Abid Hussain Rather
Every society has its basic obligatory moral and cultural values which depict its cultural standard and ways of living. When we visit an outland, we establish our opinion about their cultural standard by observing their behaviour, deportment, habits and other ways of living as these things depict the unobtrusive and hidden qualities of an individual or a society. It is an inescapable reality that an underdeveloped nation always gets influenced by the culture and ideologies of a developed nation and try to adopt their lifestyle while feeling inferiority complex of its own culture and sometimes a nation loses its own identity in the process of adopting the culture of other nations. When we keenly observe our society, we feel the same process going on with all of us. Every sensible person among us can observe that we are flowing with the cultural flow of west and with every passing day there is a change in our habits, fashions, thoughts and ideologies due to cultural and ideological war of west and we are mere spectators in this cultural war rather than defending our own cultural identity.
Parents are the role model for their children and mother’s lap is the first school of learning for a child. A child learns his ways of living from his parents and his personality is ploddingly crafted in mother’s lap. But ironically today’s parents are escaping from this duty and it has become a newfangled custom to send the kids to crèches at the age of two or three years as parents remain much busy with worldly affairs and have no time to take care of their kids. Nowadays parents provide every kind of facilities and conveniences to their children except their time and care. The unfortunate kids are left at the caretaking mercy of crèche nurses instead of looking after by their parents which profoundly affect their mental and psychological health. It has been observed by psychologist that the behaviour of such kids become acrid, impatient and arrogant in their future life and the creative, intellectual and moral aspects of their personality remain unnourished.
According to one of the reports of World Health Organization, economically independent, educated liberal and high class women mostly face the sexual violence in modern uncouth culture. This fact should not jolt us at all as it is the result of overpassing our cultural and moral values and blindly following and adopting western ideas of living. It is deplorable that there is an increase in moral indecency through internet and obscene movies in our society. The modern literature, social media, movies and TV shows are full of indecent content. Nudity is promoted in the name of modern fashion and modern dress code in different institutions. Women feel proud in working with strangers rather than handling their family affairs and working as house wives. Our youth folk, which is supposed to be the future of a nation, remain busy in night parties which is the attribute and emblem of modern western culture. It is a common trend nowadays that parents provide smartphones to their children at a very young age which is mostly misused by them and it has ill effects on their morale and conduct. Most of the parents remain unaware about their children’s activities as they have no time to spend with their children and keep an eye on them and later claim disaffection of their children. Parents need to retrospect their parenting and spare time for their kids and they should try to cultivate moral and social values in them for their better development.
People in the western world are fed up with their immoral societies and irreligious life but we are blindly following them due to our intellectual dejection and indecorous upbringing. They are coming back to accept natural laws of humanity and morality. They are sick and tired of those immoral and indecent practices which have ruined their family systems. They are redefining their norms of cultural and moral development. It is an undeniable fact that a religious and moral civilization has always paved the way for progress and development of a nation but unfortunately we are preferring immorality and indecency in the name of modernity and cultural development. It is high time that we should learn the essence of moral values and get rid from the clutches of modern uncouth culture. We need to sanctify our society from immorality and indecency and return to our old lost traditions and rescue our cultural identity so that we can save ourselves from the cultural war of west which is otherwise leading us to the brink of destruction.
(The author is an official member of JKIFTS columnists council and can be reached at [email protected])
