Threads that bind

It is easy for most of us to be unaware of what lies beyond the immediate. We are busy with work and family and play and time marches on. The thoughts and ideas of people around us, transmittted through books, magazines, newspapers, the internet and so on give us a glimpse of something different. Yet, what we are receptive to listen to or read from is dictated by our existing mental map of what the world is like. Words or sound that shake our preexisting mental maps are almost always immediately rejected and we gravitate towards what we know and are comfortable with.

In the Western world, much of what is considered as classic refers to words or sounds created by dead white males (for the most part). I can imagine it would
be unthinkable for almost any college student in the US not to have read the classics and the greek epics and so on. There is truly a wealth of wisdom in those books and sounds created by the dead white males and they should be studied carefully.

A liberal education (yes, even for engineers and scientists) must include visits with the classics as it is understood in much of the Western World. Yet, there are many in this world who are completely unaware of the classics or not as familiar with them as most college students in the US are (or should be). Students in the Far East or in the Asian Subcontinent or societies that did not develop in the Greco-Roman mold has their own classics and epics. Rest assured, these students (like the ones in the US) do read their own classics and epics, as they must.

I have had the privilege of being part of two entirely different types of cultures. Yet, I find that the ties that bind are far more numerous and stronger than those that seem to separate. There are obvious differences in language and structure and the manner in which the classics were handed down from generation to generation. What the classics and the epics deal with however are remarkable for their similarities. Life, living, relationsips - humans and their frailties, the fear of the unknown and the after-life, crime and punishment, justice and compassion.

I have read the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (but not the Iliad the Odyssey). I have read Wordsworth, Shelley and Pope, I have also read Rabindranath Tagore. I have read the Atlas Shrugged, Free to Choose, Illiberal Education - I have also read R.K. Narayan. Beethoven and Mozart and Pachelbel and Bach and Strauss are all wonderful - so are Mahalingam and Yesudas and TN Krishnan and MS Subbulakshmi and Bismillah Khan and Zakir Hussain.
Lionel Richie and Tracy Chapman are mesmerizing, so is Mohammed Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar. The thread that binds transcends language and national barriers.

The distance between humans continues to shrink, the world is only getting smaller. As the years go by, we will discover that we may look different, speak differently and have different customs, yet we are remarkably alike in so many ways that perhaps we may understand what scientists decoding the human genome have discovered - we are all unique, yet share so much in common. Let us continue to discover the amazingly different areas we have so much in common with.