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Just Another Korean BBQ

"Oh there is so much tension right now. We hate the Indians and they hate us back".

I was amused at that thought. There I was with all my Indianness, sitting there with two good Chinese friends, having a nice Korean dinner when a topic about the Indian-Chinese territorial dispute came up. I wondered if any part of her realised that I, despite my nationality, fell into the category of people that she professed she and her people hated?

Though I could relate to where these feelings came from. If it was China building man made Islands in South East Asia's backyard and even enroaching onto Indian territory, there was a part of me that would get inflamed by all this. Being Singaporean Indian, I probably had twice as much reason to get angry at what I perceived as the new bully in the block starting to take what I considered was mine. Your country's land was by association your land and if your neighbour took over it, he was asking for a fight. Along with the desire to fight came the fuel to hate.

Though the truth is that a lot of these geopolitical tensions and the associated media storms and propaganda is geared towards making the common man in one country hate the common man in another country when in actuality, the day before they did not really even spend an inch of time thinking about the other. The real fight is not between the countries and its people but between the political systems in these countries, political systems that are often dominated by the power hungry elites within the country. As always happens when these scenarios boil over and war breaks out, these elites sit in their comfy chair in their bunkers and send out the rest of the country to fight and die. As the quote goes, "When the rich wage war, it is the poor who die".

So before you say you hate a whole group of people, stop and think, because it is not his war as much as it is not yours.


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