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.

Finding Oneself

I love watching TV shows. From Chuck to Criminal Minds, from Seinfeld to How I Met You Mother or from Touch to Grey’s Anatomy, I watch everything. Without watching Coupling and The Wonder Years, I never switch off the TV.

It’s fun to see the awkward situations people get themselves into in sitcoms. It is interesting to see unusual cases being solved in those crime shows. And thriller shows just make everyday boring life slightly appealing.

But do these shows really entertain us? Or do they make us realize everything that we can’t do in our normal lives and help us live our dreams through them? Is watching these shows making us miss out on the special moments we could have experienced in our lives?

I recently got my TV connection. Before that, the last time I had watched programs on my own TV was almost four years ago. Yes, I didn’t have a TV connection for almost four years. My dad had had it disconnected so that I could study with one less distraction.

Of course I hated him for doing that. I mean, it’s a supply of entertainment, a source of time-pass, a means to do mindless activity after hours of mumbo-jumbo studying. All my friends would discuss the latest episode of Castle, while I didn’t know what the heck they were talking about (no, I didn’t watch it online because I couldn’t – I had a connection that had a speed of 112.5 KBPS).

I used to play the piano in class four, but I got bored of it by class five so I discontinued playing. But during these years of no TV, I played the piano to relax. I also started reading books, too. And, most importantly, I learnt to play the guitar on my own (I hate taking music lessons. It doesn’t make sense to go to learn music twice a week – you don’t learn anything worthwhile in an hour packed away among heaps of others in the class).

Today, when I have college admission interviews, I feel like I have more to present to the Board than what I would have if I watched TV all those years. Those four years made me discover so much about me that I feel more confident as a person and when I talk to people, I think I make a good speaker. In fact, if I wouldn’t have had all that time, I wouldn’t have gotten interested in writing either!

These days, I watch TV because only creativity inspires creativity. It freshens me up and changes my mood from the study (read: war) zone it is in to the person who composes music and loves writing. I’m not saying that my dad was right in disconnecting the TV because there surely are more ways to discover the real person that we are. But, I think I don’t have any regrets or anger because I’m happy to have found myself.

Knowing the Unknown

Questions like “Does God exist?”, “Why are we here on earth?”, “Are we alone”, etc, are a few things everybody has thought about at some or the other point in life. We often find answers to these questions, in magazines, in interviews, on websites and from learned scholars, among other sources.

But the main question is this – Which answer is right?

You could say, believe the scholars. But, scholars have studied from books and learned from experiences, both things which are easily available on the internet.

So maybe we should believe websites? Except, website manias often sprout from media articles, such as those in the magazines and newspapers.

Then believe the paper media! I mean, if they’re wrong, we can sue them or something and we’ll even have written proof! However, magazines and newspapers publish such articles in the form of interviews and they interview learned and experienced scholars.

This is the vicious cycle most of us are caught up in. Now, I can give you two answers to escape from this cycle – either read up everything, every single source and get overwhelmed by all that information our brain has never handled in that quantity at the same time, or, simply don’t care about the matter at all. I mean, everybody’s got pressing issues to handle as it is, and providing answers to gratify our curiosity isn’t, for all probable causes, a necessity.

But then arises the main question again – Which answer is right?

Each answer maybe right or wrong in different dimensions. For example, logically, not caring is better than caring, because you increase your productiveness in this world of purpose (read: money). But, mentally, choosing our curiosity over our capacity for productiveness would be natural, as that is how humans have been made.

In the end, which option can we choose? Both make sense, and yet they don’t make sense.

I really don’t think change is the only constant thing in the world, because confusion is still untouched by change. Confusion may reduce in some subjects. But, in matters of the cosmic nature – matters of which humans are the effect and not the cause – it is the only constant I know.