Collision Course

Indian Society is undoubtedly a collective society. If it is not evident to you yet (you-referring to an Indian reader, others can let this illustration be an evidence), please refer back to a memory when you were departing to some far off land to study/work/travel and your entire family comprising parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins had thronged to the airport to bid you a fond farewell. Family adhesiveness and societal pressures are indeed quintessentially Indian. I knew this at some subliminal level, but after interacting with people from so many Individualistic cultures, this realization has become completely conscious.

But although our collective conscious dominates, I see streaks of Individualistic tendencies creeping out and trying to make their presence felt. I can see this with greater clarity as I reflect on the difference between my parents and I. In a collective society people value the society more, and anyone not in adherence with the social construct would be deemed a misfit and outlier, if at all that is allowed to exist, because usually individuals would not want to do anything to be an outlier. I have heard of stories of girls wanting to become dancers and singers, but their parents opposition to trivialised profession as opposed to other respectable and well paid professions, lead to thwarted desires, and eventually contributed to those girls pursuing something in tandem with the desires of their parents, which in fact were influenced by the collective conscience. What we see here is a collision of collective conscience and an Individual identity. What eventually won here was the collective.

Indian society and culture prescribes codes of conduct, behaviour, sense of morality and sometimes even professional pursuits. This works fine as long as we live in a cocoon of socially constructed reality, oblivious to externalities of the world. But the minute this bubble explodes, as is evident now-with a vast influx of media, changed lifestyle, greater incomes, travels and perhaps an enhanced view of the world, we have rebellious youth questioning authority. How long that lasts, of course depends on how strong the collective conscience is.
Individual and collective desires are usually at loggerheads in a society like ours; there is almost always a trade off. There is no optimal strategy for gratifying both. If I do something that makes me happy, it probably will be at a cost of making my family and my society unhappy. Of course this is a simplistic generalization, and money and education has afforded some members of our society to develop their own accepted norms and values which are somewhere in between the continuum of Individualistic desires and the collective conscience.

The life of a pre-pubescent in India can be fraught with quite some confusion given a collision of identities. We grow up readings books that talk about dreaming big and exploring, we see movies in which individuals have defied the social norm to go on to do something grandiose, and then when we remove ourselves from this world of books and movies, we find ourselves confronted with a strange reality. We oft, can not do what we really are pining to do. Worse yet, our desires and wishes get engulfed by the great collective cloud, and slowly the dissonance we experience from holding these two contradictory thoughts in our head, ameliorates, and what is left is the nebulous cloud of the collective construct, and we don’t even realize when the individual became the collective.