To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Wednesday, April 03, 2019
 

I was on the verge of stepping on a zebra crossing today to get to the other side of the road when I noticed a car taking a fast turn in my direction. This shouldn’t have mattered to me because the car is supposed to stop anyway but I have noticed that I generally tend to freeze and wait for the car to pass. The car usually notices me hovering uncertainly at the edge of the road and stops so that I may go ahead and use the crossing. Once the car has stopped I confidently cross the road. This doesn’t happen always but typically when a car seems to be speeding in my direction or if it takes that direction suddenly. Today, I couldn’t help but wonder why I tend to have this reflex (and maybe other Indians as well?).
It is a commonly understood fact that we are all a product of our respective environments but we never really realise how deeply this environment is ingrained in us, so much so, that even when we have left the environment, it doesn’t leave us. It is embodied in us so to speak. In certain situations we ‘act without thinking’ and this acting seems to be incongruent with our current environment because it is a mode of acting natural to a different environment where it was learnt as a matter of course.
To put it in practical terms, in Mumbai (as I have said before, when I say India, I mean Mumbai where I grew up) the road, traffic and safety situation is horrendous to say the least; only someone who has actually lived in the busiest parts of Mumbai can relate to what I mean perhaps. Crossing the road is an art as well as science: requires careful single-minded attention to both sides of the road, expert judgement in deciding the perfect moment to make a splash across the road, years of practice in manoeuvring around sundry vehicles that may be dashing along while you make a splash, and a lot of good faith in the one above (might explain why people in India are generally believers ;)). There is no concept of a ‘zebra crossing’, a word which first we encounter in children’s books, and which is as far removed from reality as fairies.
It is not surprising if after years and years of almost perfecting the art of ‘crossing the road’ and it becoming almost second nature, your feet seem to stop in their tracks whenever you’re in a situation that broadly invokes the same context (even if it is a different environment or country altogether). The old reflexes jump in automatically and your body seems to act almost without volition. Consciously you do know that this vehicle will stop and won’t ram into you if you’re on the zebra crossing as it could back home but it’s as if your body has a mind of its own, if you know what I mean; it takes time to grow out of its habitual way of responding to the same situation (one can see how this makes sense as a survival mechanism). A lifetime of learned moves cannot be unlearnt in a year or two or maybe even more.
The French sociologist Bourdieu whom I have been reading in the past two years in relation to my research and because of whom I have started thinking deeply about how culture shapes our thinking in conscious and unconscious ways, puts it very interestingly, “arms and legs are full of numb imperatives”. Indeed!
 

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 8:29 pm 2 comments
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