Out of the Box

It was about why Indians don’t say ‘I love you’ very often just like the people in the west. I was told:

“I hate it when people don’t say it”

Why a typical Indian don’t say ‘I love you’ to his spouse or kids or friends just like that? And why somebody from the west should hate that Indian attitude?

 I was thinking about that. My father never told “I love you” to me. Nor did my mother or sister. Never heard that from any of my relatives or Indian friends too….Does that mean that they did not love me? I don’t think so..

Take a generation back. What is the divorce rate among old fashioned Indians who almost never said  ‘I love you’ to their spouse? Almost zero (among my parents’ generation, I don’t know even a single relative or acquaintance of mine who got divorced). What about the same with the west? Not much change from the current rate. What does this mean? At least this does NOT mean that those old fashioned Indian did not love their spouse. Btw, this also does not mean that Indians never express their love and care. How do they express is out of scope of this blog.

(I was thinking about my mother tongue. What is the equivalent for ‘I love you’? The closest is – ‘Njan nine premikkunnu’. For us, it is too dramatic. May be we can use it in love notes or in movies but hard to use in a face to face conversation. Of course we can say that in English. But in that case, how can that be part of Indian culture? India speaks over a hundred languages and every language is totally free from English. Zero influence; in fact, Indian language has influence on many other world languages, including English)

There are certain things in this world we should not ‘why’. It is meaningless. For example, in many countries (including India) there is one hand gesture for expressing ‘super’, ‘great’, ‘fantastic’ ‘excellent’ ‘awesome’ etc by touching the thumb and index finger and keeping the other three fingers straight. But this gesture is something filthy in some other countries. If one Indian goes and ‘why’ somebody from that country will that help? Nope. Most of the Asian countries have got traditional dress for wedding. Why can’t they dress like the west, in a ‘modern’ way?

Is there any point in an Indian pointing finger at west and a westerner pointing finger at India without trying to understand the cultures and undercurrents?

Recently Philippines and Indonesia had floods in some parts of their country. When asked, couple of Indonesians started with

“Alhamdulillah…..” (it means all praise only for Allah) 

and Philippinos did not start with any particular expression. Why? May be because they don’t have an equivalent expression, as per their tradition, I don’t know.

Once somebody told me

“I have all the answers in my scripture, so I don’t have to read any other one”

Here that person meant the scriptures of other religions.  

Some people say:

“My God is the only true God”?

So, all ‘other Gods’ are pirated, right? 

Why is it so?

How did ancient Indian Rishis say there is fire deep inside the Earth without even seeing any volcano in their lives, that too thousands of years ago? How did they say it is Earth which is rotating the sun when even glass was not known to humans? (no glass, no telescope). How did they foresee tissue culture, bore well etc? How could they talk about virgins giving birth (thousands of years before Jesus’s birth). How did that happen?

It is the BOX. We all have a box around our ‘thought factory’ the mind or we sit inside a box, when it comes to many things. That is why it is said that we need to think out of the box, at least sometimes.

Albert Einstein stands out from among the past and present scientists (Looking at the earth, he had wondered how earth stays at a perfect distance from the sun so that earth gets the right amount of heat. He could not come out with any equation. He did not think it as a coincidence nor did he believe in the conventional God). So does Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. They were capable of thinking out of the box. Not just them, those ‘rain makers’, inventors, designers, researchers, scientists and most of the ‘successful’ people. If they had seen only the obvious ones, they would not have been there where they are now. Computer, airplane, mobile phone, missile, satellite, submarine….. all those thousands of items around us are there because somebody thought out of the box. Every one of us may not be able to contribute like them. But every one of us has some area where there is scope for a little bit of out of the box thinking….