Adopting Western Culture - Status Quo

Since ancient times Indians have been curious to the way of the world and quiet open. I believe our ancestors thought we are grow our knowledge by sharing and learning from other cultures. So we started copying or rather incorporating some of the customs, religion and food right from our early invaders the Persians.

I am not against adopting western ways, like jeans, t-shirts, dresses, sometimes I even feel they are a lot comfortable. We got our salwars from elsewhere too. I even see that saree has taken on in a fashion trend which is cool.  Even food for that matter we always put an Indian spin on whatever we take from outside like Biriyani, pasta and noodles. We even adopted vegetables beans, carrots, tomatoes, chillies. Today we cannot imagine cooking without them.

Festivals are whole another game. The culture we came from is the one where peace is chosen instead of war, we only go for war when the very livelihood of people are threatened, we went to war to save poor neighboring countries. We respect parents everyday not just on mother's day. We take pride on the endless parade of festivals like Diwali, Holi and  Sankaranthi (pongal).

Recently I heard that there were Halloween celebrations in India in addition to Valentine's day and mother's day and the like. As long as we only choose to see the fairy land of princess and places across the ocean we will be tempted to copy them. Let's peel that screen off remove the cartoon glasses we have on and open our real eyes and see the matrix. Yes the truth is really scary.

The education system, banking and whole list of societal practices as well we took from outside and modified to suit our country. I think that is bold and creative. Is there a boundary line for this?

(Part 2 and Part 3 will cover do's and don't s)