Meeting and sitting with different people brings very interesting observations to us. In the same way, visiting different places also teach us so many different things that cannot be learnt from any book or other sources of information. But for this, few things must be kept in mind, which we can call to be the conditions for any such successful effort. Fist is to accept everyone better than you and accept and appreciate them in their present status.
Such thinking would bring respect to others and this respect will earn their respect to us and we will be able to enter their lines and get the true picture from a closer view. Second important factor is not criticizing others for their culture, traditions, customs and way of life. And most importantly, to put yourself in the shoes of others so that you should be able to see the things the way others see it.
You might have heard about the group of preachers, famous as ‘Jamaat-e-Tableegh’. These preachers take their things and travel for a duration ranging from three days to one year inside and outside the country and try their best to make people more informed about the teachings of religion. Some people regard this preaching as a form of addiction as a person who likes this work ones, never leaves it and continues it throughout his life. A relative of mine is also one of those preachers who has spent more than thirty years in preaching in different parts of the country.
In these thirty years, he has travelled a lot and met different kinds of people. He knows almost all the languages spoken in the country. When he speaks Pashto, listeners think that he may be a Pakhtoon but when he speaks Dari, his accent is so impressive that people regard his mother tongue to be the same. In the same way, he can understand and speak a lot many other small languages of the country. But knowing languages is not sufficient. He knows so much about different people that he can be called an encyclopedia about people, their customs, their likes and dislikes and many more.
Moreover, he has travelled so much in different areas of the country that he can tell the names of small villages, famous people living in the area, religious scholars of the area, important events or incidents of the area and many more. Many a times, I witnessed his interesting interaction with a stranger. It is his special habit to meet the strangers and inquire about his area and ethnic background. When he sees a stranger, he asks, ‘O my brother, where are you from?’ The stranger would say, let’s say, ‘I am from Helmand’. Then the next question would follow, ‘Which part of Helmand?’, ‘From Nahr-e-Siraj’, ‘Oh, which part of Nahr-e-Siraj, east or west?’, ‘From west’, ‘What is your father’s name?’ The surprised stranger would reply, ‘My father’s name is XYZ’, ‘Oh, how is he? How is his leg now? Three years before when I went to your village, I was told that he had fallen down from the rooftop and broken down his leg.’ With this, the stranger would no more remain a stranger and discussion would continue. Then he would gather a lot of fresh information about his village about the water problems, the chief of the village, the dispute between the two big families of the area and many and all these would further add to his library and would be used to surprise a person from the area at some other occasion.
Most of the credit goes to his personality that he is able to develop good relations with others and of course, his memory is so good that he can keep so many things in his mind and use them on their perfect occasions. But I observed that his personality is very polite and wherever he goes, leaves behind permanent imprints of his kind behavior. He is good at listening to others and be of help to them. In this way, he has become an ‘international man’ in terms of making so many relations and acquaintances with people of different languages, ethnic backgrounds, and areas.
Some may think that he may be good with those only who are poor and belonging to the villages and rural areas and who are comparatively simpler and greet warmly any kind of kindness towards them but it is not the case. He has also good relations with so many rich businessmen, influential officers and other members of urban settlements.
When I noticed these impressive traits in my relative, I started wondering as how it is possible that a person should be dear to so many people of different backgrounds and regions; people who speak different languages and cook the food in different ways, people who dress differently and who interact with each other in different ways. I had so many questions in my mind and wanted to observe his style from a closer view. As a result of all these, I came up with a number of findings, some of which has been mentioned above and rest will follow now. These findings are especially important in our country where population is comprised of different ethnic groups and when people fail to get their benefits normally, they take the help of their ethnic background or blame the others on the basis of race, language, color or religious differences.
Unfortunately, it is a sad fact that we still insist on our ethnic divides and its recent example came during the elections campaign when some members of both the presidential groups tried to use the card of ethnicity to win the votes of a specific ethnic group.
When we return back to our main topic, it is good to mention here that our differences can add more taste to our lives instead of creating rift between us. I have enjoyed the company of my friends from Kandahar to go to their gardens and enjoy the picnic in the good weather. I have also visited a number of very educated and most civilized families in the capital city of Kabul and was inspired by their decent and mature style of living.
The problem was that, we were in the habit of criticizing others for not doing the things the way we did or not perceiving the things the way we perceived them. In the same way, extending the differences to a whole community is a very wrong and dangerous practice. Having a look at some of the illiterate and uncivilized members, labeling a whole community to be illiterate and uncivilized is not fair. In the same way, the differences will keep growing until we don’t stop anyone talking against others as a group. You may tolerate a person calling a single person ‘stupid’ but you should never tolerate if he calls the whole community to be ‘stupid’ after his experience with a single person.
Lessons learned from the preacher are many and many of them can be shared with our readers at any other suitable time but then it becomes the responsibility of all of us to be like the preacher or at least learn from his good achievements.