Musings on the nature of contradictions in humans' personality

I expect people will never stop to amaze me (To be honest, I don’t expect them to and if this ever happens, it’ll surely be a warning sign).

It’s fascinating how some traits get combined in one person. Theoretically, everything is supposed to be possible when it comes to human mind, but when you see it in real life… I never gave much thought to it, but an encounter with one person made me wonder.

How can a person who acts as a representative of a truly valuable campaign, who started travelling the world more than 20 years ago and who has an exceptional story to tell people be at the same time unbelievably limited, unwilling to learn and at times very self-absorbed?

How can a person who has more than enough time to spare be unable to reach even basic proficiency at language that he clearly needs?

How can a person who travels the world limit his or her discussions about different countries and places to food that they hated here and there?

How can a person who inspires other people to believe in the cause be so uninteresting and unimaginative in their day-to-day life?

How can a person with such rich personal history be so narrow-minded, non-inquisitive and believe in all the clichés that exist in the world without pausing to think about them?

I expect there are a lot more “how’s” that I can come up. And perhaps it is me who should be called narrow-minded because I cannot comprehend the possibility of such drastic contradictions in one’s personality. But here it is - the thing I do not understand. 

Those who look into the root of problems...

After leaving university I had very few opportunities to communicate with people from academia. I do have a very dear friend who is a researcher with Oxford University, but that’s about it. I also have a short and very unpleasant encounter with a foreign lecturer who teaches at one of the universities in Almaty. So those two people are pretty much the only academics I spoke to in the past 3.5 years.

Last week I visited Washington and there I have been granted an opportunity to meet quite an extraordinary person – Dr. Frederick Starr. Dr. Starr is a Founder and Chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Washington.

The very first time I met Dr. Starr he was moderating a discussion on US Policy on Religious Freedom in Central Asia and the Caucus. What amazed me the most were very simple and straightforward questions he asked the speakers who participated in the discussion. But these questions looked right into the root of the problem. Through those matter-of-fact questions he pointed out some clear drawbacks in the research carried out by US researchers on religious freedom in Central Asia. Those drawbacks were not so major as to question the entire research, but they were important enough to raise some questions.

After the discussion my colleague and I have been introduced to Dr. Starr and have been offered to visit him the next day for a friendly chat. I am not going to relay the content of this meeting, because it has already been nicely outlined in the article published in Astana Times newspaper. What I do want to talk about is the academic persona of Dr. Starr. I already encountered such extraordinary individuals, but sadly not in my home country.