The Indian way of living - Personal Experiences

We all never miss opportunity to say that we are proud Indians, do we? We are really proud of our culture, our way of living and how we manage everything somehow despite all odds. Indian way of living has helped each one of us one way or the other, in one situation or the other though we might have never realized.

Now to start with most common thing, it is in Indian culture to wake up early and there are many assumptions written about benefits of waking up in Brahma-Muhurata ( 1.5 hrs. before Sun rise). I might not have read what those documented benefits were but when I started applying it from my 11^th standard in college, I was thrilled to see change in myself. It helped me in being energetic for whole day and also helped me in managing my studies much better. The power of spending 15-20 mins in peace before sun rise with cool breeze blowing is immense and it helps you to feel good about life and makes you realize importance of being a human. Try it for one week whole heartily and I can assure that you will start to feel changes in the way you think or the way live your life. Since that day I didn’t have to wait for my parents to wake me up forcibly in early morning as I was doing it myself for my own selfish reasons explained above.

The next thing which I embedded into my daily routine was prayers and chanting of few mantras. It came more or less from being from a Brahmin family in North India but I didn’t start doing it just because I was a Brahmin, I did it because I felt the magic of doing it. Chanting of "Om" every day 5 to 7 times made me realize how relaxing feel it gives and since that day I never looked back. I have been practicing it almost every day as part of my daily routine. I am not a religious person but yes I think chanting of few mantras and praying in peace for few minutes gives one immense calmness and time to realize about oneself. I don’t do prayers to ask for something, I do it just to feel the peace within myself in those few mins.

Benefit on the spot: 

Now apart from these somewhat serious values of Indian system there were many times when one belief system or the other helped me to come out of a tough situation and trust me I am not making it out just for sake of it. Here is one such incident which took place when I was travelling from Allahabad to Delhi in night train to catch my early morning flight to Bangalore and that was my first ever flight. It was winter time so heavy fog caused trains to be late and though I had anticipated for 5-6 hours delay, it turned out to bit more than that. I can’t recall the timings precisely but I guess around 1 hour before flight departure time I was still in train somewhere in outer part of Delhi. While I was in all this anxiety of losing my flight booking money and wasting my day, I saw a beggar in the compartment and guess what?? I gave him 10 Rs 😃. This might sound normal but before that day I never gave money to beggars or never even donated in any temple thinking that was waste of my hard earned money. Somehow in few minutes train reached to station and then I started searching for my cab driver as I was not much familiar with Delhi. After few mins of zigzag running I found the driver waiting and he dropped me to the airport 30 mins before flight departure time ignoring all the speed warning popping out in his cab speed control system and then thanks to Airlines staff I managed to get the flight just in time. All these things happened so suddenly that I didn’t get time to realize what was happening and why. I had lost all hopes of getting flight when I was in train and was trying to cancel the flight to save whatever bucks I could save but as there is a phrase in Bollywood derived from Indian value system of compassion that “If you give 1 paisa, you will get 10 lakh back”. I believe this is exactly what happened with me that day and saved not only my hard earned money but also my day getting wasted.

In our everyday life we follow values of our Indian belief system, many times unknowingly. Indian culture is so vast with so many values that it has answer for everything happening. Unfortunately when the West is coming to understand and adopt some of the best values of our cultural system, we are trying to ignore what is rightly ours. This TVC from Lufthansa says it so beautifully that world is trying to replicate the way we live our life after seeing the growth we as a country are making and they have realized that to win over us world has to be like #MoreIndianThanYouThink .

Be proud of our belief system doesn’t matter how old it is. If it made sense thousands of years back, it makes sense today and it will make sense in years to come.