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).