perhaps few of them are already on thier ways to thier hometowns for the celebration. Those still working are practically just waiting to go home and essentially festive mood has overwhelmed the desire to do anything. We were told that for today we can go back one hour early and I am definitely sure this is a welcome news to everyone.

I did not quite fulfill my target to have a perfect Tarawih jemaah this year as I already missed three days. But overall, I am quite please and thankful to Allah as I did not really suffer prolong gout or headache that limit my ability to go to the mosque. This year also is quite a strange year for me as I did not get a single Buka Puasa invitation from any company except from my own. Perhaps, I am already out of the radar or could be people just become fed-up to invite me again because I always prefer breaking fast with my family and shunt the invitations. Whatever the reason is, I actually feel releived as I do not have to brace the evening traffic jam to go to some of this functions and more often than not, miss more tarawih prayer .

On one of the Ramadan Kuliah Subuh I attended, the Ustaz mentioned that for some reason we the Malays like to associate Eidfitr with the feeling of sadness and despair. This can be observed in many ways such as they way we melodize our Takbir Raya and also the way we sing the Raya songs ! Full of sadness, full of hopelessness :-(

Granted that some Raya songs are rhytmic in nature but majority of our Raya songs I would say, are very sentimental and touching. The true spirit of Eidfitri should be a joyous one and that is why Allah ban fasting on the first day of Eid so that all muslims can celebrate the joyous occasion.

As a muslim, , we have been guaranteed by Allah to be free from the feeling of fear and sadness as qouted in the following ayat:


What I understand is that if we do all the things asked by Allah and avoid all the things that are forbidden, we will be among those that will be at peace all the time ! Hence..why do we need to be sad especially during Eid ?

A Great Team Effort...

This morning I received an email from the aide of my divisional VP. The email is basically a thank you email from the VP to all of us for the very good result that we acheived in the last Fiscal Year of 08/09 in terms of reducing the loss of load. In fact, the achievement is almost 600% better than last year and frankly speaking, I could not imagine last year anybody in the company would think that collectively as a division, we could achieve this . I was overjoyed when I read the para that mentions "He said that such great achievement could not be achieved without support and hard work put by Asset Maintenance and System Operation, of course with strong cooperation from other departments". The fact that my department was co-singled out for this achievement really means a lot to me and my staff especially after what we have gone through together for the last 1.5 years. Looking within the unit, I could only attribute the success to each of my staff for their perseverence, hard-work, dedication and unselfishness in getting things done the way they should. Of course there were many ups and downs along the way not only for them but also for me, but alhamdullilah, we managed as team.

The challenge for us now is whether we can sustain this achievement in the current FY. With so many uncertainties about the industry future and the impending change of guards in the company,I am only hopeful that all of us can maintain the momentum and move forward with full of zest. But as they always say, maintaining is more difficult than achieving and with this may Allah help us in our earnest effort to be the best !