celebrations away from home

festivals are celebrated and rituals are followed with a lot more vigour by people when they are away from their homes/ land.

i noticed this first on campus when the entire student community in the hostel used to celebrate festivals like diwali and holi with a lot more enthusiasm and vigour than they normally would back home.

i recently read an article in the times of india about the onam celebrations in mumbai. the article had various malayalees reminiscing about how they celebrated onam in their villages back in kerala. these fond memories now inspire the malayalees all over the world (except, maybe in kerala itself) to relive the rituals and traditions of this festival.i would daresay that you could enjoy a more traditional onam celebration and meal in mumbai or dubai than in thiruvananthapuram itself!

i would assume this is the case with most other communities too.

i am sure all of us have our quota of cousins, relatives and friends in the us/ london/ australia, etc. who strive to keep their culture alive by attending bharatnatyam, carnatic music, kathak, tabla classes with a lot more vigour than they would if they were in their own home-land. i have noticed that this group also is very particular about performing various traditional rituals including pujas, punyajanam, festivals, etc. which they would not be following if they were back home.

i believe this zeal is born more from the need for the comfort from the sense of identity that they can hold on to than from the concern to keep their 'culture' alive.

and i think this is more true for the first-generation expatriate who has had some prior experience and exposure to some of these traditions before they departed to foreign shores.

distance not only seems to make the heart grow fonder, but also more zealous about our roots!

bundle of thoughts!

what if you were told you were nothing but a bundle of thoughts?

and thoughts are nothing more than just energy in a modified form. all the food we eat transforms into energy (and also blood and bone and tissue, of course). so food is the source of our thoughts.

and why then are our thoughts so different from the thoughts of all the others we know? we'll discuss this in another posting some other day.

now, coming back to our discussion about us being thoughts.

now let's follow this chain of thought :-)

everything i know about myself is nothing but a vast reservoir of thoughts. every idea, notion, belief and bias i entertain is nothing but a thought stored away in that massive memory bank of ours. in fact, that's it. our sense of identity is nothing but a cumulative effect of all our past memories that we access in a very complex way at every waking moment.

imagine you woke up one day and lost all your memory, just like they show in the movies. you would have no clue of who you were, who your family/friends/relatives were, what job you did, what likes/dislikes you had, your hobbies, your favorite movie/book/song .... nothing.

and suddenly you realise that everything you are, everything you believe yourself to be, every characteristic, every habit, every aspect of your ego is nothing but thoughts in your memory bank.

you, the person you believe you are, are nothing but a bundle of thoughts!

think about it! and i'd like to hear your thoughts in this regard.