Posts tagged ‘Parent’

26/08/2014

For young Indian urbanites, caste is no longer a marital consideration – but Mummy and Papa are

Caste and language are losing significance in urban India, at least as far as marriage is concerned, according to a survey of more than 400 single adults in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. But other social traditions are not being forgotten: adults between the ages of 20 and 35 say the most important thing is that their partner respects elders and treats their spouse’s family just as they do their own.

More than half of the participants in the survey conducted by Floh, a forum for singles to meet and interact online and offline, said they would take the decision of whom to marry jointly with their parents. Only 22% believed that they could marry someone their parents did not entirely approve of. The respondents all came from similar socio-economic background, with at least an undergraduate degree and earning more than Rs 40,000 per month.

Floh founder Siddharth Mangharam believes that the survey shows that India treads its own path when it comes to social interactions. “We are not following some Western ideology, just 20 or 30 years behind,” he said.

Young urban Indians – and parents, who were also interviewed – seem to have unshakable faith in the idea that humans fall in love at first sight. When asked, 71% of single adults and 62% of parents said they were convinced the phenomenon existed. Most respondents’ main reason for being single was that they had not found the “right one”.

via Scroll.in – News. Politics. Culture..

06/09/2012

* Beijing Updates Parables, ‘The 24 Paragons of Filial Piety’

NY Times: “Reading it now, six centuries after Guo Jujing wrote this paean to parental devotion, “The 24 Paragons of Filial Piety” comes off as a collection of scary bedtime stories. There is the woman who cut out her own liver to feed her sick mother, the boy who sat awake shirtless all night to draw mosquitoes away from his slumbering parents and the man who sold himself into servitude to pay for a father’s funeral.

While the parables are even more familiar to most Chinese than Grimms’ Fairy Tales are to Americans — the text remains a mainstay of educational curriculum here — they have understandably lost much of their motivational punch.

But when the government, in an effort to address the book’s glaring obsolescence, issued an updated version last month in the hope that the book would encourage more Chinese to turn away from their increasingly self-centered ways and perhaps phone home once in a while, it wasn’t quite prepared for the backlash.

Compared with its predecessor, the new book brims with down-to-earth suggestions for keeping parents happy in their golden years. Readers are urged to teach them how to surf the Internet, take Mom to a classic film and buy health insurance for retired parents.

“Family is the nucleus of society,” intoned Cui Shuhui, the director of the All-China Women’s Federation, which, along with the China National Committee on Aging, published the new guidelines after two years of interviews with older Chinese. “We need family in order to advance Chinese society and improve our economic situation.”

So far, those good intentions appear to have prompted mostly ridicule. But they have also unintentionally kicked up a debate on whether the government, not overextended children, should be looking after China’s ballooning population of retirees.

In a fast-aging nation where hundreds of millions of people have left their former homes in the countryside in search of jobs, “The New 24 Paragons of Filial Piety” strikes many as nearly as out of touch with the problems of modern China as the old parables.”

via Beijing Updates Parables, ‘The 24 Paragons of Filial Piety’ – NYTimes.com.

See also: China’s aging population

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