Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Life lesson before 8 a.m.

It was a chilly autumn day, as it always was in the north of France. Truth is, on this side of the Hexagon, it was always autumn or winter. Summer would grace us with its presence for two weeks a year, and before you know it, you'd be grabbing your winter coat on your way out again.

I was on my daily commute to campus, half an hour away across town. The journey was mostly uneventful until I caught a glimpse of my Solid Mechanics professor getting on the increasingly crowded metro. She was fumbling with her twisted earphone cords, or what I call the less intellectual version of the Rubik's cube.

It was always a funny sight when I saw my professors outside of campus, living their mundane plebeian lives like everyone else. The sudden realisation that they were just normal people with issues of their own, like earphone cords that needed straightening, or money problems, or just the usual waking up on the wrong side of the bed, somehow lowered the pedestal they were thrust onto.

She saw me. I shot her an acknowledging smile, but she took it as an invitation to come over and intrude the peaceful fictitious sphere populated by me and my iPod. Damn you social courtesy.

"So do you always take the metro to campus?" I asked her, knowing very well that she did. In my defense, there are absolutely no good questions before 8 a.m. In fact, if I were to overhaul the code of social conduct, I would abolish all forms of communication before 8 a.m. or morning coffee, whichever comes first.

"Yes, I do. It's just more economical, what with the hike in gas price and all," she replied. I nodded in agreement. Now that the first stupid question was out of the way, I was stumped. What do we talk about next? I contemplated talking about the weather, but it'd been the same grey sky for the last 5 years, and I wasn't a big fan of stating the obvious.

"So you're a Malaysian Muslim right?" she asked, brows arched. I nodded. "Which sect of Islam do you belong to? Sunni or Shia?"

Sunni, I replied.

"I'm a Muslim, too. My family comes from a predominantly Shia region in Morocco," she said with a smile. We then proceeded to talking about the different rites and rituals of our respective cultures, with no one trying to discredit anyone's belief. It was merely a healthy discussion between two people from two diverging sects of the same religion, without judgement or persecution.

I alighted the metro having learned something about Shia and life in general. Most importantly, I was all the more convinced that people are just people. Back home, us Sunnis see Shias as heretics, with some going as far as seeing them fit to be mass murdered. It's funny how we seem to tolerate people from other faiths more than people from another sect of our own faith. And here I was, talking to a Shi'i, with the Muslim faith being the common denominator for both of us, instead of our different sects dividing us.

The world would be a much better place if people would just let people be.


1 comment:

WP said...

Totally agree on this one. :)