How well balanced Indian youth are upon tradition and trends?
It’s a festival day, at least today go to the temple!!! A typical mother’s dialogue. This generation kids have no discipline!!! A 70 yr old grand dad’s regular saying!!! There are many more criticisms like this that the Indian youth today, gets to hear on a day to day basis. But does this mean that we do not believe in god?? Or is it true that we youngsters do not know or follow discipline??? It’s just that with time the portrayal of things have changed.
There are so many examples that can be quoted over this conversation. Let’s start of with temples as such. There is always complains that we are not visiting temples or enchanting slokas or even lighting a diya at home. Agreed we youth today do not go the temples regularly or sit enchant slokas. In fact I should say we go to temples very rarely. But let’s remind them, we do not live in the 12th century. We live in an era where technology is really sound. We have brought the temples down to our laptop screens and mobile screens, where they are more than idols. We don keep ourselves restricted to the temple timing. We believe in God, hence we also believe in staying connected with Him anytime and anywhere. And devotion towards God needn’t be expressed only through slokas and bhajans. True faith from the bottom of the heart is true devotion and it is the language that He best understands too. We do believe the positive vibes given by these slokas and bhajans and that’s why we have them downloaded in our computers, laptops and mobile and hear to them on pressing a button. We have not forgotten our Almighty but our approach towards him has changed and the display of him is also changed.
Not necessary that we have to sit in Madam M.S.Subbulakshmi’s or Ms. Sudha Raghunathan’s show to understand devotional discipline. Or why do even we have to do that when we have their voices recorded in our ipods. Devotional discipline doesn’t arise by sitting on a chair for three full hours, listening to someone sing. Hip-hop, rap, rock, etc. are in vogue. Like how carnatic music is our culture, hip-hop is the culture for another country, rock for another. We respect the culture of every country and make an effort to understand rather than calling them stupidity or non-sense. We don’t listen only to head-banging music but we also enjoy the melody of our country. To sum up this in simple terms, we are moving towards globalization.
Devotional discipline is a part of the mannerism and discipline. Today we youths of the country are blamed saying we are ill-mannered kids with no discipline. We do not say Namaste; we do not pay respect by touching the elderly foot. I am actually a live example for this. A couple of months back I had been to my native place along with my mother, aunt, brothers and sister. As soon as we got into the house, the first thing my mother and aunt did was paying respect to the elders at home by touching their feet. We were out meeting our cousins. My mother walks up to me and says, “You children of this age have no proper mannerism. Shouldn’t you touch the elders feet when you meet them?”. We did meet the elders and greet them; we do not think you got to say your ‘namaste’ by touching your feet. The picture beside teaches us what Namaste means. We believe in it, that’s why we greet them with the word Namaste, probably in different slangs for different languages. If this tried explaining to the elders then they call it an unnecessary argument. We know our tradition and culture but we live it our way and let us live it our way.
They do not talk about discipline only in terms of actions, but also in terms of eating!!!! Guys isn’t ‘gol gappa’ a country food??? Eating them is also a crime now. To be honest, there are a lot of good restaurants that make chaat items for us. But the most preferred is the road side ones, because they are much tastier. Gol gappas are in vogue today. In fact on an average any youth would be eating gol gappas once in every two days. For pizzas, on an average a youth would eat it thrice every month. To add fuel to the fire, there is a regular complain that we do not eat on time and we eat a lot of junk food. This is ‘not being disciplined’ in terms of many elders today. Why??? Only dhal, roti, sabjji and rice are not food. These are also food items. I wouldn’t call them junk food as they are the staple food for some parts of the country or of a different country. We are adopting ourselves to different cultures, i.e. we are walking towards globalization. At the same time we do know what are staple food is and do make it a point to eat them too for our body metabolism to function normally. But the situation should also be understood right?? We do not live in their era, where they either use to sit at home 24X7 or carry a bag full of food where ever they go. Today the world is very competitive and is moving very fast. We got to stay in pace with it. To stay n pace with it, we got to do certain things like this, which becomes a part of the discipline note for the this generation.
We know our tradition, that’s why the country still exists. What the previous generation called discipline belief or superstition; we try and understand it with science. What was accepted by them blindly yesterday, are being reasoned out by us today!!!! Probably that’s why we youth are neither here nor there. We try and follow our tradition, yet end up being a little trendy!!! It’s like we are the cats on the wall because the gray hair today do not understand what we go through!!! Wake up elders!!! Understand our feeling!!! Live an yet live!!!
Anjana Seshan, INgene-Chennai (20 years)
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