Tea for a Monday and vice versa

It doesn't rain here as much as they said it would, I remember arguing last Sunday. And since that very night, water has been falling from the sky every single day. I shouldn't have opened my mouth? Maybe, but then again, what does the weather got to do with me?

 

So it was indeed raining that day I ran into Abdullah at Oxford Road right before our Farsi class, on my very way to wasting time in God knows which waste of time I was about to engage in. I can safely state the latter since I ended up in a café drinking my first ever cup of tea in the UK with the only Iraqi person I have met in my life.

Abdullah speaks quite loudly. But not in the usual annoying way: Rather in the way it makes you happy to be seating by the same table of that person who fills the atmosphere with echoes of passion.

I learned a lot. Quite a lot more than I would have learned reading a fair stack of material on the 80s Iran-Iraq war. Biased or not, I take the story as it comes, because nothing advises me to resist. Plus, it was for a good reason that I was that Monday sitting at a table with that precise Iraqi guy, instead of wasting my time sheltering from the rain rather than breathing under it.

Abdullah thinks way too many people enter the universities these days, when the real purpose of higher education institutions should be focused on a smaller elite group of people, who would be able to generate and create knowledge, a group which he doesn't feel he belongs to. The rest of us should just get to work right ahead, he says, of course in a more plausible way than just that.

Maybe I agree with his observation to a convenient personal interpretation:

What were universities first created for? Many wrong reasons pop into my mind in a reasonable flow. Focusing on careers rather than in life? Forgetting one is aiming to fill the spirit rather than one's CV? Believing that there is more to learn inside a classroom than outside of it?

Quite obvious wrong reasons yes, perhaps thoroughly debated and discussed over and over again even in highly academical environments. In spite of what I do admit I sometimes forget so, but as long as I am always catching up with the real meanings of existence every once in a while, the beauty of the world keeps shining clearly right in front of my very eyes. And I see it even under the rain, on our way to our Farsi class, leaving our tea cups behind.