Choosing to Know and Reshuffling Priorities

Friday, 23 February 2007
09.38 AM
Koningsstraat, Amsterdam

It is perhaps almost a fact: We live in this haven where we choose to be unexposed to what other people, who have different skin colour and language than us, experience. We care more about celebrity gossip than the effects of Chernobyl.

The use of the word 'we' is not of euphimism. If it was not because I had moved to the Netherlands and made friends with people from Eastern Europe, I would not have even known about the many issues they had to go/are going through. Having long discussions and gaining insight towards their ideas of integration, segregation, marginalisation, oppression and human rights violation; sometimes I still stay in awe listening to their stories. How their reality is so different from mine. And how the empathy becomes real just as a result of knowing. What if I hadn't known? What about the issues of people I have never met? If information becomes a tool to care, and information has become ubiquitous with the presence of the internet, then the current premise becomes: we are chosing to not care.

Amidst cultural globalisation, listening sensitively about cultural differences and historical accounts are no longer a mandate - it becomes an obligation. Of course we would invest more time to our personal issues but believe me, you would care less about not having a dress to wear for this week's party after reading about how, in the year 2007, people are still dying of malnutrition. Perhaps what I am trying to say is that once in a while, it helps to reshuffle your priorities by studying what is currently happening outside our little box. It is best shown through the words of Edward Said: "For the intellectual the task, I believe, is explicitly to universalize the crisis, to give greater human scope to what a particular race or nation suffered, to associate that experience with the suffering of others." And with freedom to information, we are all intellectuals with tasks.

Just as it works in simple conversations: if you do not listen to other people when they speak, how do you expect them to listen when it's your turn? In another metaphore: when you know the person next to you is starving, could you still eat your dessert?