Eaglezview

Does our sense of appreciation depend on exposure? Let me elaborate. Do we tend to appreciate a piece of art or culture or for that matter any aspect of human endeavour, more when we are constantly exposed to its nuances in a favourable manner and setting?

 It is not awareness that I am referring to, but exposure.   The reason this question came up in my mind is that out of some of the books and articles I have been reading recently, I realized that we, and by ‘we’ I mean the general English educated population anywhere in the world, read, talk and write in English. We watch English language movies. We conceive and express ideas better in English. We learn more words of English than from our mother tongue; we are more tuned to the western culture than we are to our own.

Now, given all this exposure to western culture (I don’t necessarily mean the ‘disco’ culture here – again a stereotype)and language, are we not more appreciative of it than we are of those cultures (may be our own), to which we have far fewer touch points in our daily lives? This is a long term risk to the diverse human conscience that has evolved over the ages. I heard the anthropologist Wade Davis in one of his talks say that no culture or civilization is on top of the cultural pyramid and the others at the bottom; in fact there is no cultural pyramid to indicate that the western civilization and sophistication is far superior to the others around the world. Each civilization and culture has expressed and evolved better in some human quest – the west probably in technological and rational pursuit, the east in the spiritual pursuit. Each is nothing but  a mode of expression of the collective human conscience of that people.

Diversity amongst humans is an endangered species in today’s times of global proximity enabled by technological explosion. I am myself nagged by this question many times – I am Tamilian who can’t read and write the language in a fluent manner, although I can speak it fluently.  It means that from my generation of people, that is one less a person who knows lesser about the literature, art and other aspects of the Tamil culture. Already, most of the rituals and practices followed in my village don’t make sense to me, or at least I don’t feel connected to them. Nevertheless, a small part of my heart chides me for this feeling; a feeling built layer by layer by both my lack of exposure to these things and by an amplified exposure of western ideas and concepts ( I don’t mean one is better or worse than the other). May be this awareness itself will change things for me and coax me appreciate these things better; the key would be to engage more.