All humans are the same wherever they may be. Who causes the difference?

How we take for granted our neighbours’ presence as we live our lives from day to day sharing each other’s joy and sadness, living our lives safe in the knowledge that there are friendly people around us regardless of the neighbour’s race, religion or beliefs and cultures.

In the 1950’s when I was living in Caunter Hall, now known as Jalan P. Ramli, Penang, a number of families lived in a huge bungalow house with seven rooms, each room housing a family. Some rooms were not as safe as others as their doors face the outside of the house while some rooms are safer as the doors lead out into an enclosed locked area with the common kitchen and big bathroom within that enclosed locked area.

Safer or not, all the families knew that help was always available should the alarm be sounded. Of course, in those days, there was no electronic alarm device which could turn on lights and alert the occupants with loud sounds should there be movement detected in the darkness of the night. But what they had was just as effective for should any occupant were to hear any suspicious movement or sound outside, he or she immediately reaches for a metal pan or its lid and hit it with a stick to sound the alarm, thus awakening all the other households, with every awaken occupant reaching for his or her own pot and stick to add to the din and that was sufficient to deter any robber or mischief maker from continuing with his/her nefarious activity. Pots and pans must be cheap in those days. Either that or they did not mind having dented pots and pans to cook with and possibly broken wooden ladles

And in those days, the Chinese, Indians and the Malays live closer to each other, especially in the rural areas where the simple folks only think of themselves as humans living together with a togetherness that has unfortunately been destroyed by the craze for power and ego politically and in matters of religion where there are those who divide humans into races and religions in order to master the power over God’s people. (To me, everyone is God’s people and God does not belong to anyone, for God is the creator.) These power crazy people use race and religion to separate the people, dividing them, creating the idea that certain races are more superior to others and certain religions the only religion of God, putting in human laws and professing such laws the words of God sometimes by having differing interpretation of words in holy books so that today in every existing religion, there are so many sects or groups with slightly different beliefs and these different sects are not on friendly terms with each other and in such a manner are moving away from the most important teachings of God, one of which is that all men are brothers, therefore women sisters. All are the same in the eyes of God Almighty.

Let us go back to those old days in Caunter Hall, Penang, where of the seven families, one of them was an Indian Muslim family. Although the family practiced the Islamic religion, praying at mosques and not eating pork, they cook in the same kitchen where others cooked their pork and sometimes accept and eat boiled cubed sweet potatoes from the same bowls as those used by the others, as the religion does not want its followers to eat pork and that is accepted and understood by everyone and no one would insist a Muslim should eat pork. With that understanding, they would eat at the same table too, respecting each and everyone with their religion's do and don't. And none felt any other difference among themselves except where religious rules are concerned.

Today, as politics and religious leaders put more meaning into race and religion, more differences are created and many Muslims cannot accept the sight or presence of pork. Sometimes, there is so much suspicion on the food available when it is prepared by people from another religion, even when those people are friends who would never knowingly hurt the feelings of their friends. Some would not take food even from the same bowls or utensils just as some Buddhist separate their utensils from those of non-vegetarians. Do we have to be more than just not eating a particular food? Does God mean us to be this way. Where the Buddhists are concerned, the religion encourages them to eat vegetarian food because Buddhists believe they should not kill and therefore by not eating meat, the necessity to kill the animals is eliminated. But to use utensils which had never been used to cook meat, I think that is not what the Buddha teaches.

It happened a few years ago. This friend was so disappointed especially as he believed that his friends were different. Although the relatives and in-laws had advised him against it, in a positive state of mind he went ahead and reserved some tables in one section and had ordered Muslim food from another restaurant to be delivered there so that all his friends, regardless of race would be there to celebrate the most important occasion of his life, his marriage. Unfortunately, less than half of the expected guests of those specially reserved tables were present. Here was a man who thought his well-educated friends were above those divisive ideas but instead had a lesson delivered on that occasion. Yet it ought not to have happened as suitable food had been provided. If the place was not suitable, would the few who came had come? Who caused such a feeling of difference? It certainly is not God’s doing. God would not be that small minded to mind the place. From what I observed, it is the slow but gradual planting of suspicion in the mind that leaders do to divide, inculcating a difference and inferring that the leaders’ ideology is far more superior than the others.

This superiority complex has been a thorn in the peaceful togetherness of humans. It is the idea of race superiority that led Alexander the Great to conquer other countries, to become their conqueror and have them be the conquered. Then, the same superiority led Hitler and the Nazis to cause so much death and destruction during the First World War. Again, the belief in Japanese’s supremacy took on the world to prove Japan’s greatness through another round of death and destruction only to shaken from their illusion by the atomic bomb. Man has learned from history and understands that with nuclear bombs available, a third world war can lead to the destruction of the human race or worst, the remaining humans maimed or scarred or permanently affected by the nuclear chemicals, living a life of misery, a horrid reminder of human follies.

So history has to be taught to every child in order that such a folly will never befall us to the extent of causing man not just to cause division through some kind of dislike or hatred but a war in which can possibly bring the end to this world or as I have said something incredibly worse.