straight from the heart
till today i have been indifferent to culture. having lived in a cosmopolitian setup and brought up on uniculture, it took years to register that culture comes from language, its ethos and the communication tools that use that language.
Yakshagana, the art form that was showcased in college today, entralled me and set my thought process in motion. i still am not sure about its impact- it will surely some day be put down as one more turning point in my life. but one thing is clear, i need to look beyond the popular culture at understanding and appreciating diversity and richness that comes with it.
I think i consciously made a choice today- there was an English play (different cultural setting, i suppose) and there was the yakshagana. i think it is never too late to go back to the roots to find oneself, after having lost ones identity in the persuit of universal acceptance.
This may look like a typical rambling, but in it lies a seed of change. this is, of course, only the first step towards growing out a complacent sense of 'nothing matters'. only our patronage can provide the push that may see the different art (cultural) forms blossom, once more. this may, to some, look like an indirect attack against westernisation- it is a direct one.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
what lang was yakshagana in?
and i guess it would be slightly hasty for us not to think that english is very much a deep rooted part of this generation and also urs.
what lang was yakshagana in?
and i guess it would be slightly hasty for us not to think that english is very much a deep rooted part of this generation and also urs.
When you were speaking in class about this, I thought of something -- the fact that I am a Sankethi but I have no idea of the language or the community apart from what my grandmother has told me (which isn't much, beacause she doesn't know about it either.) Your talk inspired me to go online at once to find out more about my father's side of the family. I found out that Sankethi has no script of its own; it is completely distinct from both Tamil and Kannada; the Dravidian script will not work for it.
There are such tiny nuances in our culture that nobody knows about. We all talk of the major languages, English, Hindi, Telugu...but how many of us know about small communities and dialects? The sad part is that even one belonging to a tiny community, one of just 50,000, is ignorant about the history of it. This is what urbanisation has brought us to, I guess!
-- Deepti
dear sankethi, my roommate in US for a year happened to be a Sankethi. there is a community called NASA- north american sankethi association. many sankethis in the us. they are supposed to have originated from kerala. there is an interesting story of a female begin banished and settling in a far off place. that is the reason why sankethis dont belong to any one place.
i consider myself identity less! for many reasons, being that i cant place my self in any culture, and that i tend to have a strict difficulty in grasping new languages.
As a kid, i was always outcasted by my relatives, cause i could not speak tulu. and so i hated, and almost refused putting any effort in trying to grasp it. but slowly, seeing that my culutre might soon die off, including my ancestoral language, im slowly considering that I go that extra mile to learn the language, lest it slips off, and its too late.
but sometimes, i think logically, and say, that whats the point? old cultures vanish, and new ones come...isnt that how it has been on since the dawn of life? but as long as diversity is maintained, i guess its okay to relax. the problem arises, when an all ecompassing monoculture begins to thrive. that by far could be a devastating threat. but i guess as long as people live in places, which are geographically wide spread, there will always be nuances which will set apart one from the other.
Post a Comment