Where The Wild Things Are

A close friend of mine, wrote me an opening line in my YM, “Hi. I’m bored reading medical journals on diabetes.”

Not too sure how to respond to that message I reciprocated with a mere 'hi' and lifted my eyes from the laptop monitor and gazed outside the window where the road became gradually deserted and there was a lazy drizzle amidst the backdrop of a shady Friday.

Returning to the monitor, I absent-mindedly typed in her YM window, “Great. That should add up to your knowledge about insulin and pancreas.”

My mind wasn’t really focusing on that impromptu topic. I was actually thinking about how a senior journalist with a mainstream English-language daily newspaper and who have written hundreds of articles on or about the local governments eventually ended up, writing literatures for new drugs. Perhaps drugs are more psychedelic than clotted monsoon drains or inadequate parking yards.

We have not met for a while now, but she and her daughter, Khalidah are always on my mind – she, for her resourcefulness and her daughter, for her imaginative mind.

One day, some years ago, Khalidah who was then lived with her grannies in Alor Star and attending her first year of schooling called her mom to ask a question pertaining to the pillar of the Islamic faith. It was about her ‘Agama’ paper in school – a multiple-choice answers question. More or less:

The Islamic faith is the belief towards (choose the most correct answer/s):

A. The God and His prophets
B. Idols
C. Some trees.
D. The Quran and the prophets.

And Khalidah selected B and C as the most correct answers. Now, that was pretty wild.

Her mom and I were laughing over late afternoon tea that day.

I didn’t blame Khalidah. Some weeks prior to the incident I gave her a book The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. In that children book the author wrote about how a large tree provided all sorts of help to a boy – from his childhood days right to his old age. Perhaps that has prompted Khalidah to think the pillar of faith also lies on some trees.

“Yeah some trees are big and mighty,” I told my friend, “and look impeding and godly.”

But I could not understand why her ustaz did not explain the existence of God via dalil `akli’ and `naqli’. He should have done that before even began to speak about the pillar of faith to the six-year old kids.

Most kids possess those wild imaginations about things they see or listen to. And not all kids have the chance to attend the Islamic kindergartens. Our religious teachers in the primary school must not imagine the kids already knew the basic.

For the kids, the entire world is the place where the wild things are and for adults like you and me, we imagine the untamed forests as the place for where strange and wild creatures roam and dwell.

At times I imagine if we could live in a world where even beasts could be helpful and friendly, or even sincere and honest. Unfortunately, even symbolically, we are not just simpy too far from such imagination, instead the ordinary people, especially those whom we have placed our trust upon them and whom we view as the giants of the society are fast becoming real beasts and have reduced us into their “big-gulps”.

I guess many things have changed since the publication of Maurice Sendak’s , Where The Wild Things Are in 1963. The changes have occurred in all kind of world, imaginative or otherwise. In our very own little world, our powerful politicians who are supposedly to be the defenders of our cultures and traditions could no longer be bothered if these once preserved cultures and traditions of ours were steadily making their way to the graveyard of history.

Will there be anything left for us to imagine in time to come? Here and now, where the wild things really are and are really wild.

Meanwhile: The video adaptation. The Universal's movie is yet to be released.