There is a great deal of risk i run of sounding cliched,while writing the following post. i m sorry if you as a reader donot enjoy reading it due to the subject of the post.
A lot has been said abt the Americanizing of indians while the americans desi-fy themselves. But i was hit by this reality very recently by two rather contrasting events that i came across. My cousin got married to an American girl and it was "Atman weds Nicole" all over our lives for around a week, and in the bride i saw this cultured,well-bred,amiable,adjusting,and loving girl...an apparently-extinct or may be even a previously-thought-of-as-inexistent breed. She got married in an Indian ceremony to an Indian boy and even was heard telling her father-in-law how she would love to expose her children to the Indian culture and raise them with the awareness of the rituals and customs of their paternal side. She drank Indian water and ate our food,danced to our rhythm,wore our clothes,and won our hearts...
And just days after the very touching ceremony,the news channels flash this piece about a shootout at a Delhi school, reminiscent of the Columbia shootout...a gruesome act...and something that was related with the developed countries. Although the shootout dint hve a deranged kid shooting everyone in his school, but was a planned murder as per the media coverage so far, all the same my heart goes out to the parents of the boy as much as it did to all the victims of Littletown(the name of the place, if i m nt wrong).
What point i m trying to make is not that our culture is great nor am i trying to say that the west is all bad. i m not trying to be moralistic here, but i m actually trying to link the two events that touched my heart in totally contrasting ways..and may be in all this there is also an underlying idea...that of love. It was love that brought nicole to india...and may be, just may be, it was lack of love that made all those kids kill ppl they shared their meals with and played with.May be it isn't as much about the east or the west...may be our cultures aren't all that different...may be its jz compassion and love and humanity that we all should live by...
