What exactly is this culture shock thing!

This is a sincere attempt to get into the serious writing space. If you don’t like this, please feel free to let me know about it. I will try to refrain form getting into such ventures in future (this is no promise!).

Everytime I take my mother to a mall in Bangalore during the weekend, and I feel like taking a set of blinders, because I know what comments are waiting in the wings, whenever she gets a glimpse of the dressing sense on the streets, theaters, restaurants, just about anywhere.

I too feel a little uncomfortable, when I see smokes emanating from cigarettes held in those hands, which would do much better holding a bunch of flowers. It really is a weird uncomfortable feeling.

Now the point is, all these are things that are acceptable in different parts of the world, and hence is not bad or wrong, when looked at in isolation. But, what creates the deafening silence in the atmosphere is when it is looked at in conjunction with the overall environment.

When you find these things in a place where, it is not really warranted, not sure about the dressing sense, but definitely with respect to smoking or its fully compatible affiliates, there is no compelling reason for it, except mere snobbishness, it is tough to accept it as a matter of fact.

This precisely is culture shock, as I see it. Readers may have differing views, and are most welcome to comment on this.

I am not playing the saint here, but what I am trying to convey here is that, each one has a certain level of acceptance capacity, and the superset of the majority’s tolerance is the over all domain within which the boundaries of culture are defined. When a certain behavioural trend tries to push these boundaries by testing new waters, that is the reason for the culture shock factor to creep in.

Does this mean that doing what you like best is not the way to live. Not really. As long as the attributes that you are using to differentiae yourself from the rest, or generally accepted norms, is going to add value to your or the lives around you, nobody would complain, and just like common perception that is a summation of individual perception, these changes when collected together from people across the spectrum would lift the society one level higher, and that is genuine evolution.

Societies love to cope up with evolution, but are right in their own ways to disapprove regressive, unwarranted behavioural trends. Shock absorbers are not the need of the hour, corrective thinking is!