It has been an eventful week for NKF and now with a interim management in place to take over the previous management who had resigned en bloc, everything should be back to normal and hopefully it will regain the confidence and support of the public for its various life-saving programmes. NKF has been set up to help kidney patients who can't afford to undergo expensive dialysis treatments and it has done a good job of providing for these unfortunate patients for the past 37 years, thus regardless of what the past management has done, it's unfair to penalise these patients who were fighting to keep alive - an instinct that all living things possess.

Talking about this natural instinct, it makes me ponder what has happened to this very instinct of those who had taken their own life. How did they lose their natural instinct to stay alive? Perhaps whatever they were going through then had suppressed their desire to continue living. Perhaps they felt that being alive was more miserable than being dead. Perhaps they believe that that was the only way to get back at those who had contributed to their sufferings. Perhaps ...... the list can go on.

What then is the value of life? It's ironical that on one hand, we have people struggling to stay alive while on the other hand we have people so determine to end it all. Take the recent incident of a 16-year-old boy who jumped off from his girlfriend's block of flats when she refused to patch up with him. Was he trying to make her feel guilty for the rest of her life by committing suicide in front of her? Maybe he was and I believe that he had succeeded not only in haunting her conscience for life, he had also broken his mother's heart for good. In fact, cases of teenagers ending their lives for love have been increasing and they are also getting younger. That brings us back to the question of the value of life. How do we place a value on life? Who or what determine the value of life? Whose life is more valuable, a person living in luxuries or a person living in poverty? Is a healthy person more valuable than a dying person? Between a child and an old man, whose life has more value?Whatever it is, one thing for sure, not all lives are of equal value simply because the value of a life is determined subjectively. To some, the quality of life (being rich or poor) is used to determine its value, to others, the state of life (being healthy, ailing or old) determines the value. Thus, it's up to the individual to determine the value of his/her life but that doesn't mean one can go round devaluing our life and end it as and when we feel like it. We are all bonded by some social and moral responsibilities and to end one's life recklessly, we are not only being irresponsible but more importantly we are being selfish and unfair to those who love and care for us.

We only realise the value of a friend after losing a friend, do we then have to lose a life to value a life? What is the value of your life? How valuable is your life to you and to those around you?

' The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.' Have you begun living your life yet?