Many a times I have heard this statement : " The influence of the Western Culture has ruined our ..... " or something similar. And the context ofcourse is Indian culture , values and traditions.
I thought about it and my Axiom of Choice philosophy tells me that it is immature and a bit harsh on the West to categosie everything we do blindly as an influence.
Humans are superior animals because of their ability to rationally and logically think on things that come their way and it is nothing more than being stupid to categorise a rational and logical choice as an undue or unwanted influence.
Their are plethora of ills and illogical acts imbibed in Indian tradition and if the West can be smart enough to pick up the good ones for themselves like Yoga , Meditation , Faith & Belief , why cant we be wise enough to do the same when it comes to picking up things from Western culture. In any case I have not seen any European complain about bad influences of the Indian culture.
A concrete example was when I told one of my German colleague that my family denied the proposal of a nice , decent girl because our horoscopes did not match. Now that is something common in Indian society and I am no exception to be forced into believing that. But my colleague's 2 line explanation of that was : Future life is based on how we perform and not on position of stars and to him it was a ridicule and illogical. Well a die hard astrologer can argue with him but the bottom line is he agrees to be driven in life by logic and reason and he has no complaints. He is being uniform in his actions and thoughts.
On one hand we boast of the scientific though process we posess and on other we leverage in an negative sense to get rid of our wrong doings by imposing it on some one else.
We all must try and bring uniformity is what we think , say and do. To end , let me quote Kabir:
"Mansa , Vaacha , Karmna , Kabir Sumiran Saar ".
Meaning : What we think should be what we say and what we say should be what we should do.
SS 2009
17 years ago
