Have you heard of 'Timbuktu'?

Post 27 ‘From here to Timbuktu’

I first heard of the word ‘Timbuktu’ when I was just a primary school boy. To me it sounded exactly like ‘throwing stones’ as spoken in the Chinese Hokkien dialect in my hometown. It was only during one Geography lesson in the secondary school that the word ‘Timbuktu’ began to ring a bell. It is a city in the West African nation of Mali, and has been deemed to be the birth place of one of the first universities in the world.

In the West it has been for long that ‘from here to Timbuktu’ represents a metaphor for forsaken places or distant lands. When one is told to go to Timbuktu, one is asked to go to a far away and deserted place. It will be interesting to know whether the younger generation is familiar with the word ‘Timbuktu’ or is that a word which is far off and alien to them. With the ease of air travel and the availability of the internet, nowhere in this globalised world is remote any more.

In life one cannot expect to understand everything that is known. No single person can master the sum of human knowledge because it is humanly impossible. However, through much reading and travelling, one is able to gain a good general knowledge. The time and effort spent in acquiring knowledge give the best returns in terms of intrinsic values because knowledge makes a man.

Be a learned person who is conversant with things past and present.

5 January 2010