Whose Balloon Is Better?
Ricky Hendrika (The Winner of ICL Writing Competition)
One day, there was an old man who sold lots of balloons. Then came a young innocent boy. He bought a white balloon and suddenly he let it fly into the sky. He was still curious about the black balloon and wanted to see whether or not it could fly, so he asked for it and right after holding it he released it. He was surprised that it could also fly.
I’m Ricky Hendrika, in this article I will be more focused on my “Interpersonal Realm” with the concern of “Whose balloon is better?”. If I were to answer the question of “What is your interpersonal realm?” I will answer it by saying “to be a channel of blessing and to break the stereotypes in society”. People will probably keep questioning “How can a 16 years old boy have this kind of ambition, to break a very widespread stereotype and also to change the world?” Personally, I believe this stereotype has no boundary, it targets every layer of the society, and miserably including me, the 16 years old boy who is craving for the attention to be heard.
Since I was young, I have been taught that people are created very differently but that each creation is a perfection. I admit that I have not finished my student exchange selection yet, but here I declare that I have learned and observed through social media, from the way we glorify our culture and degradate other cultures at the same time. The perfect way to build this cultural understanding is to exchange our ideas with foreigners. Programs such as student exchange are one of the suitable platforms to do so. The closer we are, the better for us the let others know about us. I have been relling people about how beautiful it is to live amidst diversity. We can talk by meeting face-to-face or by meeting “chat-to-chat” through social media. Talking to strangers now is not only a request, it has become a requirement for us. I’m very passionate about this because by this I can prove that the stereotypes of society are unapologetically wrong, no one should ever be underestimated just because their culture, belief, appearance, or age. We might be too late to stop the cultural tension that has happened, but it is never too late to prevent another tension from happening, so from now let’s start our first step by respecting every culture and by stopping this habit of stereotyping people.
Reflecting on my first analogy about the balloon seller and the little kid, we should have known that each culture is different in its package but that this does not the matter because each culture is perfect in its way. Instead of changing the culture what we need to do is to change the perspective of society towards it. We will succeed in changing the entire world’s perspective by starting it ourselves. It will create a chain reaction where one person will attract a community, a community will inspire a country and a country will be a blessing towards the whole world. By this chain reaction we can exhale our personal ego and inhale the global community in our time which provides us the understanding of sensitivity in each culture and an expanded horizon in tolerating and appreciating diversity and all of this can help us to start the international understanding movement. Respecting culture is not about forced separation in pursuit of unity but it is about a celebration of diversity.
Talking about balloons, in the end of the day we all already have our own balloon. It’s not about whose balloon is better but it’s about the uniqueness of our own color. Moreover it’s about how you direct this balloon to fly so its color can captivate the hearts of many and letting the color radiates through the way we live ourlives. Yes, this balloon represents our own culture. Call me crazy, but I imagine a world where we smile when we live in diversity. Because that will mean we are one bar closer to humanity.
I’m Ricky, thank you.
