Day 26 of Lockdown!

Culture and Tradition:

One of those things happened to me while surfing the net (YouTube), inadvertently.

Hold your horses! What I have in mind, to click and clutter my screen, is just not what you are imagining!

Intrigued? Hmmm, thought so!

Well, this was what I had in my mind and letting loose from my grey cells.

I chanced upon a few Korean soapies and thought, what the heck? Let me give it a go. Anyways, they all had the option of subtitles in English (for people like me) and so I started to watch their soapies and tried to compare it with ours. Not that I am a big fan or critic of Indian soapies. But to my limited knowledge of watching them, on and off compulsorily, I was just curious.

To my utter surprise, I watched so many of their soapies non-stop, not just over these days but also prior to that. Man, there are some serious Rom-Coms, Action, Thrillers, Historical, Sci-Fi, et al. and believe me, these are produced very well covering all genres.

Most of these soapies are of 16-20 episodes of which many are further stripped into parts of an episode around 20min each. You can go on binge-watching these episodes on YouTube, if you activate the Auto Play feature. They even have short stories and dramas too.

What really struck me, on viewing over a number of episodes from a variety of soapies, is the fact that the Koreans have a very strong affinity for their culture and tradition. Also, they address their parents in the way very similar to us; e.g. for mother they call “Umma” and for father, it is “Appa”, which surprised me a lot.
 
In all of those I watched, there was a respect to the tradition, be it;

• Sitting on the floor for eating breakfast, lunch or dinner (only those that exhibited lifestyle of the ultra-rich showed dining tables),
• Display of respect to elders and guests,
• Changing the footwear used outside the house to the ones for use indoors only, right at the entrance of the main door, etc.
• Accepting a drink (including tea) from any person with both hands,
• Not drinking with your face to the elder or senior but by turning your face to the side not visible to the elder/senior,

To check my understanding, before I conclude on the above, I made sure to watch from amongst assorted themes and genres. I was really flabbergasted to see the strong clasp, of their culture and tradition, come across all these soapies without an exception.

This is in sharp contrast to what we exhibit in our soapies, at least to my limited knowledge of these across various genres. Except where the central theme is around rural or semi-rural background, all other soapies ooze unnecessary grandeur and unrealistic costumes, particularly of the female cast, which not only confuses the viewers but are way off from reality. Agreed, our costume directors for these soapies, base their creation on what is warranted by the producers and directors of these productions and also ape the ideas from other regional soapies. After all, we have umpteen languages and the TV channels have to cater to all these languages.

Well, many of the traditions have long gone into thin air as a heavy dose of ‘Westernisation’ has swayed us and made us question everything that our culture had, innately. The current scenario of lockdowns and emphasis on personal hygiene and social distancing is proving to be a chance to make people understand that these were the exact hygienic values our forefathers and ancestors had bequeathed us but in the garb of modernisation, we have lost all these by the wayside.

Isn’t it time to think about this? Can’t we pick up from where we left and move on?