Home Page of Dr. Saumitra Mohan

The Great Indian Family: Some Reflections *Saumitra Mohan We have always taken pride in our celebrated Indian family values, asserting their superiority over similar values of any other culture. In fact, asked to define the ‘Heaven’, someone defined it as a life that would include a British house, an American salary, Chinese food and Indian family. Accordingly, the hell was defined to subsume the worst from the same four cultures namely an Indian salary, a Chinese house, the British food and an American family. Whatever that is supposed to mean, the fact remains that still our Indian family system and the cognate family values are deemed to be the best, at least, when we compare them with other cultural values. But notwithstanding many positive and wholesome attributes of our hoary family values, many negativities appear to have crept into the same over the years or have never been acknowledged to be part of our value system as they represent toouglier or seamier sides of our ...