Our Culture their culture

Our culture their culture, our language their language, our religion their religion, the sacred line has been drawn, the tug of war has been started, the clueless game of mindless, substance less cultural superiority has begun. Beware the human race, gone are the days of natural selection, we have now new theory of survival – “Cultural Selection”.

Culture is a very complex phenomenon that encompass everything, from the religion to the food we ate to the cloth we wear.  Human being has always been choosing the subset (in form of either language, religion etc.) of this broad set to rally masses behind them to advance their parochial interests that could be either personnel or not personnel. It all comes to this, isn’t it? All this so called Jehad, honour killing, racism, casteism, communalism etc. etc. are nothing but just a one liner – my culture is better than yours, you accept it or perish to the doom.

The mindless quest of human race or individual to achieve cultural superiority is beyond my comprehension. It’s nothing but the two neighbors fighting with each other over their Garden’s Roses by saying my rose is better than yours. Why can’t they enjoy each other roses and be elated by discovering the varieties of roses in different gardens. Just imagine how boring it would be when every house in a village just have one type of rose. Just think how ridiculous it would be when both families start baying for each other blood, just to preserve the claim of superiority of bunch of Roses in their garden.

“These roses are part of our garden, our family for generations, let’s not be there one head on their torso who tries to defy honour of our roses, let’s all vow to protect honour of our Roses till our death” – This would be the passionate and rousing speech by the head of the family to their members.

This might sound ridiculous to the core but at the macroscopic level that is what nevertheless is happening in world around us. The senseless mob goes behind their leader for some reason which is nothing but matter of establishing cultural superiority.

Instead of rejoicing on variety all around us, instead of having curiosity to grasp a vast knowledge strewn all over world due to cultural varieties, human kind has always been engaged in tussle of imposing or protecting their culture on one or other or from one or other.

Just sometimes back I read a news where author announces proudly that “A Hindu has been appointed for so and so post in US”, for a moment I felt an emotion of pride immediately followed by a pang of pain. Our mind is so socially wired to have a huge socio-cultural ego in terms of the “language we speak, food we eat, cloth we wear, song we sing, god we worship, our customs, our rituals, our beliefs, our faith etc.”.  That socio-cultural ego overpower our sense of reasoning and power of understanding. Hence the sense of cultural superiority feed our socio-cultural ego and led us to believe in our own individual superiority over others.

The propensity to overpower the human being at the other end of cultural line (some time to the extent of killing them), just because they have a different set of cultural customs and belief, which rational human mind can accept that? Who are to decide about superiority? Why do I have to proud of my heritage, why can’t I simply enjoy those wonderful heritage provided by accumulation of centuries of cultural assimilation along with having admiration of heritage of people at other side of cultural line. Every cultures are wonderful. They are not creation of one day or one year, they are the cumulative consciences of thousands of people over thousands of years. None are superior and none are inferior and World will not be complete by omitting even a tiny part of them.

Then why this madness to prove your superiority? All these dirty schemes, plots, frenziness and obsession – just to prove that you are superior, the faith you follow is superior, the ancient civilization that you have inherited is superior, the custom you follow is superior, the god you worship is superior?

As Gandhiji had said that ‘The world has enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed’. Greed could be either material greed or so called spiritual or cultural greed. Each and every one of us are supplemented by our ancestors with wonderful heritage that would be enough for us to sustain and prosper as a community. We do not have place for cultural greed to overpower others or proclaim to protect ours, that would only take us towards the doom of human race. Human race has survived natural selection, it cannot survive cultural selection.

Beauty and the Beast

How many times we have read the stories of beautiful princesses, ladies with magnificent beauty or a beautiful damsel in distress? Beauty has always been glorified to such an extent that it often overshadows any virtues that mankind may possess. All these overhype about beauty that I have been hearing since my childhood, left me wondering that what it would be like to live in a world that does not have a differentiation line dividing mankind based on their look?

It’s not that I am not enamored by the magnificence of the beauty. Story of Cinderella, Snow White and multiple other beautiful princesses has nonetheless dazzled me. It was a general accepted idea that any uncle or brother should have a beautiful wife. A simmering blindfold made up by millions of stories, movies and social heresy is on eyes of each of us that dazzles us to a divine effect of beauty. The effect of that blindfold has been wearing off for some time (For me) and in the process it has led me to realize the ugly truth behind the notion of beauty. Suddenly my mind has started hitting me with questions about the logic of the rules of this illogical world.

Why beauty is important? Why a beautiful person should be credited with extra merit that might tower all other merits. A person does not choose their look, they are just born with it. Why such a quality on which mankind has no control should be the dominating factor. We do not choose the way we look, and don’t earn our look too then why should be we rewarded/punished for something we never worked for.  

You might argue that talent count too. Nobody would like a silly and beautiful person. But that just an empty argument. We all know that the effort a simple looking person has to put to make an effect on society and how easy it comes to an attractive person. And what about “made-in-Heaven” marriages? This “so called” holy and life size decision is made purely based on look. “Looking for a fair, beautiful/Handsome Bride/Groom”, who want a non-fair and ugly one?

To a certain extent our professional life has come to be defined by our merit (though so called beautiful person still has some edge, which of course is regardless of their merit), our personal and social life is still largely defined by the way we look. Men kind has always tried to eliminate variable from their life. We have always tried to write our destiny since the time memorial. But why we have failed to eliminate the biggest variable from our life – “Our Look” – on which we have no control. If we closely look at this issue then we can narrow this problem down to the one half of the humanity. While the one half – male – has been able to successfully elevate their merit upon their look (not completely though), the other half – Female – is still being perished under the tight shackle of beautiness. Looking beautiful has been the prime motive of female since the time immemorial and this convention is only growing stronger. I often see parents brimming with pride on their beautiful daughter, as though she has won the biggest crown purely on her merit. Has she?

The chain of beauty has been throttling us, slowly and gradually sipping the life out of us. What worry you have in your life if you are a fair maiden, and how treacherous the life path is for a simple girl and that’s just because of an accident, an accident called “Gene”. The curse of beauty has been made permanent on the femalekind by trillion dollars of “Beauty” industry. All you have to do is look pretty to stand out in this world.  If you do not pass the eligibility criteria then don’t worry our trillion dollar industry is working hard to elevate you to that position, which has nevertheless been defined by them.

The biggest culprit are our art and literature. Why god/goddess, heroes/heroines etc are portrayed as beautiful and villain as ugly? Why a good person is to be beautiful and bad person to be ugly? Who defines the criteria of beauty? We have talked about discrimination based on caste, race, religion, gender, class etc. Why have we not yet added the discrimination criteria of “look”, which is the most prevalent form of discrimination all over the world? I guess we don’t have answer for that. We might achieve gender disparity in next 1000 years but we still wouldn’t dare to speak against “Look Disparity”. Ours is a society of hypocrites and we would continue to be hypocrite. The real tragedy is that, now I wish that blindfold is tightened on my eyes again so that I do get the courage of living in the world of hypocrites.