A Conflict of Mindsets....

Another new evening has arrived, the sun is shining, the wind is blowing, the trees are swaying from side to side and amidst all of this, sits a young boy who like most millennials is busy on his phone and caught up with the usual monotony of life right from dusk till dawn. The birds are chirping, the flowers are blooming and a smell of burning smoke from a nearby area fills the air. As the boy, sits there busy gazing at his phone as well as his laptop, a sudden knock on the door, followed by the ringing of the bell can be heard. Annoyed and frustrated as he is, he goes to open the door only to realize that it is one of the neighbors who often comes on regular visits to his place. The very thought of the neighbor coming over and visiting him fills his mind with agony that he flees to his room informing his parents that the neighbor has come to which they do go to open the door and welcome the guest.

As harsh or as hard it may sound, such is the reality that most of us millennials face today with our lives getting increasingly busy with lot of assignments at college and other activities of our day to day personal lives that we forget to even think of our close friends or people who often come to visit us with a kind and a generous heart. There is what I would often say a rigid dichotomy that exists between the value systems that we have been born and brought up with versus the value systems we often come across with when adjusting to a new society. It does create a lot of tensions as we try and pace up with what the challenging environment has to offer us. However in the whole process, there is a lot of learning that we gain in how to equip ourselves and keep ourselves standing higher so that we can overcome whatever challenges that may come along the way.

It was and has always been a hard time for me as a youngster, having been born and brought up in a different country from the hometown of my parents and grandparents. There is what I would often say, a conflict of value systems that one encounters when getting accustomed to a new society which in my case was Goa. The very thought of neighbors and maintaining relations with them is a concept that I had found really hard to digest in my initial days of getting used to the life in Goa, as back in Sharjah- a city in U.A.E, we had neighbours but we would never get involved or interfere with them, there was a persistent belief that neighbours were non-existent, however when I came here to Goa, I saw a stark difference when it comes to the closeness of the neighbors and the degree or the extent to which they knew quite an amount of your personal life as compared to the neighbours in the city which was quite annoying in it's initial days, but later on I got to know the reality of the people's lives here in the village. For that matter, even the differentiation that exists in the society here in Goa was what had really shocked me like anything, as coming from a city background, I was of the belief  that we all are human beings, and what keeps us different from the rest is our differences, and by looking at differences as an opportunity to cooperate, collaborate and expand on our relationships with one another, we can definitely live together as great and happy human beings rather than trying to differentiate ourselves and in the process isolating ourselves from others.

In this way, there have been a lot of instances which have just left me spellbound and wondering as to why a society would go to such an extent to divide rather than to unite people belonging to ultimately the same culture and the same state, but in the whole process it has also been a great learning as to how a society goes about organizing themselves and the relations they carry out with one another which keeps the spirit going among the population for the rest of their survival.....

PS: This post is a short account into my personal experiences as an overseas Goan of my life here in Goa, and is in no way here to hurt the sentiments of the countrymen and women of the state of Goa