Difference in culture between North and South India
India is a vast country
comprising of multitude of religions, ethnicity and languages. I got a good
measure of it, as soon as I landed at Chennai city in southern India to
commence my undergraduate education at IIT Madras. Till then, I had been raised
in the northern and western parts of the country. The language, dress, food,
mannerisms of Chennai all looked alien to me. Almost no one knew Hindi, my
mother tongue, as a mechanism of protest (started in 1960s) towards domination
of north Indians in the political and cultural sphere.
I found myself
isolated and alone in the first few months. Fortunately, I found a good south-Indian
friend as we played and attended classes together. Through him, I experienced
the south-Indian culture as he shared stories of his upbringing. I realized the
stark contrast with my own family and traditions. For example, while he
received books and volumes of encyclopedia on his birthdays, I was gifted
clothes and shoes midst much fanfare on my birthdays. I started respecting the
knowledge-driven society of south India. No wonder, most of the top bureaucratic
positions in India were and are still headed by people of south-Indian origin.
However, as I embraced the culture further by learning Tamil language and
reading local dailies, I found commonality with the rest of India with respect
to deeply rooted superstitions and caste-system.
I spent five years with tremendously diverse and quirky individuals with
varied passions (not necessarily engineering). I learnt to appreciate diverse
viewpoints and realized through participation in various extra-curricular
activities that when these diverse individuals work on a common problem,
innovation is bound to happen. I couldn’t have asked for a more balanced education
during the formative years of my life.
But, North has a lot to learn from South in terms of bringing up their kids, being humble and god-fearing instead of being cocky and flaunting their wealth. The crime scene in North (esp. Delhi/NCR) is on the rise and perhaps beyond point of return. I have had the fortunate of living in several cities in north as well as south: Bangalore, Hyd, Chennai, Gurgaon, Jaipur, Ahmedabad - and I can safely say that south is a much better place to live and settle down.
On a side note, I strongly believe that in order to change the pathetic and middle-age mindset in North India, we need to educate parents first. Parents and elders should be taught how nurture and raise their children. Sadly, there are hardly any parental-coaching classes in India (any entrepreneur listening).
