Cast From The Herd Exerpt #115: Let The Expanding Universe Be Your Teacher

 Cast From The Herd:  Memories of Matriarchal Malaysia

M. Bakri Musa

Excerpt #115:  Let The Expanding Universe Be Your Teacher

Our city bus tour of Ottawa also took us to an experimental farm out in the suburb. A young man demonstrated his experiments crossing prairie wild grass with alfalfa varieties that would yield high protein to benefit cattle ranchers. He was a PhD, in cowboy boots and jeans, his hands dirty with mud and loving it! I did not realize that the simple wild grass could potentially have such economic significance. Then I remembered the conversations I had with my biology teacher at my old school in Kuala Pilah who recounted his fellow graduate student doing his doctoral dissertation on worms. There is nothing in nature that is not worthy of study!

            Before I left Malaysia, my parents urged me to write home often. There was no possibility for them ever to visit Canada; my writing home would serve as vicarious visits for them. Observe the country and its people, they counseled me, as well as be perceptive of and receptive to your new environment. Heed the wisdom of our culture, Alam terkembang dijadikan guru (Let the expanding universe be your teacher), echoing Wordsworth’s “Let nature be your teacher.” The more you learn, the more your universe expands. That bus tour provided me with ample materials for many letters home, quite apart from expanding my universe.

            My father also asked me to ponder this question:  Why was it that Canada was giving those generous scholarships to young Malaysians and not Malaysia to young Canadians? I doubted whether any other parents of Colombo Plan scholars had ever pondered that question.

            Years later at an international gathering I attended, an African student suggested that the West offered such generous scholarships to Third World students in order to influence them. They would then return home thoroughly infatuated with the West. Far from being a generous gesture, this student suggested, those scholarships were but subtle and nefarious means of “mental neo-colonization.” 

            That African student had the benefit of modern Western education; my father did not. Clearly, education is no guarantee of wisdom, any more than medicine is to health. Not properly appreciated or applied, education like medicine could perversely destroy if not pervert you, as with that African student.

            Jared Diamond in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel:  The Fate of Human Societies, recounted his experience with a Papua New Guinea chief at the end of World War II. At that time the Allied Forces were dropping regular relief supplies to the natives. To them, those “goodies” were literally dropped from heaven. Their wise chief Yali however, went beyond. He wondered why it was that Diamond’s people (meaning the West, white people) who were dropping those gifts to the natives, and not the other way around, echoing my parent’s earlier query.

            The central theme of that perceptive chief’s, as well as my wise father’s observation, was this:  Why are some societies developed, successful, and consequently generous while others remain poor, backward, and forever dependent on the charity of others? Thinkers and philosophers throughout the ages have pondered this critical question. The answers still elude us.

            Viewed from a different perspective, why was I grateful to the Canadian government for financing my education while that African student looked upon that same generous gesture as but a sinister scheme to brainwash him? Dispensing with the philosophical query of intent versus deed (a frequent Qur’anic refrain, together with the prophetic tradition of actions be judged by intentions), as the beneficiary of someone’s generosity I must be grateful and attribute only the noblest of intentions to my benefactor.

            That was the personal dilemma I wrestled with in high school when I had nominated my classmate Nafsiah to be president of our science society. Yes indeed she felt honored and was grateful for my doing so, but my motives were less pure if not downright malicious. I did it so as to distract her from her studies and thus lessen the competition for me. Having learned from that episode, my duty now should be to make full use of that precious gift endowed upon me so I could in turn reciprocate the gesture to others, and do so with the purest of intentions. 

            My father’s earlier wise counsel sensitized me to the world beyond my classrooms and lecture halls. It made me a student in the broadest sense of the word. On a pragmatic level, seeing that I had no shortage of material, I wondered whether my father’s advice was but his sneaky way to get me to write home often, much like his earlier queries (when I was in primary school) on the pictures in the English newspaper were but prods at making me read the full article. Otherwise with nothing to write home about beyond “I’m fine; don’t worry,” I would not be so diligent in doing it. 

            Alas, my stay in Ottawa ended way too fast. Soon I was on the plane again back to Toronto, and then westward to Edmonton, Alberta, my final destination. 

Next:  Excerpt #116:  Alberta, Here I come!