Skip to main content

Celebrate the Diversity



You won’t find too many women in the Northeast wearing sari. The tribal people have their own traditional dresses and they wear them. They look elegant in those dresses. Those are dresses they designed for their convenience. Those are dresses that add a unique charm to the people.
The diversity of dresses in the northeast may astound you. There are over 220 ethnic groups in that one region of India alone and an equal number of dialects. All these groups have their own dresses, cuisines, festivals, and cultures. When I started my career as a teacher in Shillong in 1986, I used to have Khasi tribal food for my lunch from a small and only restaurant near my school. It was not easy to like the bland dishes with almost no spices in them. But soon I did grow to like them so much that I thought they were better than my own traditional foods. One thing was certain anyway: they were far better than the foods I cooked myself for breakfast and dinner. My culinary skills have not improved to this day.
Later when I shifted to Delhi I fell in love with the north Indian vegetarian cuisine which my school provided me. I still consider those veg meals far more delicious and nutritious than all the stuff I get to eat in my native state of Kerala now.
I have eaten all sorts of foods: Assamese to Punjabi, Bengali to Telugu. I loved most of them. I love this diversity in my country. I love the immense diversity of food, dress, culture, language, festivals, and a whole lot of things in my country. This diversity is what really makes India a fabulous place. There may not be another country in the world with so much diversity.
Why would anyone wish to pulverize all this diversity under a nationalist juggernaut? I wonder. What a boring country would India be if everyone from Ladakh to Thanjavur spoke the same language, wore the same dress, ate the same food, celebrated the same festivals and expressed the same opinions?
The present craze in the country to homogenize everything is sheer silliness if not infantile lack of imagination. We should learn to appreciate the immense variety we have in the country. We should celebrate it. We should showcase it to the world as a rare patrimony for any country.
PS. Written for Indispire Edition 308: Variety is the spice of life. Let us celebrate India's diversity, the fascinating cultures, amazing clothes, scintillating festivals... #IndianDiversity

Comments

  1. pranita deshpandeJanuary 22, 2020 at 1:48 PM

    Great sharing

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anita SabatJanuary 23, 2020 at 1:50 AM

    India is great!
    Proud of our country.

    ReplyDelete
  3. जितेन्द्र माथुरJanuary 23, 2020 at 8:43 AM

    India (and the Indian culture) is a beautiful picture having several colours properly placed in the drawing on the canvas. Your views are agreeable. The craze of homogenizing everything is silliness and a sign of mental bankruptcy of the people indulged in the exercise.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJanuary 23, 2020 at 9:27 AM

      The immense diversity in the country has never ceased to charm me. I find it amazing and delightful.

      Delete

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...
18 comments
Read more

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...
8 comments
Read more

Two Women and Their Frustrations

Illustration by Gemini AI Nora and Millie are two unforgettable women in literature. Both are frustrated with their married life, though Nora’s frustration is a late experience. How they deal with their personal situations is worth a deep study. One redeems herself while the other destroys herself as well as her husband. Nora is the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House , and Millie is her counterpart in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version . [The links take you to the respective text.] Personal frustration leads one to growth into an enlightened selfhood while it embitters the other. Nora’s story is emancipatory and Millie’s is destructive. Nora questions patriarchal oppression and liberates herself from it with equanimity, while Millie is trapped in a meaningless relationship. Since I have summarised these plays in earlier posts, now I’m moving on to a discussion on the enlightening contrasts between these two characters. If you’re interested in the plot ...
12 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