Tuesday, February 26, 2013

A moment of reflection

Wanted to share something that happened yesterday (25th Feb 13) when I was doing TA (Teaching Assistant) for a programming course. I forgot one of my student's name and he corrected me. I said sorry and in an further futile attempt to justify my mistake, I said that its hard to keep track of all student names etc...and we broke into a discussion and a third student also joined in...

Then this student started asking me about Islam religion. First I thought it as a general question and started answering him. Then I realized that he assumed I was a Muslim.I was shocked and maybe a little offended and quickly replied "NO!".. Then he said "Hindu?"...and I followed "NO!".. and before he ventured another guess I replied with a strong resounding answer, "Buddhist!". He smiled and said "Close enough!.. You all look the same..".

Later that evening, I was FB and saw another of these Halal posters claiming how different the Muslims were from Buddhists. But it seems, to a foreign eye, we all look the same. That got me thinking...the more I thought, the more similar we appeared to be. So these differences are nothing more than a problem of the perspective we take. You see the world through colored glasses and you ll see everything colored!. This post was not meant to claim anything more than a personal reflection I just had. Hope everyone will have similar experiences in the near future and will stop alienating all brothers in every other religion. We are people divided by casts, regions, provinces, elevation (upper country/lower country) etc... don't bring religion into the mix...and always remember, no matter how different you think you are, to a foreigner, you all look the same!.

Akila Subasinghe
26-02-2013

3 comments:

  1. The problem is with the book reciting idiots who know nothing what the Buddha thought about how to treat other religions. They know the poems by heart and nothing is in the brain.
    Suddenly they forget that we got loads of support from Pakistan and Iran to defeat the terrorists. Wonder whether they'd have rejected all the RPGs and close range trajectory weapons from Pakistan saying they were "Halaal"!

    Every country has a set of idiots who know nothing and dont realize they know nothing! What to do aiya!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Quite rightly so..Yes every country has a minority with crazy ideas. But when the majority stays uninvolved, the minority becomes the voice of us all. Thats why its important to call racism the way you see it. We do need to fight against any cultural invasion be it from the middle east or from within us. But the people who fight should never alienate everyone else. In fact, we should join together in talking about these matters. Lot of my Muslim friends on FB watches these posts, but never intervene... thats because we have already lost the cause. If people are only worried about the cultural changes, they then should worry more about the rising number of night clubs and high class brothels in Sri Lanka since that has way more adverse impact on our kids than few women wearing a burca. Its OK to regulate Halal branding through the government body (The SLAQ), but its so bloody unethical to call a ban for it. If we do, we are no better than the extremists, we are fighting against.

    PS - Things always go wrong when you take any book literaly..

    ReplyDelete
  3. We all are Indians when we go to west countries as my experience.

    ReplyDelete