Once upon a time, someone sneezed before leaving home.
On another day, someone else sneezed before someone else was leaving.
Both met with such legendary misfortune that an entire generation decided sneezing before departure was bad luck — for you, for them, for everyone within earshot.
Nobody remembers what exactly went wrong that day, only that ever since, we’ve been holding our breath before stepping out.
In our society, of which’s norms and rules I learnt while growing up, has a lot of rules that you are not told of, but you are definitely scolded for not adhering to them. If I have to tell you some, they are:
You cannot cut your nails on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays; don’t sweep after dark; avoid walking under the ladders, breaking mirrors, or opening umbrellas indoors; and please keep an eye out for black cats.
Maybe some poor soul did all that on the same day and had a terrible week and that was enough for the elders to consider these actions cursed forever.
Weird enough how that one incident that happened to someone else is now a cause for an instruction to me.
Now this brings us to a question:
What even is Culture?
Culture is maybe just the collective memory of the whole family, community, region, religion, country or even whole of continents. That memory gets to the next generation by word of mouth, written document, story, fable, prayers or even superstitions.
Culture does not just exist in our stories and sayings but also in our daily lives. How we interact with things around us. Like we avoid stepping over someone’s legs, or instinctively touch the book to our head and heart if we drop them or they touch our feet by accident, which slowly permeates into our habit of “seeking blessing” of anything other than the floor and shoes that touches our feet. Such tiny gestures demonstrate the fact that how closely connected to the culture we are, and it is not just a family it is a whole society in which we can observe such thing happening.
In my family, the Deepawali routine is, we decorate the in-house ‘mandir’ a little bit more than usual festive decoration, then arrange all the festive prayer things, and then we would wait for my Great-grandfather, who would, without fail, come to our place every year, after conducting the pujan at our old family house, to conduct the prayer. His prayers’ preparation was elaborate and very precise; every year I have seen the very same arrangement of things kept in front of him as he started the prayers.
Then came the old shlokas and mantras that just reverberated all around, making the atmosphere even more pious. When the prayer ended, we all would stand up, starting from the Eldest to the youngest of our elders, we would touch their feet and distribute the fruits we kept as prasad. That was the normal Deepawali for me.
This year we had to conduct the prayers without him, and it was not the same. We still did the prayer prep, and we still lit the lamps and diyas as always, but that echo was the reminisce of an old powerful sound.
Maybe culture isn’t what we remember, maybe it is what we refuse to forget.
It is almost comforting how I do not even question it, maybe faith is just a collective muscle memory.
Maybe that is why I keep thinking about you, not as an idea, a concept or a word that we throw around in sociological discussions, but as something living, breathing, watching us silently.
Dear Culture,
Sometimes I think you’re a Ghost, haunting us kindly. You speak in recipes, rituals, wise words and scolding's and I keep translating you back into language. I used to think you were outside me something I could observe, critique, maybe even reject. But the older I get, the more I see you everywhere, in my gestures, in my food cravings, in the way I apologize to books. You are not history and tradition; you are a habit and timing. I’ll admit, sometimes you exhaust me. You sit quietly in things that don’t make sense anymore in the silences we keep at the dinner table, in the prejudices we dress up as “values”. You’re beautiful when you bind us, unbearable when you cage us and separate us. Maybe that’s why I can’t escape you — because you were never outside me to begin with.
The thing about Culture is, you can love it and still find it exhausting. It’s like family comforting, familiar, but always reminding you who’s really in charge. Culture teaches us how to belong, but it also teaches us where not to. It’s strange how the same hands that fold in prayer sometimes draw invisible lines between who can eat together. I have seen people preach unity in the morning and correct surnames by the evening.
When questioned about it, I was told, “It has always been like this, you will understand when you’re older.” But that is not an explanation, that is a plot twist. All that they are doing is try to hold on to something that had made sense eons ago.
And it is not just age, even gender bends under the weight of culture. For a civilization that worships goddesses, we still seem a little afraid of women who speak too loudly or dream too far. “Be a good boy,” they said. “Be a good girl”, they said. But no one really defined good but it was always known that it was a command to be quiet. That’s the thing about cultural socialization it doesn’t just teach us how to behave; it teaches us what to believe about behaviour. We learn early what earns approval and what provokes silence. Before we can even name it, we internalize what’s “respectable”, what’s “shameful”, and what should never be spoken at all. It is not written anywhere it is performed, demonstrated, and reinforced until it becomes instinct.
Sometimes I wonder how deep these rules go whether they stop at behaviour or creep into our choices, like love. If I ever fell for someone from a different culture, would I add hers to mine, or expect her to fold into mine like a footnote? That’s socialization again the invisible voice that whispers compatibility means similarity. We pretend love is pure, but even it comes preloaded with instructions: same language, same gods, same last name.
We host diversity panels in the same halls where we whisper about who married outside caste.
We chant for peace and share memes about “our traditions”.
We romanticize how inclusive we are as long as inclusion doesn’t show up for dinner.
The truth is, socialization doesn’t end in childhood; it just gets subtle.
It hides in our preferences, in the people we call “our kind”, in the stories we tell to feel proud of ourselves. It shapes not only what we do, but what we imagine is possible.
Culture is funny that way. It’s a house with doors that never shut, but windows that never open. You can always come home, but you can’t always breathe freely once you do.
Now here’s the thing about growing up, I have realised that I have become the very person I used to roll my eyes at. I question everything yet I still fold my hands before leaving home. I mock half the rituals I follow but I still follow them. That is my truce with Culture: Eyeroll first then compliance.
It is actually very strange how deep that imprint actually runs. Even when I disagree with something, the reflex still remains. Maybe that is how socialization actually works, not by forcing us but by making its lessons more of an instinct. I can analyse however much I want to but my hand still works with that unexplainable efficiency while lighting the diyas on Deepawali.
Continuation of a lot of things felt like a blind tradition or even a nuisance, but now it feels like we are keeping somethings or someone alive, by taking care of small things or actions that they used to carry out. My mother used to scold me for a lot of things back at home, now that I am not at home I get irked by the very same things my mother used to get irked at.
Culture isn’t a rulebook; it’s more like a family recipe.
You improvise, tweak the spice, replace what’s missing; but you still make it because you remember how it made everyone feel.
At my place every day at sundown we light an incense stick with a short prayer, it had a calming sensation on me. Now if ever, I feel uncomfortable in my room, I light up an incense stick, if the smell doesn’t reach me, the view of that continuous smoke emanating from that glowing red tip, calms me beyond measure.
Maybe that’s all Culture really wants, it is not worship or perfect preservation, just remembrance, a quiet promise not to discard it completely. It is not a burden; it’s a hand-me-down with frayed edges that still fits somehow.
You cannot call it modern or ancient it is just human, carried forward in the easiest way we know how: by habit, by love. By accident.
P.S. Dear Culture,
I don’t always understand you,
but I think I’d miss you if you were gone.
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