1. Is ‘Culture’ Just Social
Conditioning?
By Harit Rathi

2. That Question
• A Sunday afternoon and like always, lazily lying on the bed,
gazing with all the interest at the ceiling and pondering over
everything possible.
• Suddenly, a thought strikes. College tomorrow!
• Subsequently, preparation for a 5 minute long talk on Culture
begins.
• I never imagined that I’d actually explore so much about a
topic like culture.
• I could very much foresee a thoughtful day and immediately
called up my friends and cancelled plans for the day.
• The question was, what is culture? How have we evolved with
the existence of cultures? Why do we value it? And obviously,
the various perceptions that we have about them.

3. • My thoughts deviated and I went too much into how the
word came up and how did cultures come into existence.
• On thinking a little too much, I came up with the life cycle of a
culture.
• I know it’s going to sound very strange and out of
understanding but yes, it made sense to me.

4. This is how it goes
• When we’re born and the way we grow up, we partially
inherit ‘culture’ from our family and the people around us.
• As we grow up a little more, we develop our mindsets on the
basis of the values and believe we have been thought and
brought up with.
• On further growing up and starting to evolve as an individual
and generate thoughts, on continuously nurturing these
thoughts, we come up with ideas.
• Later, as we commence and grow up with the ideas, we tend
to modify them by having a pre conceived blue print of the
current situation of the world around us.

5. The trend
• These ideas are eventually communicated and spoken about.
• People take these up and communicate it further.
• This results in more and more people getting aware of our
idea and following it.
• When a large number of people start following and practicing
it, it takes the form of a trend.
• This trend is later converted into what we call, ‘culture‘. This
happens over a long period of time but we hardly get to
realize it.

6. • This is how our mindsets generate thoughts that convert into
ideas.
• They’re then modified and communicated. Once
communicated, they’re followed and practiced and result
into trends.
• Finally, when these trends are accepted and liked by people,
they’re called a culture.

7. The change that ever evolves
• Basically, as we live in the world today, we live with a lot of
conditions and externalities that constantly act upon us even
if we don’t feel their existence.
• At times, they do act as unknown barriers to accomplishment
of our work.
• They have existed for long and will always be there.
• We have learned to live with them.
• And hence, by default we happen to teach them to the
upcoming generation and this is how we generate their
mindsets that will in turn result into the upcoming of an even
worse culture for the future generations to come.

8. The change in mindsets
• This was thought proving and time taking in the beginning
but proved to be fun later.
• It was convincing how I monitored each of my thought so
closely.
• I’ve enjoyed exploring this and voicing it out. Today, if a girl
was raped, we blame the man and the man’s ‘culture.’
• If we come across a girl smoking, we leave it unseen or may
be call it ‘her choice.’
• Lets wake up! Lets not blame ‘cultures,’ lets change mindsets.

9. • Read more on Youth Ki Awaaz at http://bit.ly/XOd4qM

10. • Read more on Youth Ki Awaaz at http://bit.ly/XOd4qM