Honnasiri's Catch

Culture and traditions don't come in 200 ml bottle sizes with suggestions of what they go best with, leaving the mixing and matching to us. They come in whole specific-brand supermarkets, where it's kept all in the same family. It's a whole Universes that's all contained in and you have everything you're supposed to need, if you follow the rule book to the tee. Anything else is treachery, that we spare no expense crying about. We chastise, traumatize and cull anything else—what we otherwise call moral policing.  The treachery is inevitable when old ideas meet different ones. Unless we're busy getting enraged about it and screaming treason, cultural interaction is an ongoing experiment in which the older habits die hard, if we let them. Over time, our ways solidify and become tradition which becomes our ways which becomes our culture. It is a spectrum that goes from mild to hard core, with the hard core se...

What's synonymous across people and cultures is that everyone always honours their tradition i.e. how they grew up. It's, after all, first response. The mistake in doing that is when it goes unchecked to become big norm. See, all our traditions may not be good, healthy or positive. Some cultures and values are steeped in things that humanity and society need not bring itself to, the first things we need to clean up if we ever start. Majority traditional Indian culture isn't an exception. It has evolved into a very serious problem: a leftover one. And our response: we happen to handle it just like we handle our garbage in real life i.e. conveniently ignore it. Find the closest obscure spot on a main road and shamelessly dump it there, as it rots and stinks in front of us as we normalise ourselves to it.  It becomes the potbelly we drum on and never care to healthily address. Since we all pus...