Translator: Jonathan Phillips Reviewer: Yulia Kallistratova
Imagine the bank of a wide river.
The sun beats down,
a large fire burns near the waterline,
and in that fire, lies the body of a man.
Many people have gathered around the fire to pay their last respects.
Nearby, in the dirty river water, a half-naked man washes his clothes.
But nobody tries to chase him away; nobody pays him any attention at all,
despite that fact that no one has any idea who he is.
This is India.
Now imagine another scene:
you're a little girl, you're two years old.
One day, your parents start dressing you in boy's clothes and give you a boy's name
and all of your relatives start to give you boy's toys.
At seven years old, you're playing football in the courtyard
getting into fights, wearing shirts and trousers
and everyone in your neighbourhood knows you as an active mischievous little boy.
At the age of 12, your mother once more comes to you with girl's clothing in hand,
she tells you that you'll now be known by your female name again,
that you can't go out like used to anymore,
that you're not allowed to do anything that you did before,
and that she's already looking for a husband for you, so be ready.
This is Pakistan.
Now, imagine something totally unbelievable:
you're a university graduate, you used to work for the civil service,
but all that's in the past: now you, along with dozens like you,
live in a shack in the woods, growing food and praying diligently every day.
But you don't worship just anyone, you worship the late emperor of Ethiopia.
You wait for the day when he will return to this world with his army,
an army of flying saucers,
and vaporise everyone who has, under their skin, the mark of the devil:
a small electronic chip,
with which the world government controls us all.
This is Jamaica.
I'm sure that many of you think these stories are absolutely insane,
or at least think that they're all a little bit strange.
But they're absolutely real.
I've personally seen and heard many such stories which are no less unbelievable.
I specifically seek them out.
I travel around the world to find the most diverse forms of human behaviour.
I even started filming a programme about my travels,
it's called 'Khochu Domoy' [I Want To Go Home].
I know, it's a strange name for a travel show,
but ...
when ...
when you're in a desert in Pakistan being escorted god-knows-where by soldiers
or when you're running away from an enraged mob in a Haitian ghetto,
no other thought comes into your head;
you just want to go home,
back to the nice, safe, familiar world
because much of what I see on my travels truly frightens me.
And in general, to be faced with a reality which so differs from your own,
not in a book or a film but in the real world,
it's frightening.
It's like being in a parallel universe.
And what can we do?
How can we learn to understand and accept all these parallel worlds,
which, as it turns out, are all around us in unimaginable quantities.
This is a huge question which I will try to answer.
As I said, the things I see are often scary
so much so that I don't even want to leave my room.
When you're walking around the streets of Haiti
and every third passerby yells out to you very rudely and very aggressively,
'Hey you! Hey, whitey!'
and the streets look like this,
as if they've just been hit by an apocalypse.
Before I went to Haiti, I met with a man from Barbados who told me,
'If you walk around Haiti with a watch on your wrist,
then someone will definitely steal it.
But thieves won't worry about taking the watch off first,
they'll just take out a machete
and cut off the watch along with your arm.'
That is, they'll cut off your arm along with the watch.
Do you know anything about Haiti?
Normally, when I ask people,
only a few remember that, a few years ago,
Haiti was hit by a devastating earthquake in which hundreds of thousands died.
But that's it.
The world has forgotten about Haiti,
no one travels there, save for humanitarian aid workers,
and it's impossible to find any up-to-date information about the country
except these horror stories.
For modern travellers it's practically terra incognito.
And whilst sitting there,
for several days too afraid to leave my room,
too afraid to do anything,
I realised at some point that the root of my fear was the unknown -
my own lack of knowledge.
It's normal to fear the unknown,
but that fear leads to aggression,
which itself leads to hatred.
And, whilst travelling,
I saw absolutely clearly how our world is full,
I mean really full to the brim, with this hatred.
I once spent a few days
living with an Armenian Family in Nagorno-Karabakh.
One night, over dinner and a bottle of local moonshine, we started talking
and they told me about how they survived the 1988 pogroms in Sumgait.
At that time many Armenians lived in Azerbaijan,
and when the massacres of Armenians began, something strange happened:
some of the family's neighbours,
Azerbajainis,
suddenly became hostile towards them,
whilst their other neighbours,
also Azerbaijanis,
took the family in and hid them under the bed,
so that those first neighbours wouldn't find them and kill them.
But what could cause people that you've lived next to for years,
to suddenly take such divergent attitudes towards you?
The answer is quite simple:
the family spoke often and openly with the one group of neighbours,
whilst with the others they spoke only to say 'hello' and 'goodbye'.
It's pretty easy to guess which ones ended up helping them, isn't it?
This story of good neighbours and bad neighbours
is repeated regularly all around the world and on a much greater scale too.
No matter where I go, locals always want to tell me
about how much they dislike and fear their neighbours.
Ukrainians dislike Russians;
Dominicans, Haitians;
Iranians, Iraqis;
I could go on forever.
(Gasp)
'You're going to Balochistan!'
'But they're savages there! They have a terrorist mindset.'
That's what a young Iranian said
when he found out I was going to Balochistan, a province of Pakistan.
I asked him, 'And have you, even just once, ever spoken to a real Baloch?'
'No! Why would I?'
Listening to these kinds of things, I understood something important:
we all live in our own little information bubbles.
Almost everywhere on the planet, even,
even in Haiti,
where there's no running water, no constant electricity supply,
no food even,
people have access to the internet and to all the information it contains,
even there.
Yet despite this, we know very little about people who live in other countries.
And this doesn't at all depend on one's level of wealth or education.
Moreover, we know catastrophically little about our own neighbours.
This results in rumours and speculation,
which turn into prejudices and eventually into hatred.
I think you're all aware
that Donald Trump plans to build a wall on the US-Mexico border.
But few people realise that construction of a border wall began in 1993,
and that it currently covers a third of the length of that border.
It's not even really a wall, more a several-metre-tall pallisade fence
with thick steel bars, which have large gaps between them.
Once, I was in Arizona, standing near this fence
and my arm illegally crossed through the fence into Mexico,
bought a few pies, some sweetcorn,
and smuggled them back into the States.
Through that same gap between the bars I got talking to some Mexicans.
I asked them about their work, their families, just everyday things,
but I though then
that probably everyone should occasionally do something like this:
try to get to the edge of your information bubble,
find someone from a neighbouring country
and just have a chat with them about life.
Thanks to the internet, you won't even need to leave your house.
Every time I go to Ukraine, I'm always faced with a similar situation:
one of the locals, hearing me speaking in Russian, assumes I'm from Russia
and suddenly gets quite unfriendly, even a little aggressive.
I immediately say, 'I'm from Belarus, chill'.
In that moment everything changes;
suddenly they're all smiles and hugs, almost as if I was their own brother.
But what happened here?
It's not like I suddenly became a different person.
For some reason, we tend to group people based on their outward characteristics.
Probably because it makes it easier for us to structure the world and understand it.
Just lump everyone into us and them.
Just say 'all Muslims are bad' and 'all Buddhists are good',
then it'll be clear how to treat them.
But somehow, I didn't think that way when, in Western Tibet,
Buddhist monks started throwing stones at me
for no apparent reason.
And other monks almost attacked me, demanding money for hitchhiking with them.
It's obvious,
to say 'all Buddhists are good'
sounds just as ridiculous as to say 'all blondes are stupid'.
But according to this absurd and completely illogical principle,
we make judgements about people who we know nothing about.
Maybe Pakistani culture seems alien to you, maybe you don't like it
but that doesn't mean you don't like people from Pakistan,
you've hardly ever met anyone from there.
Once, whilst making my show,
I filmed a Pakistani student who was performing namaz.
As soon as he finished his prayer,
he suddenly started telling me
about which porn sites he most likes to visit.
For me, this was unbelievably interesting to observe
because just a minute earlier I had seen a Muslim
whereas now I saw just an ordinary guy.
And all I needed to see the difference was a short conversation.
You can read as many books as you want,
watch an endless amount of films,
devour all the information you can about other cultures
but it will never give you that exciting sense of understanding
when you just connect with the person instead of figuring them out rationally,
that feeling where the only thing you can say is,
'Bro, I so get you right now'.
And the magical thing is that you can get this feeling anywhere,
in any part of the world,
with anybody.
In the jungles of Panama,
where women walk around topless and people live in stilt houses with no walls,
I spoke to locals about the tattoos that they have there and we have here.
They really like decorating themselves.
And during that conversation, I felt that feeling of human connection.
In a criminal ghetto in Kingston, Jamaica, I spoke with a former prisoner
about how best to cook cabbage pies.
Again, I felt that same human connection.
Regarding the guys from Haiti, who I was scared to death of,
I actually ended up meeting a group of, to me at least, shady looking guys
in an awful ghetto,
closer to slums really.
And after just a five-minute-long chat I found out they love fried chicken,
listen to Rihanna,
worry when their pictures don't get many likes.
They, yes, they wholeheartedly believe in the existence of zombies.
They're mortally afraid of practitioners of voodoo.
But it turns out that if you just talk to them,
not about politics, not about religion,
not about personal convictions or beliefs,
then you won't have any reason to be afraid of them
or not to love them
because you'll see they're just people, like yourself.
Eventually, I realised my videos, kind of by themselves, had changed:
they had stopped being about travelling
and had started to focus entirely on these conversations with locals.
It's probably because I find conversation the most of effective way
of combating my fear of the unknown.
And the main discovery I've made through all of this
is that in essence, when it comes to things we value most in our lives,
we're all pretty much the same.
Regardless of the culture or conditions we live in
we all love to laugh,
all love to eat well,
all love music,
all want to look good,
all want to love and be loved.
There's this universal language
which wipes away all our differences and borders between us.
It's the language of life:
the language of our basic, everyday, interests and day-to-day problems.
As soon as you strip away the stereotypes about race and religion
people instantly become more human and easier to understand.
I still don't fully understand a lot of things I've seen on my travels
but I've at least learnt to accept this as normal
or rather, I've learnt that there is no 'normal'.
Yes, there are good people and there are bad people,
that's obvious,
but there are no good and bad cultures, no correct and incorrect way of living,
just very different ones.
As soon as I realised this, I found it easier to live.
Many conflicting ideas I had about the world disappeared,
if you stop prejudging people, there's no conflict.
I still make distinctions between people of course,
some people I like more, others less,
but I'm glad that now all of my subjective opinions
are based solely on people's personal qualities, on their actions.
And I'm convinced
that in order to end this global hatred,
maybe even to end major conflicts,
all we need to do is start talking to each other like humans,
not about anything grandiose or abstract
but about life,
about our day-to-day worries
and, of course, about our families, about love and about our dreams.
And it would really make me happy
if everyone who's watching this were to, at some point, approach someone
who, for whatever reason, they dislike,
and have a simple conversation with them about life.
I'm sure that in just a few short minutes
your relationship with them will change forever.
Thank you.
(Applause)