We have heard our elders say ever since we came in this world and started thinking:
Do not clean your houses after 5pm
Do not throw garbage out of the house after sunset
Do not eat non-vegetarian food on certain religiously auspicious days
Girls and women do not pray or enter kitchen during menstrual cycle
Women do not sleep after sunset; so on and so forth. The list is never-ending
Refuting the above statements, I have experienced the extreme opposite situations in India only:
Gujarati’s the richest vegetarian clan devoted to cleanliness cleans their house all the day upto 7pm, daily. Moreover, men folk do it which is considered a sin in North India.
Gujarati’s throw garbage till 7 pm outside their houses.
My own cousin eats non-vegetarian food during Navratri’s (The 9-day fasting in Hindus, twice a year in which Goddess Durga is worshipped).
My own friends have visited Vaishno Devi shrine when her cycle started.
What if a woman is ill! Yes, then the elders would say- ‘exceptions are acceptable.’ How hypocritical!
I say what is the logic behind forbidding a woman to enter her own kitchen when the cycle is a natural phomena? If they give us logic for any conventional belief no one would mind accepting it, as long as it is justified. But religion forces the youth to follow things which they too have blindly followed without questioning. But today’s generation and the next-gen will never do it as they are exposed to a global environment because; no foreign nation follows either or more of Indian social conventions.
Today’s generation is frustrated and is breaking these social conventions as and when possible. It is something like the revolution our leaders took to ban Sati in Indian history.