~Unity in Diversity~

Over the weekend, I was reading a book by an international bestseller, Khaleed Hossein. The book is a fiction entitled A Thousand Splendid Suns. Initially, I bought it as a birthday present to a friend. Anyway that aside, my attention was solidly captured when I flipped through the initial few pages. The story, which set in Afghanistan, is about women discrimination and how they strived under the Taliban rule.

To describe the story as heart wrenching, is perhaps an understatement. Apart from swelling your eyes with tears (to someone perhaps but not me), the story drives you to think deep about discrimination. So in this post, I just want to pen down some haphazard thoughts about this topic.

Even in the 21st century, sad to say discrimination still happens in almost every society. It appears in different forms. It can take the form as gender discrimination, racial discrimination, sexual preference discrimination and many more. Being a smoker, sometimes I am also discriminated by that too!

It is really mind puzzling how discrimination can happen. I have read of accounts that women being gang raped in Middle Eastern countries. If that is not devastating enough, there are also not short of accounts, where women being burnt to death in India. In most society, women are always sidelined. Sometimes I suspect, we can even drown the whole world if we were to collect one drop of tears from each woman who has been discrimated since the last century.

Living in a multi culture society, I do not even want to talk about racial discrimination as it has become an everyday life affairs. If you want to get a feel of what is racial discrimination, nothing speaks louder than a copy of Utusan Malaysia (one of the Malaysia mainstream newspaper in Malay language).

From friends to relatives and even family members, my sexual preference seems to be very much of their interest. Maybe it is due to my level of sensitivity, which surpasses any normal guy, numerous times I had been harassed with the question whether I am gay. The peculiarity is I am not really angered by such a question but more like amused by it. Have you heard of people being asked are you straight? The rule of large numbers applies here. As the majority of world's citizens live a straight normal life i.e. getting married and have a football team of children, any deviation from it, is viewed as abnormal or against the nature. However, nature is not shaped by the majority. Nature is merely what you see, hear, taste or feel from the physical world. In other words, nature is largely defined by the experience when your senses contact with the outer world. Therefore, NATURE, to the contrary of most people believe, is largely a personalized individual experience.

If every human were to spend just a second to think - you and me and everyone else are not really so much in difference. You will find that gender, skin colour or even sexual preference are merely the attributes that shape an individual. Deep down everyone, regardless of gender, race or sexual preference, only has one aspiration and that's to be happy. If that's so why don't we help each other to achieve it together?