it is a shame really that R knows little about Bong culture... the icons we grew up with... Ray, Tagore, Mrinal Sen, Ritwik Ghatak... are not even familiar names to her... she does not know who did what and what is their claim to fame, except that Tagore won the Nobel for Literature... and yes, we do have Sanchaita and Gitobitan, the two tomes of Tagore's poems that every Bong home has...
actually it is not her fault... when she was little, we were in Mumbai... relocated to Kolkata briefly to pack again to Delhi... again back to Kolkata and left for Muscat and then Doha...
am i making excuses for R? nope, for myself, trying to explain why i did not teach her to read and write the mother tongue... she speaks, since she learnt that at home... but it should have been us who should have taken the trouble to teach her to read and write the language... unless one reads in a language, how else is one expected to have any interest in what goes on within the culture...
here, we have fallen short... so no point in now getting annoyed when she is busy with some remix on her iPod while we are blasting a Rezwana Choudhury Bonya at home or in the car... she is not aware that this can be listened to as well... we have failed here... not she...
culture is a function of the place where one lives and grows up... R has constantly been moving, so she has no specific regional cultural values, except the broad contours of right and wrong, do-able/not-allowed, good/bad categories in mind...
to an extent, today's generation is growing with universal values, which means good in one way, but detrimental in another...
good that universal values get reinforced so many times over and bad that local distinctness gets lost...
i grew up in a home where Tagore was the staple of many discussions... many sang his compositions... there was an effort on the part of my parents to inculcate the habit of reading Tagore, listening to his songs...
B too had a somewhat similar background...
why did we fail teaching the finer nuances of our specific culture? is this not the way in which so many major currents get lost? YES... so why blame R?
The Hero’s Journey
3 days ago
3 comments:
do we sense nostalgia? something you said you don't feel majorly?
the fact that we cannot share with R the "feeling" that we get when we listen to a Tagore song...
if that "feeling" is nostalgia, then it is...
You need feel in that way dear, there are lot many in Bengal who are not interested in tagore who feel that the modern music is much important and soothing to their ears. we are all in fact bearers of our own culture and custom which we with our multitasking fail. Nothing to worry about, if it is in her it will come up with age
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