Weird or just different?

Being different is fine but being weird? How do we all eat? We eat with our hands and mouth whereas the Northern leopard frog eats with its eyes and pushes the food into the throat. This might sound weird for us but God created it differently.

What is the difference between weird and different? We can come up with a humpty number of hypothesis. A weird person is somebody who would not have clarity of thoughts, maybe shabbily dressed, unkempt, mysterious, ghostly, abnormal, etc. Whereas a different person will have a mind which thinks differently, who is very neatly dressed, well-behaved with a great personality, unique, distinct from others, independent, etc.

In the southern part of India, there is a place called Thirupathi, which is a religious pilgrimage site. Almost everybody who visits this holy place tonsures their head. So a person with a long hair amongst people with tonsured head is a different unique person. Whereas if the hair is dirty with lots of tangles immediately we will have a light flash that would say “oh! this person is so weird”. This is human nature. But in a group of badly dressed people, if a neatly dressed person comes in who is weird and who is different?

When something sounds out of place we immediately call that person weird. But how would that person who we feel is weird think about us? From our point of view, that person is weird, but to the “so called weird person” we would look weird because we are not like him or her. It is all in the way we see it. Instead of pointing to someone as weird, let us sit down and retract back and see how weird we are and what are the annoying habits we have. When someone calls us weird, that is a signal to think and change ourselves, so that we do not continue being a weird person to the world.

The same way what would be an ordinary thing for one religion or community would be weird for someone who belongs to a different community. In Hindu marriages, there will be so much music and dance with colourful silk sarees and ghagra for the bride and silk dhoti for the bridegroom, whereas, in Christian weddings, it will be calm and quiet with the bridegroom in a black suit and the bride in a white dress. For a Hindu bride, wearing a white dress might sound weird as it is not auspicious whereas for the Christian bride, it is purity and she would think the colourful Hindu dresses are weird.

How would we feel if we are stuck with a weird person alone in an elevator? There will be so much uneasiness in us and we would pray to God for the lift to start working soon. Because we feel that a person who is weird has a “bulb” which is switched off and they behave in a very disturbing abnormal fashion. They do not need to be mentally retarded to behave weirdly, even normal people at times behave in a weird way. Whereas, if we are stuck with the most charming different person, we would definitely wish for their friendship and would thank God for introducing us to a great friend.

Even supernatural people if they come for real will be weird too. We all would have enjoyed Spider man and Superman in movies. But how would we react if we see them for real? We will be so scared to see the Spider man's web and Superman's heroic stunts. How about Avatars, Aliens, Zombie, ghosts, etc? We may not consider them normal people at all because of their unnatural skills. The same way for them, we will all be aliens!!!

Strange behaviour of a person can be annoying but it is just that he/she is trying to be different that's all. Let's accept that and treat everybody equally.