Acceptance

Unfortunately, when I travel for work it is mandatory that I fly kuwait airways, even if there are no direct flights but anyway, I've moved on from this painful requirement and accepted it as an interesting experience I wouldn't otherwise normally have!

I mean what other airline would you ever find a bunch of hippie tourists coming back from the far east with their backpacks and dreads, and then a string of niqab wearing women with their numerous noisy children and beard sporting husbands all cramped up together by the gate, waiting for Godot. Then you have the well connected group travellors that take discounted or sometimes free trips from Kuwait Airways for supposedly having serious emergency illnesses in need of a fully subsidized out-of-kuwait medical check-up, but then you somehow spot them shopping across the street. Out of this melting pot of organisms about to embark on kuwait airways was an interesting fella that i really would have liked to know.

This fella had multiple highlights, long hair that fell to his shoulders and a pierced lip. He was sitting down fiddling with his iPod, and i could have sworn he was anything but Kuwaiti, untill I saw him speak to his dishdasha-and-qitra-wearing father with an overcoat on his way to a european country. The clash between father and son was so splendid, that other people noticed too. In fact, one of these people even dared to go as far as snapping a photograph.

The young pierced lip dude noticed this effort and made a scene. He rose up from his chair dramatically to chase after the sneaky photographer, but alas, the security men had to act all mighty and powerful and grab the young man to question his outburst. They were blatantly mocking him as he was relaying to them his grieviances, yet he kept persisting his pleas unthwarted, with full confidence and conviction telling them "no matter who you are, everyone deserves the right of privacy and the right not to be photographed". The security men still weren't taking him seriously, with their nonending disgusting snickers and sarcastic remarks like "enzain itha 9idt il mu9awir, ishbitsaweela wiya wayhik!". I'm not saying that the security men should have pulled out their guns and run after this alleged photographer james bond style, but deriding the guy with such direct ridicule is totally unnecessary and disturbing to me personally.

Its interesting when the young man's old father emerged into the scene, proper decorum and decent language suddenly burgeoned among the security men. But they were not subtle when they fiercely eyed the father and son back and forth in the attempt to make sense of the dichotomy. Their thought process in that mili second was so transparent that the father immediately realized that it was useless, pulled his son away and maintained his dignity. I was touched, and I wistfully fantasized of the day when people in kuwait will treat everybody with the same respect without loudly displaying narrow minded judgements based on somebody's unorthodox appearance. But you see, we are a culture that thrives on behavior homgeneity, and we love to take absolute hegemony in dictating how one should be and how one should look like and conveniently wave it under the flag of 'tradition' and 'religion'.

I think this as I walk down the streets of a modern city, with people of all kinds of differences. An old african man with dreads cascading to the floor is playing merrily on his drums, a young well dressed blonde woman passes him, stops to admire his musical flavor, tosses him a coin, a shabby looking man with a visible tatoo on his neck banging his head to the beats of his CD player flashes me a smile and keeps walking on by, and a clean cut jogger kindly stopping to give a young woman with black lipstick and gothic jewelery directions.

I wanted to go back to that young fella from the airport with long highlighted hair and peirced lips to tell him that he had every right to be angry, and then beg him not to be dismayed.