When a natural disaster or even a traffic accident snatches away loved ones, especially young children in the bloom of youth, the sense of loss and pain felt by family members must be so acute that the future is simply a tunnel of darkness resembling the end of time.

No matter how big a catastrophe, the demise of human lives exerts its heart-breaking anguish on individuals. If the Earth is shattered in a blast, leaving no survivors, there is nobody to suffer grief. It would be a clean sweep as portrayed in Buddhist tales.

If doomsday is complete as it is supposed to be, there is really nothing we mere mortals can do about it.

The band-aid approach is laughable. A relative of mine from a province prone to such belief called days ago, reminding me to stock up on candles, and I said, "What's the point?

"The blowing up of Earth will emit so much light it's gonna light up the galaxy for quite a while. My candles are not gonna help either way, adding to the brightness or protecting my vision."

Of course, he conceived doomsday as an extended power outage, which, if you think about it, is scaling an absolute uncontrollable calamity to manageable size.

I believe this kind of positive thinking is drilled into us by Hollywood movies. If a massive meteor is going to hit Earth, we send Bruce Willis to splinter it up before it comes into contact with our peaceful planet. That 1998 movie is one of a rich line-up of disaster films that opened before the millennium, arguably to give vent to our innate fears of the end of the world. But the end didn't come, not even the scientifically authenticated Y2K that was supposed to wreck havoc with our computer system.

Different strokes for different folks	Muddy waters	When a star loses its luster	Blessed month for movie lovers