One can afford not to be educated, but having less money is a crime. It is that span of your life when people try to pressurise you. Your relatives, well-wishers, friends, not all but most of them try to take advantage of the situation and treat you ill. Money can shut people’s mouth. Truth of today’s’ life! I don’t believe it is the only thing which rules the world but in most of cases yes. It is one of the most important things to exist in this world. An uneducated businessperson, who knows how to earn money, can have hundreds of highly educated professionals working for him. The perception of people towards this same uneducated person changes within no time.
Marriages are made in heaven! Someone said this, I don’t know who said though. But when it is an intercast marriage, couples have to go through hell before marriage and sometimes even after. Marriage when is an intercast or an inter religion, then our society doesn’t take it so well. It is fair enough to accept it. People who have been blaming their relatives children for doing an intercultural marriage, when their own children do an intercultural marriage, then the whole attitude towards it changes. Then they starve to present the relatives and well-wishers, how good the family of their son in law or daughter in law is. How good their culture is, how the boy or girl is well mannered, and ofcourse how stinky rich the family is. Views do change and suddenly very conservative family turns into broad minded.
After living in Pune for so many years, where Marathi is still prominent and majorly spoken. Though Pune has lot of cosmopolitian crowd coming in during last 5 years, still to be able to speak in Marathi in Pune was something I was proud about. After coming to Germany, forget Marathi, people are not even aware of existence of Hindi as a language. The only common language to communicate is German. Then I felt, where I was in the world of my own, where I use to feel, people from other states coming to Maharashtra should learn Marathi. But then I realised Germans are conservative about their language. If you have to live in Germany, you need to learn German. They would not speak in English (as the earlier generations have never learnt English throughout their education. This generation does speak in English.). I could feel Shiv sena and Nav Nirman Sena’s strategy here, though implemented in a non violent manner. We Indians are of such adjusting nature for various reasons may be. During my previous german class, I had lot of Muslim classmates in my batch. The first thing in the morning they did was, they used to greet each other as ‘Atsalam Valekum’. I felt in them the same conservative nature about their language. Though they came from different Muslim countries and spoke different languages, to greet, was in same manner. Eventually they started greeted me as well by the same gesture. This time I tried to be rigid and conservative too! I replied them with ‘Namaste’ and eventually I taught them to greet me by saying ‘Namaste’.
My view on languages keeps on changing. Sometimes rigid to speak only our language and sometimes lenient enough to adjust and speak foreign language.
After all it’s the perception! Perceptions can change the direction of your life. Perceptions are changed with the situations and experiences coming your way.
