Skip to main content

Traditions





Traditions are not sacrosanct. As time changes, as our understanding of the universe improves, as civilization grows, traditions may have to change. Many traditions have changed. For example, we got rid of the tradition of burning the widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Different states in India had various traditional measures to stigmatise the lower caste or untouchable people. Most of these traditions have vanished though some linger on in certain places.

The less there is to justify a tradition, the harder it is to get rid of it, said Mark Twain. Tradition, more often than not, is an excuse to avoid thinking. Human civilisation would have remained in its primitive stages if everyone had remained stuck to traditions.

Good traditions should be preserved, of course. What is good, however? One may argue that whatever is associated with religion is good. Is it? Don’t forget that religious traditions have been responsible for much of the exploitation of certain sections of people. Religions have killed large numbers of people in the name of some tradition or the other. There are communities in India even today which dedicate some of their girl children to prostitution in the name of Devadasi tradition.

What is ‘good’ then when it comes to tradition? Any tradition that promotes the welfare of the individual and the community may be regarded as good provided that does not at the same time prove to be harmful to some other individuals or communities.  Respecting elders even with certain physical gestures has been a good tradition followed in India.

Those traditions which do no good to people in general should be discarded even if they have some religious roots.  Those which promote the welfare of people should be preserved and reinforced. Following traditions blindly just because they are traditions is quite silly. As G.K. Chesterton says, “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.” Why not be alive and kicking?


Top post on IndiBlogger, the biggest community of Indian Bloggers

Comments

  1. Pradeep NairNovember 11, 2018 at 5:36 PM

    I agree with you. Like I wrote in a post earlier, nothing stays for ever. What is observed today is not what was earlier. And what will be in future, will not be what is today. No religion or no society has been an exception to changes.
    Tradition is all about collective individual faith. When a majority start doing something in a different way, the tradition changes.
    There are many practices / rituals in places of worship and events like marriage, which are observed in different ways by different people in different places.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 11, 2018 at 7:18 PM

      Resistance to change is often due to vested interests. If we look closely at the people who resist we'll see the motives clearly enough. Of course, there are always some pe
      people whom change scares.

      Delete
  2. pranita deshpandeNovember 11, 2018 at 5:36 PM

    You are correct but some traditions carries scientific reason.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 11, 2018 at 7:21 PM

      Even without the backing of science some traditions remain valid. That's why i suggest the touchstone of welfare. Those traditions which promote welfare of people should be retained whether they have scientific backing or not.

      Delete
  3. Lalit BhattNovember 12, 2018 at 10:45 AM

    Well said. Rules are made for the convenience of people but eventually people are forced to live as per the convenience of rules.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 12, 2018 at 11:43 AM

      People are hoodwinked by religious and nationalist sentiments.

      Delete
  4. wingsNovember 12, 2018 at 8:17 PM

    The song is a good satire ridiculing traditions.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

You Don’t Know the Sky

I asked the bird to lend me wings. I longed to fly like her. Gracefully. She tilted her head and said, “Wings won’t be of any use to you because you don’t know the sky.” And she flew away. Into the sky. For a moment, I was offended. What arrogance! Does she think she owns the sky? As I watched the bird soar effortlessly into the blue vastness, I began to see what she meant. I wanted wings, not the flight. Like wanting freedom without the responsibility that comes with it. The bird had earned her wings. Through storms, through hunger, through braving the odds. She manoeuvred her way among the missiles that flew between invisible borders erected by us humans. She witnessed the macabre dance of death that brought down cities, laid waste a whole country. Wings are about more than flights. How often have you perched on the stump of a massive tree brought down by a falling warhead and wept looking at the debris of civilisations? The language of the sky is different from tha...
12 comments
Read more

Insecurity and Exclusivism

“ Hindu khatare mein hai.” This was one of the first slogans that accompanied the emergence of Narendra Modi on the national scene. It means Hindus are in Danger . It reveals a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity. Hindus constitute an overwhelming majority in India – 80%. All the high positions in governance, judiciary, academics, any significant place, are occupied by Hindus. Yet the slogan was born. Strange? It will be facile to argue that Modi used this slogan and its concomitant hatred of Muslims and Christians as a political weapon for winning votes. True, he was successful in that; he rose to the highest political post in the country using minority-bashing. But the hatred did not end with that achievement; rather it spread outward and became more exclusive. Muslim and European rulers of India were booted out from the country’s history books and wherever else possible like the names of roads and institutions. With vengeance. Now there is a concerted effort going on to place In...
10 comments
Read more