knowledge has no horizons

Culture is to a nation as heart is to a human being. Have you ever imagined any living creature without a backbone of its own? Certainly not! It would be apt to call culture the backbone of any nation. The word “culture” having its root from the Latin word “Cultura” means "to cultivate". It is the thing which cultivated the stone-age man and turned him to sophisticated man.

Culture is always defined as a set of general customs or belief of a particular group of people or any nation or a part of a nation. To put it in simple terms, it is “the way of life of an entire society”. It is almost always applied to the way people are to behave or to lead their life, to the manners, customs and beliefs, albeit applied to other forms such as art, literature, film, painting, sculpture and theater.

Every nation has its own culture. Among the European nations, Greece traces the history of having a richness of culture right from the antiquities, and the Romans share the respect of the same with the Greeks. In Asia, countries like Egypt and China also had very good culture in ancient times. After all, the fact that should not be forgotten is that India boasts of its culture from the beginning of the world, and it is not hyperbolic to say that India pioneered the world about having a culture of its own.

The Tamils (an ethnic group that form the southern part of India) have a lot of things to admire about their culture, like one for each other in marital life. It is clear and evident from the Tamil epics like Manimekala that it is almost considered a sin for a girl or a woman to make a man have a feel of lust with her luscious eyes or by lascivious appearance. Even thinking of another man’s wife was a cruel and unpardonable thing in ancient times. Kambar, a great poet in Tamil literature, too, described in his Ramayana the character of Lakshmana as a worshipper of his brother Rama and his beloved wife and presented him as he used to talk to her by seeing the fingers in her feet.

Culture has changed a lot nowadays. There is no gender discrimination between people. The advent of science made its impact in the every sphere of people’s lives and also in their culture. Cinema has its devastating effect in making the culture go on the way of wrack and ruin. Cultural dress like sarees and dhotis are replaced by churidhars and pants. T-shirts and jeans become a common thing for both men and women. I am not here to say that such kind of changes should not be welcomed, but not affecting the roots of culture.

Of course, everything in this world is subject to change except the word “change” itself, and it is acceptable that it is ineluctable to have changes in the basics of culture because of the factors like “contact between societies” and “changes in the natural environment”, but not at the cost of culture itself. For, culture, according to a critic, is “the best that has been thought and said in the world”, and it is our duty and responsibility to save it from the so-called fashions of the modern era.

Beauteous to behold is the placid place,
And blessed with bliss is the bird and its race,
That rummages through the ramages of the trees,
To peck the fruits scrumptious in the gentle breeze.

The brook flowing beneath is glowing in gloaming,
Flinging pebbles small slowly on its moving;
And whisper with rustling all through its route,
In the air, the Cuckoo’s poised canorous note.

The well-spring of glee in my weird world,
Winding-down worries from my wearied mind and sad;
Wither you flit, blithe and blissful bird,
Wake I am the ecstatic songs thine to be heard.

No shifts for you to work, ye happy bird,
Nor to meet the evenings ever tired;
No dinner in hungry stomachs to gorge,
Nor have you the peccable minds to forge.

Wake we to work and work, and work till night,
With all our endless efforts and might,
And rest we in beds a little while to make
The tired minds and bodies afresh, Lo! again to wake.

Fly away and bring me into your blissful region,
From the land perilous with farragoes legion;
Or come out to make my dull soul be shone,
From your coppices dark and fully-grown.

Ye, enchorial to the ever ecstatic world,
Take me to live ever in thine joyous shade;
Cos, agonizing is the life here and there,
As the Ten Plagues occurring altogether.


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O, my beloved, be with me forever,
Let us prove to the world
The ecstasies infinite yet undiscovered.
Come my Love, I will get for you
The heavenly apples from the Hesperides.
Or gift you gathering the sands all
Stained with gold from the Pactolus filled.

O, the Helen of the heart of mine,
Let us bid Daedalus to fashion
The feathered-wings to be fixed,
And wander with clouds the world around,
And make those under the sun dumb-found.
Or grab with Athena's harness golden
The Pegasus from the Hippocrene and fly.

O, the walking perennial beauty enviable,
Let us order Apollo to speed up
His day chariot to driving it fast;
And get us hurt from the Cupid's bows
To feel the painful pleasures of nights.
And asking Aurora to be ever at rest
And find we in Love the finest and best.

Hark to me, my honied heart, to the words
Of the willing slave of your winking eyes;
'Come live with me and be my love'.
We shall dine upon the Idunn's apples ever
In the elation-filled Elysian fields,
To be ebullient with eternal youth, and find
The dimwitted Tithonus felt jealous-found.

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