“Whatever, all tend to swear by their respective cultures.”
“The notion that culture was shaped by the wisdom of yore is rooted in the cerebral puniness of the day,” he said. “It’s this self diminution of the men of our clan that proved to be a double jeopardy for the widows for so long; were a woman to lose her man, won’t she be needing succor from her kith and kin; but our custom used to quarantine her for full three days, and what’s worse, subjected her to many a humiliating ritual thereafter. Well, as I was away when my grandfathers died, I was not aware of what my grandmothers had endured, and so I had no idea of what was in the offing for my mother when my father died; and being unprepared, I failed to prevent all those travails forced upon her in the name of our tradition. Oh, how I wish I had put my foot down on all that humiliating crap, and why this gloating over cultures that are connotations of insensitivities.”
“That they’ve stopped tonsuring widows; won’t it show the change in attitudes?”
“That is owing to the vanity of the children, more so sons, than out of any concern for the woman,” he said. “Which son would like to flaunt his tonsured mother to his embarrassment; well only when it hurts men collectively that they turn against the self-embarrassing customs. But why anyone should bother about, say, the farce of a sakunam as it is inimical to only a few, who are supposed to bring bad omens. There was a guy in our village considered a bad sakunam by one and all, and setting out on an errand, all used to pray that the fellow shouldn’t cross their paths. If only they happened to come across him, its mission abandoned for the day that is not before venting their ire on the hapless chap with abuses galore. Where in all this was the thought of the hurt to his self-worth; the problem with the half-wits is that they validate from small samples; well, any writing on the absurdities in cultures would make a couple of volumes or more for each of them, and yet all lament about our cultural decline. Is there any custom that is even remotely rational in its conception; it’s the small minds that lay great store on these for they can’t think out of the box into which their upbringing pushes them.”
“But then counter-cultures fared no better and more over won’t a culture-less society bring in anarchy?”