Growing up Culturally Inept

TLDR: Random Thoughts from Charu's brain on a Saturday morning at Home

Yesterday I spent the day, plucking mangoes, cleaning them and then prepping them for the ripening process with my family. It made me start to wonder if my kids would ever have these experiences. And by experiences, I mean small cultural learnings - identifying the fish in the market, cleaning a water tank, know all the different types of bananas that exist, climbing trees to pluck fruits, swimming in the ocean and many more seemingly small thing. In fact, most people who grow up in concrete jungles aka cities are likely to grow up "culturally inept" if I may call it.

This led me to wonder, well... I've probably not grown up with even 50% of the stuff my dad grew up doing. I've lived most of my life, as the most fanciest kid in my neighborhood and for a lot of my early childhood, we didn't live in Kerala. My dad must feel that I grew up to be "culturally inept" by his definitions, so I decided asking him would probably be the first place to start.

Here's what my dad had to say, "Every generation has new things to learn, everywhere you live has new things to learn about". This is an interesting take, I'd say. However, I really don't know what my life in Bangalore has taught me, was it how to order anything in 2 minutes on Blinkit?

Well... the first thing I thought of when I was thinking of this was it would be embarrassing to raise a kid who doesn't possess at least a bit of cultural knowledge. But it made me ask myself, why would it be embarrassing - what's so relevant about this knowledge, did it help me in life in any way? This made me realize, the so called cultural knowledge that I picked up was particularly relevant because I lived in the ways I did, back home. For somebody living in the city, knowing the fish's for the way they look and not by name is good enough, you just have to choose big fish or small fish on Licious, you don't need to climb trees as you probably want have the requirement to ever. Have these skills helped me in other ways in life - weirdly yes actually. Whenever, the shuttle gets stuck in weird places when I play badminton, most of the people I play badminton expect me to climb the wall and get the shuttle back 😂. Is that a good enough reason to learn to climb surfaces - maybe not. So, I think my dad's take does stand for the most part - you learn what you need in those situations, they may benefit you in other ways but that's not a good enough reason to pick up on them.

Okay this has mostly been a rant - but if you made it till here, thanks for that :)