He wanted to look at pussies at the SPCA today, so I humoured him. Many of the dogs looked gaunt. Of all of them, I particularly liked this Prince Charles:
After that, he humoured me by going to watch the Nam Wai Pai Qigong Demo, which I'd been wanting to go for quite a long time, ever since seeing the ad in the papers.
The audience was rather large, included many English speaking people - surprise and even one guy from Sri Lanka. Needless to say, at least 5 of us had cameras or videocams.
It was really amusing, for to promote their Qigong, they demonstrated many fantastic moves. For example, what is described in the ad as "See the Master using his 'Qi' to repel 8 strong men charging at him". A series of frames from some of the videos I took follows.
And then was the part where some demonstrators absorbed "Qi" from the ground (considering this was on the 5th storey, I assume if they'd done it on ground level, they would have been so powerful, they'd have been able to fly ala Chinese Gongfu Movies). It looked quite freaky, like they were in a trance.
After charging themselves with "Qi", they invited "young, strong" audience members to hit them. Naturally I was chosen. I hit his back 3 times with each forearm, and after that my arm felt a bit warm and tingled (probably from the increased blood flow). If it'd been up to me, I would have kicked him in the stomach to test his "Qi" but, oh well.
And the penultimate demonstration was the Master using his Qi to repel 8 strong men lined up in front of him.
It was all very melodramatic, but easily faked.
Through the session, Qigong was touted as having lots of therapeutic properties - from lowering blood pressure, to getting rid of asthma, to destroying lumps in one's breast. I'm not sure what to believe, but the power of the mind is great indeed, and there is much about the human body that modern medicine does not yet know.
[Update: I'm told NUS has a Nam Wah Pai Qigong club too. wth?!]