Thatta Kedona

Culture is a Basic Need

Why Travel
Friday, November 15, 2013

Strong travel movements characterize our times. The infrastructure, good connections by land, water and air make travel easy and suggest that everything is easily available everywhere. The values of the traditional culture however are increasingly forgotten in this scenario, although it is these values, which give the city dweller – the local one as well as foreigners a new outlook and possibilities to show off people and places. Which is why it is recomded tha conveniences of city life be transfered to villages.

Tourists, visitors an travelers, for example to the Punjabi village Thatta Ghulamka Dhiroka are best recommended to leave back their city ideas and thereby become more open for understanding the rural life and its rich, traditional culture. If the come with urban attitudes, the visitors will start pitying the village dwellers for the deficient possibilities. Currently the villagers there do not need gymnastic studios like the city dwellers, the dusty path from one village to another is sufficient for walking practice instead of taking rounds in an oval stadium, and so on.

The so-called conveniences of city life must be financed. The drainage water must be disposed of somewhere, cultural and other institutions must be filled with life.

While making a journey to a village, one should leave behind expectations of necessities of life, like multiple course meals, air-conditioned rooms, luxurious bathrooms, swimming pools, the list goes on because with such fixed ideas one cannot learn anything about the culture in the rural areas.

We have already reported on the tragedy of the traditional culture, -- the absence of assessment possibilities of the economic impact only when the traditional values do not exist any more. Do we give them the due value which is at that point of time is probably too late?

An eventual help here is the reference to the increasing environmental sensitivities in populations in industrialized countries. The protection of the nature, the earth, the water is a luxury, which must be financed very expensively, with the side effect that one is not able to compete with countries that overexploit their resources.

Labels: Rural Areas