Ashraf Wani
2015 is history and we are living well into 2016 now. This is how it is. Time transcends everything-culture, religion, mindsets, ideologies, etc. Evolutionary sociologists call it social evolution. Whether we like it or not, with time things change and nothing stays the same forever. Change is the essence of time. You may perceive the change as good or bad. But time doesn’t care. The fact is it happens so gradually and naturally that we don’t even realize that things around us are changing. People who create dynamism in them do not feel challenged by the change, they move with the time smoothly and comfortably. There are others who feel challenged by the change and resist it. But time, as we know, cannot be enslaved, neither persuaded nor threatened to behave according to one’s fantasies. Unable to cope with this fact, some people create a protective defence of delusion around them. They refuse to accept change as change. They see it, or pretend to see it , as ‘cultural aggression’, conspiracy of the West and/or forces of occupation to erode our ‘rich cultural and religious values’. There was a time when even western culture didn’t allow women to vote. Until 1869, women in Great Britain did not have right to franchise. By allowing women to participate in electing the political representatives, did the West lose its rich culture? Time has proved it otherwise, we all know. Similarly, the same Saudi Arabia whose rich cultural and religious traditions barred the participation of women in any activity outside home has a women municipal councillor now. Women were allowed to participate and vote in the local municipal elections for the first time in the ultra conservative country in 2015 (the year that was). I didn’t hear anyone say, not at least in Kashmir, that Saudi Arab is losing its cultural values, because it has slightly indicated empowering her women. Neither did anyone label Saudis as ‘cheap mentality people’ for having copied the western democracy.
Come new year and we get to hear a lot of sermons as to what is religious and what is immoral and irreligious. There are people who celebrate the occasion, there are some who want nobody to celebrate it. Yet there is a majority for whom it doesn’t matter, for them it is just a change of date, but their unmindfulness is not distracted by the very news that someone is celebrating the occasion. On one hand we claim that our cultural values are so rocksolid that they have withstood many a test and preserved themselves against all odds, on the other hand we feel threatened by a mere new year celebration or saying a Dewali or a Christmas wish to a non-Muslim friend. If our culture is rocksolid, then nothing can shake it and if it is fragile then nothing can protect it, sooner or later it will succumb to the ‘invasive forces’. If we believe it is both, as our knee jerk reactions convey, then it is cognitive distortion resulting out of the irrational reaction to change. Saying “Happy Christmas, Happy Dewali or Happy New Year to someone does not necessarily mean agreeing with the faith or belief system of the other, it only conveys a feeling of love and respect for that person, which is a universal ‘good culture’. In keeping with the same, let me wish one and all a VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR!
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