Remembering the Past Image

Around twenty years ago, the West was *the* place to be. Everybody loved following western culture. Everybody loved adding the unfamiliar western twang and slang to whatever they spoke. And most importantly, everybody loved being remembered as a “Westernized” person.

The culture of my country, India, is perhaps one of the oldest known in the history. The amount of scriptures, prayers, gods, languages, dialects, traditions and beliefs that India has can’t be matched by any other country.

And for a lot of time, we wholly took pride in our culture, until the advent of Westernization. And since then, our people have begun to abandon our cultures to adopt the westernized ways of living. Joint families were replaced by nuclear families. The respect of elders has slowly started decreasing. People have become shallow and have started caring too much about their social image and status.

And this is where we went wrong. The West never taught us all this! Sure, these things more frequently do happen there, but we conveniently ignored the efforts the Westerners take to keep their families together, the amount of time they spend with each other, how they follow their cultures such as Thanksgiving dinners and celebrating their festivals with gusto. We never picked up their love for sports or their sportsmanship and their drive to be a prospering country in every field possible.

The ironic thing is that the West is curious to learn about Indian cultures and traditions. People travel thousands of miles to come to India and be amazed and refreshed by the meditative, enigmatic atmosphere that is found in every city of India. The foreigners know more about our culture more than we know it ourselves!

Why have we given up on our culture? Is it because a sarod is not as funky as an electrical guitar? Is it because most Bollywood films are Hollywood copies and hence, we see everybody as a wannabe? Or is it simply because it is easier for us to act like we’re cool and amazing than to follow the rules of living a good life?

I’m not saying that the changes have been entirely bad. A lot has changed in this country for which we must thank the foreigners because, without these changes, we wouldn’t have been able to cope with the New World. But I think while we’re busy adopting an awesome way to live life, we must pay attention to not leave behind our intuition, our cultures, our rich heritage and most importantly, we must remember a past image of our true selves. Because only when we know where we come from, do we know where we can go.