I was watching my favorite food adventure TV show last night. The host was traveling in Calcutta, India; and he was keen to try everything local there. In one of the scenes, there were a couple of local hawkers, shirtless, bare-feet, sitting on low stools above the oil drench ground, rolling hundreds of small pieces of dough. They are making the raw material of mini-Poori, an Indian deep-fried bread. When the flattened small pieces of dough are thrown into the hot oil, they puff up into balls at the size slightly bigger than a golf ball.
The TV program host lapped up the street food and as he was about to finish his last ball of Poori, he complemented on how freshly delicious the filling was and he said “these guys have been doing this for generations”
That picture brought me back to many similar scenes in my own growing up days in South East Asia; visiting hawkers who do the same thing for decades, usually in the humblest shop that look perpetually make-shift. They often wear worn out t-shirt and flip-flops that may have been as old as their makeshift hawker booth. Many of them don’t spend time being nice to you, but their food keeps you coming back.
I flipped the channels on my television and landed on a news channel, updating me about the Israel Palestine war, the state of Australian housing market and the status of a missing person that has become a sensation in the country. The presenter was well dressed, fully made up and speaks very clear English. She is presenting three subjects that she has no knowledge about, but the prompter, the team that collected the information behind the scene, the clothes and the makeup helped to make her sound and look credible enough. I wonder what will happen to the TV viewership if the presenter dressed or talked like the hawkers that we saw earlier.
I flipped the channel again, and found myself watching a little bit of sports. The latest basketball sensation in the USA is a 20-year-old French player called Victor Wembanyama. He is 7’4, or 223 cm tall, 95 kg in weight with an impressive 243 cm wide wingspan. With that height and wing-span he can easily paint the ceiling in my house or pick fruits in my backyard without any tools. If I stand in front of him, I’ll be staring at his stomach; yet he is only 15 kg heavier, fast like a cheetah on the basketball court. I often wondered if a person like him and I should belong to the same species, because we are clearly so different physically.
At one point during the evening, I thought to myself on how different the three people I just saw on TV from myself, and from each other. We differ not only in our genetic makeup but also in our mental and intellectual setup. We are made even more diverse with our cultural exposure, experiential and nutritional intakes. By the time we take our first breath as an infant we would start on a trajectory that makes us so distinct and unique.
Perhaps the world is in such chaos because we do not dare to speak about our differences. Our modern socio-political discourses are based on the idea of “every human is created equal” and we rush to sweep our differences under the rug, as if they are sources of conflict, anger and pain. Our awareness of the breadth and depth of humanity has been so narrow since the time humans learned to travel the seas and it has not gotten wider despite us reaching the age of Artificial Intelligence. We continue to talk about equality only when others are the same as us.
We are so different, and yet we share only one home. The social media and the airplanes are breaking down walls that used to separate all of us. In this modern age we are like housemates who used to have our own rooms and toilet but decided to move to a big hall with shared beds, bathrooms and kitchen. All things that used to be private are now out in the open for others to see and experience. All things that we did not choose to see are shown to us, whether we want it or not.
In our world now, a big hall with no walls and many shared amenities, information comes to our senses from all sides in real time. The information overload is often bewildering, shocking, discomforting, because they are often so different than what we know all our lives. We make the situation worse by quickly reacting with our opinion and judgement. The big hall we live in becomes so noisy and maddening, and we start labeling things we can’t understand as mis-information.
For us to start moving towards peace in this world, we need to work very hard to reverse the trajectory of ignorance. We should try to see the depth and breadth of our humanity as a gift, not a curse. We need to embrace the differences, and allow those differences to enrich us. We need to pause from judgement and opinions each time something new is presented to our awareness. At the end, peace is achievable if we make space for each other to live.
March 2024
