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.