cast in sugar

India, Tradition, Classical, Customs, Festival, Festive food, Festival Preparations, these are words that ignite a sort of passion in me. Somehow, I feel we are a lost generation. We are neither Indians nor Westerners, we try to ape the westerners and we succeed in being apes. I don’t even see the point of trying to become like them when they are so not ready to accept us even as humans, let alone as "them". Why do we want to become part of the hypocrisy? The worst is the kind of outlook we have towards our own language and customs and the "not so well off as us" people. Why do we want to spit at ourselves? The worst thing in the world is internal conflict of a man against himself and accepting to be degraded. I see a lot of people from my own generation going through it. The internal conflict is how they identify themselves as, in reality they are Indians but are supposed to be western in behavior. We can see clearly that being modern is not all about drinking and partying but in making our nation strong, getting our infrastructure right, getting back to being a developed country. It is sickening to be called cheap labor, to be thrown tit-bits, leftovers and rotten junk and being told that we are the IT capital. This is against what we read in our history, what we see in our grandparents and we are left lost. There is absolutely no respect for the generation, from the elders nor from peers. Everyone knows we are doing nothing great and in such a case where does the respect come from? The money is there, but the respect and dignity, it's just not there. Sometimes I hate our previous generation, for not being the kind who taught us to care for our own values, for wavering and loosing identity and many other reasons the top of which is the desire for money in dollars and for respecting dollars and not humans.

These were random musings as I was making the cast sugar sweets for the harvest festival. We are like the sugar casts, tasty and sweet but not strong, who melt away easily and loose our identity but then essential for flavor.