David Hartanto Widjaja: celebrity.

David Hartanto Widjaja has become a posthumous celebrity of some kind. I say this upon observation of the traffic to my blog. You see, since the day news of his death by attempted murder-suicide broke and I wrote of it, about one fifth of the traffic to my blog has arrived with searches for either "David Hartanto Widjaja" or simply "David Widjaja". A few arrive by searching "NTU boy commits suicide over scholarship". I find this really very surprising, for I have been tracking news stories for two years, now - and this is the first that I have written of, that has attracted so much traffic.

I wrote of the death of Heath Ledger - and got a couple of hits a day for a few days after his death. Since mentioning David Hartanto Widjaja's shocking demise, my blog has been inundated with arrivals looking for more information about him.

His story of a despair that a young man could not take and thought fit to throw his life away, over, has become a persistent story - one with a momentum that few stories have. The consequence of this is that David Hartanto Widjaja is actually becoming famous in death. How sad, then, that what he is famous for is the manner of his death. Most who are famous after death, are famous for their lives, not their death. I think, given the significant traffic I am receiving in search of him, that, in some way, David Hartanto Widjaja will never be forgotten. The tale of the NTU boy who tried to kill his lecturer, then killed himself will long be remembered. With it, of course, there is a lesson beneath the tale: a lesson of the extremes to which the Singaporean education system pushes students, extremes which some students just cannot cope with.

I hope that David Hartanto Widjaja's memory is never forgotten. For, as long as we remember his short, tragic life, we may guard against putting our young under too much pressure in the name of academia. There are more important things in life than scholarships, academic achievements and educational status. There is love, there is happiness, there is peace of mind. I don't think that David Hartanto Widjaja felt that he had enough of these - particularly the latter. It seems more than certain that the demands of his course ensured that he had no peace of mind in his final months.

Let our children, then, know peace of mind, happiness and love. Let those be the core of their lives - and not scholarships, awards and grades. The latter accolades are hollow when measured against the things of life that have true worth. Singapore, of all societies, needs to learn this. Otherwise, it is at too much risk of being a hollow society. Oh dear, perhaps it already is...

Rest in Peace, David Hartanto Widjaja.

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to: http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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