SINGAPORE, (AFP) - Funerals are normally sombre affairs but at the Nirvana Memorial Garden in Singapore mourners could be forgiven for thinking they had strayed into a luxury hotel with a mystical Asian theme.
 |
| One of the rooms with ancestral tablets (L) sitting on the shelves around the wall of Nirvana Memorial Garden in Singapore. |
The self-proclaimed "six star" columbarium, where families can store the ashes of their loved ones for a fee, offers a modern and lavish twist to the ancient tradition of honouring the dead.
At a recent ceremony in a dark, cavernous auditorium, a deep male voice intoned in Mandarin: "I will live on happily in your image and always remember you."Green and red laser beams shot out from the foreheads of three 10-metre (33-foot) tall gold-plated Buddhas as soothing chants and ambient music played from cinema-quality loudspeakers.
Suddenly, a beam of pure white light from above illuminated the main attraction: an urn containing the ashes of a recently cremated person, sitting on a revolving pedestal shaped like a lotus flower.
The 13,000 square-metre (139,931 square-foot) centre is the biggest and most ambitious project by Malaysia-based columbarium operator Nirvana.
From the "check-in" to the long-term stay, the company, which operates smaller projects in Indonesia, Cambodia, Taiwan and Vietnam, consciously replicates the feel of a top hotel.
"Actually it's not for the dead people, it's more for the live people," said Phang Siang Yang, Nirvana's country head in Singapore, a largely ethnic Chinese society with a rich but rapidly ageing population. |
E-mail
