On Mar 27, 2012, at 7:31 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan wrote: > On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 6:50 PM, ss <[email protected]> wrote: >> The former conforms to dharma, the latter is adharma. > > > India went through an even greater transition in the last 70 some > independent years, second only to the Chinese cultural revolution, and > yet it's gone unnoticed. Like the silent killer of the night, > inconspicuous yet deadly. > > Under the literate tradition of Raja Ram Mohan Roy and later the Nehru > - Gandhi dynasty, a cultural and western educated elite operating > presumably centuries ahead in their thought than their obedient > compatriots, three hundred million people used to an alien hand on the > leash, allowed themselves to be led. > > India leaped from a classical age of temples, society, rituals, castes > and traditions headlong into the bureaucratic equality and rationed > guarantees of socialism and then the shunned embraces of market > capitalism. For a vocal democracy capable of great bloodshed this was > a rather boring bureaucratic revolution. > > With India's historical disdain for the humanities, neither historian > nor sociologist was around to fully record or explain the scale of the > destruction. And thus, inside the heads of most upwardly mobile urban > Indians today there's a very poorly formed sense of society and > family, and an even less formed sense of self. Since the revolution > was never announced other than as a fait accompli, most Indians never > fully grasped the enormity of the change, nor of the havoc it was > going to wreak on family, hearth and home. >
I'm an American profoundly ignorant of Indian history, culture(s), politics and current trends. I offer thus a few highly "abstracted" observations: 1) I remain grateful for having been invited to this list. I enjoy it very much, even if many of the references and allusions elude me. 2) About children and day & night care: I, a parent with 75+ parent-years' experience, am very reluctant to judge how other presumably well-meaning people handle their parental responsibilities. I do believe it is the moral obligation of disinterested outsiders to protect children from their parents and family when said parents and family are not seeing to the basic emotional and physical needs of their own children. But although the NYT story that started this thread made me a bit uneasy, I didn't see anything that set off the proverbial "alarm bells". And, as an American who is completely untuned to Indian/Bangalorean cultural frequencies, I disqualify myself from further judgement. 3) When I was 19 years old, a college freshman (Hamilton College, Clinton, NY), on a whim I enrolled in a course in cultural anthropology. I found it totally enthralling, and went on to take an undergraduate degree in that field. In anthropology, (at least as it was studied back then when dinosaurs roamed the earth), "culture" is/was more or less defined as "the consensus view of members of a society on shared values, stories and ways of seeing things." (We'll skirt for now the definition of 'society'). It seems to me that in 2012 virtually all societies on earth are dealing with rapid, profound, unsettling change. But in some places, such as the USA, the changes are basically the result of conflicts and intermixing of relatively modern sub-cultures. In places like India and China, as far as I can tell, what's going on is the conflict and intermixing of traditional (pre-scientific, sometimes pre-literate) sub-cultures with hyper-modern ones. As an outsider, I find these transformations endlessly fascinating, even though, as I've said, I do accept that I'm missing 90+ % of the story because I don't understand the cultural/historical context. But it's still fascinating. jrs
