Values – Is it Relative? Part 2

Now let extrapolate this to what I have witnessed in the last few weeks and then you would be proud of the how strong the Indian belief system is, that though we have wrongly defined values, has taken us great steps ahead and will do for a long time till we throw away our values.

So, I guess I can use a traditional North Indian family tradition as an example, which is to touch the feet of elders and take their Ashirwad. Now by doing that, indirectly you have administered to bow down, which means you are not the, be all and end all of life, you tend to respect authority (again in the “right” manner) and are asked to be humble and respect human beings around you. Phew I never thought I can think so much and be so creative – Hahaha. The key value here is respect.

To place this in the UK context and the current generation of the Brits, let me quote my experiences. To begin with, I take a bus to work and everyday in the morning there are a set of students who travel along with me on the same route to reach their school which is a few stops before the one get off. Among these students there are 3 “white” (This is just contextual and not any racial discrimination) girls who probably are in high school, looking at their age, certainly in their teens though. The first day itself I found them to be really loud, laughing, giggling, shouting, talking etc. I gave them their credit purely based on their age and just took it as a one off case where they probably were sharing some joy, but wondered where the British decorum was; as time went by, this was their normal routine, day in and day out and all the travellers were getting disturbed and were showing their dissent through their body language and these girls were not bothered at all about their surroundings. It’s good to be your self as long as you take responsibility for the same. This even continuous till today, but sometime last week, a fellow passenger who travels the same line and walked up to them and asked to respect the others in the Bus and have a check on their noise levels and these girls asked this traveller to basically bugger off. Now this traveller must be in his late thirties and these girls probably early teens and when this incident happened, one elderly women remarked, saying, this is the generation of England which will kill the culture of Old Britain. It’s so true to look at that these girls have absolutely no respect for fellow human beings and even today they were the same. Now this might be trivial, but as you travel, read and watch programmes of the youth across the UK, you would just wonder where all the respect and kindness of the basic lifestyle and behaviour, which is what the English are known for are and have disappeared. What the lady said is very true, with this change of lack of respect and the attitude the younger generation of Brits have, they are going to turn Britain into a violent and aggressive country and the environment is going to change, thanks to the lack of values they perceive.

If we look at the largest working, knowledgeable and English speaking middle class out of India, lots of things have changed. Very few want to join a PSU and retire, ambitions are soaring, the money power is increasing, the lifestyle has changed, but overall the set of beliefs that have been instilled, which create a set of perceived values are what has kept us going and will keep us going. For decades now, the west has come to see our culture, the reason simply is that they don’t have much of it and whatever they have is deteriorating. It is not only pertinent for us as Indians to ensure we continue to live with our values and belief systems but also to ensure we instil the same if not more into the generations to follow for us to be the world capital of culture, values and good belief systems.