I've removed my cartoon portrait from the side panel. Don't ask me why. Just don't feel like looking at it anymore.
There was this rather famous actor from Singapore MediaCorp, or should i say ex-actor, Xie Shao Guang, who had left his glorious acting career to open a shelter in Johor for abandoned/stray animals. Before he left MediaCorp, he was still having a promising career, being the actor with the best acting skill among all the artistes in MediaCorp. He's a staunch Buddhist and seems like a person who doesn't care much about wealth and fame. So his departure at the height of his career wasn't really a big surprise.
A few weeks back, the local (Johor) segment of the newspaper published an article about his deeds and i got some unexpected reactions from my mom and aunts. Instead of admiring his endeavour, they questioned his purpose and why he didn't put the money into helping people instead. They said that if he has so much money, then he should help the people in need rather than spending on the animals.
I wasn't too happy upon hearing what they were saying, so i interposed sarcastically, "oh, poor Xie Shao Guang; he does good deeds also kena condemned." Immediately, my mom and aunts stopped the conversation embarrassingly.
Honestly, i don't know why i reacted that way to what they said. Heck, i'm not even one of his fans. At that point of time, i just felt that it was wrong to condemn someone who's already doing good for others, even if the others are animals and not human beings. I've thought that what he did was really admirable, you know, willing to give up his career for a good cause and all. I doubt i would do that if i have a career like his.
On retrospect, they weren't totally wrong in what they said. The money could have been used to help the needy people; a lot of them in fact. My mom and aunts are not animal persons to begin with, so it's understandable that they wouldn't consider the welfare of animals as something important at all.
So what's the moral of the story? There are two actually:
- No matter what we do, people will always judge or even criticize us, and it's even more so for public figure.
- As the saying goes, "one man's meat is another man's poison." We hold different issues close to our hearts and it's only human that our judgement will often be warped by the weighing scale in our hearts.
