When your culture stinks and that's normal

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 push it under the carpet, we now have a problem. There's a bunch of trash sitting around untreated. What do we do about it? The popular answer is simple: Nothing! Our cultural values are too skewed to address their own refuse. 

The reason for these leftovers is that we're stuck in time and just don't know where else to evolve. The values we followed were be all and end all. The catch is that they also defined whether or not you get any basic respect around here which made them all the more vital to stick with and we got addicted. So when the times moved, we were stuck for response and chose extreme pride instead. When we ended up being the only ones on the block doing that, we let our fears rule over sense and stuck to our guns even more. 

So, our ways remain stuck and we remain stuck with a bunch of "timeless values" that sit and ferment till they dangerously morph into what will soon be a very normal way of life. While we smile and live that life, inside is a seething rot that gets fouler by the minute. Of course, we could just as easily introspect and correct age old customs that rob you of wisdom, but why not let be the silent creator of destruction anyway? It must be fun to be evil, no? 

Think of culture like a terrarrium: a complete plant ecosystem in a closed bottle that feeds itself and needs to be watered only once in 50 years. The culture we religiously follow under the guise of tradition must be able to afford itself. It should be a clean, efficient cycle that isn't self-crippling, not eject waste it can't accommodate or treat, and not need a dose of life injected every now and then. It should be its own source of the life it needs. 

The only reason we follow such patched up customs is because we have a deficit problem that's been long untraceable. It goes back a gazillion generations to when someone needed their respect and decided that they're going to get it, by hook or by crook. And they've crookedly gotten us hooked on to a cultural value system that depletes itself before it even respectably survives for more than two seconds. It makes into refuse all those who don't fit in to somebody's respect and it mandates that they sit there and rot. It doesn't matter if they're real people, as real as that somebody, who just isn't on top of the hierarchy. If we have the shame to not dispose of them because of what that would make us, shouldn't we have the shame to give them an equal place in this ecosystem?

You can't really blame us, though. Our tradition didn't come with a moving-forward-with-the-times exit plan. None ever come with that privilege. What some do come with it reason and rationality. They help you look beyond your singular values into what they do people as human individuals in society, and judge whether it's worth it or not. They set the definition of respect, freedom, happiness and honour for all involved, first. It doesn't protect its own view. It protects an individual's right to be, regardless of gender or status, and that's just the start of how it defines everything else. That means those who benefit from it aren't the only ones winning excluding those who end being either used for that benefit or end up being refuse. 

If you're really the nice person from the evil culture you proudly profess, you will judge your pride by its trash. By that, I mean women who are given lesser priority and not educated/educated well and married off instead. The classes of people your habits tend to look down upon, like the maid who has her own utensils and sit in a place that isn't the place that everybody else does. The protection you'd oblige to give a woman at the cost of a full life because you've been wired to know she must have it. You could also offer it without restricting her, if the danger is indeed so grave with an intention that belong in 18th, not the 20th, century. Your intention cannot possibly end up being a good one.

The list is long. If you can't completely rationalise your behaviour while treating people with as much respect as you treat yourself, you're on the slow road to certain death. Like the way you are normalised to the refuse your values create, you will be a cultural zombie, and not even know it. If you don't have the option of choosing the behaviour meted out to you, you need to leave. Fast! You can either be one or the other. If you either and you stay this way any longer, you will just create a deficit that you will pass on and the problem will be on someone else's head.

What do you choose?