Sanskara aur Parampara

Last night I watched Swades. Although the website I watched it from had cut down the length, thereby deleting some of the talked about scenes of the movie, it was a great watch.

But this is not a review of the movie itself. I just want to talk about one scene that I think says so much. The sequence goes like this. When confronted with the fact that America is far ahead of India, the village elders fall back on the old Indian trick. They claim that the greatest strength of India is its sanskara ( values) and parampara( tradition) and that these things make India the greatest country on earth. Admirably, the director took this notion head on through the lead actor Khan and made the case that this notion of superiority based on culture is not only misplaced but also detrimental to the development of India. It is only if we realise where we have gone wrong that we can go on to fix it. Sweeping the problems under the carpet is not going to work. The garbage under the carpet is only going to rot with time.

This struck me because I remember being asked a similar question weeks before I was departing for the US. One of my relatives asked me which culture I think is better, Indian or American. It is evident what answer he was looking for.