----- Original Message ----- > From: John Sundman <j...@wetmachine.com> > To: silklist@lists.hserus.net > Cc: > Sent: Wednesday, 28 March 2012 6:09 AM > Subject: Re: [silk] Fwd: Life and Love in Bangalore > > > On Mar 27, 2012, at 7:31 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan wrote: > >> On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 6:50 PM, ss <cybers...@gmail.com> 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
A minor quibble - perhaps pre-technological would be more accurate than pre-scientific. Although India has had a proto-scientific culture, full-blown scientific theory eluded (and sometimes seems to continue to elude) us. On the other hand, there is a clear divide between pre-technological and post-. I think. Pre-literate presumably refers to the Chinese, since there is no other visible target.
