Yesterday night i was talking to one of my pals somehow the conversation boiled down to our religion which is sikhism, apparently what he said was a huge disappointment.
So here is how it goes:
Being punjabi, he does not speak, write or understand anything. He is absolutely lost when it comes to punjabi. So i questioned him being 10 years my senior, what happens when people talk to you in punjabi for eg: the elderly.
He: i reply in english or i walk away.
He does not even know the basic greeting of welcoming in punjabi and i told him if you didn't learn punjabi what did you learn?
He: malay, definitely he is very fluent in malay.
However isn't it ironic that you are able to learn to preserve other cultures but not your own?
He: I SEE NO NEED AND I CANNOT BE BOTHERED,
That caught me offguard. He does not even celebrate the common festivals we celebrate in the punjabi society, for the chinese you have chinese new year for sikhs we have diwali or vesakhi which yet again he has no clue about how to participate in the festivals.
Now that indicates a lot of culture decandence, he summed it all up and put it across to me if i were ever to have kids no way would they speak punjabi, because i don't even know how to do my prayers in punjabi when they are prayers in a temple. Its that bad, so i told him its amazing because everyone is given this beautiful gift from god known as religion, what you do with it is your gift back to god. However its a pity that he does not realise the beauty of it, he has practically lost his identity in a modern world and it does not bother him at all. At the end of it all since the conversation was not going anywhere since he was bent on i cannot be bothered about my religion, i concluded that he was entitled to his opinions and so was i. This was absurd coming from a diploma holder who has graduated from a local polytechnic and has a good job earning a salary of about 7 grand.
Does knowledge really broaden our horizon? I beg to differ in this case.
tasha signs off.
