India Abroad: The multi-cultural living – it’s a culture thing
It’s human nature; we have opinions; we carry biases in our head all the times, even when we don’t want to. The way we are raised, the way we have seen the world growing up, affects the way we think. We always look at everything and everyone through the eyes of our own culture.
.
One of the common biases in any culture is the self superiority complex – every culture considers itself superior or better than others. For someone from India who is new in America, for example, it is not an unreasonable belief that Indian culture (or subculture based on the part of India one belongs to) is far better than any of the local American cultures.
One of the key reasons for self superiority is that fact that we don’t know as much about other cultures. We try to judge and perceive everything and everybody from the viewpoints of our own culture.
Why?
Because that is the only reliable reference we have. We know our culture so intimately; we are so used to our own social standards. Everything outside our society has to measure up to our cultural norms – good or bad, true or false. That is why we are always comparing different aspects of a newly acquired foreign society to that of what we are so used to – our own India culture or sub-cultures. Read the rest of this entry »
