A Cross-Cultural Comparison Project

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- Food

Diversity can be found in India's food. Flavors (spices) are an essential part of food arrangement and are utilized to enhance the taste of a dish. Right utilization and mixing of the aromatic flavors and spices is essential to the best possible preparation of Indian food. Even oil is a vital part of cooking, whether it's mustard oil in the north or coconut oil in the south, every area of the nation has its own preferences.

Vegetables vary as indicated by the distinctive districts and the season. The vegetables are set up according to the main dish or sustenance that is to be presented with them. It is not normal for Indians to keep leftover food, if it is purchased or made in the same day, it is consumed that same day. A few foods compliments each other, with the Tamil Nadu's rice and lentils being an example. These foods taste best when they are eaten with broiled vegetables, while in Punjab, Sarson ka saag compliments the Makke ki Roti (maize bread).

-RELIGIOUS INFLUENCES

Although a number of religions exist in India, the two cultures that have influenced Indian cooking and food habits are the Hindu and the Muslim traditions. Each new wave of settlers brought with them their own culinary practices. However, over time they adopted a lot of specialties and cooking methods from the Indian cuisine and blended the two to perfection. The Portuguese, the Persians and the British made important contributions to the Indian culinary scene. It was the British who started the commercial cultivation of tea in India.

The Hindu vegetarian custom is widespread in India, although numerous Hindus eat meat now. The Muslim custom is most obvious in the cooking of meats. Mughlai sustenance, kababs, rich Kormas (curries) and nargisi koftas (meatballs), the biryani (a layered rice and meat readiness), rogan josh, and arrangements from the dirt over or tandoor like tandoori rotis and tandoori chicken are all essential contributions made by Muslim pioneers in India.

- Music

Music has generally offered solidarity to Indian culture and civilization, regularly doing so in contrast to the friction among the prevailing religions and numerous sects of South Asia. The symbolic implications of music gives common musical substance and practice, and they are shared across sacred limits of numerous kinds.

The religious and philosophical unity embodied through musical practice, in this way, has profound historical roots, which has implied that music and religion offer numerous parts of a typical metaphysics. South Asian musical practices, additionally, have regularly mediated the contentions between religions, reacting to new potential outcomes for shared dialog and strengthening worship. There for, it is virtually impossible to separate music from religion in India, for religious importance, concrete and dynamic, is available in South Asian music at each level.

-Core Concepts about the Relation of Music to Religion

Sorted out and explained as music, sacred sound has the ability to represent the order of the universe and by expansion typically to maintain human existence. The metaphorical of music lies in the ability to support a focal pitch, the ōm of Hindu power, the drone of the Indian music. Like the ōm, a drone shows qualities of centrality and unbrokenness. Both qualities are apparent in the oldest musical routine of Brahmanic Hinduism, the performance of passages from the Ṛgveda, in which chanters sing tunes that encompass and return to the typically focal pitch, which itself is articulated to the syllable, ōm. For all intents and purposes each Indian musical practice has adapted the symbolic use of sound to express the request of the universe, packing it in the automaton pitch, which is not just played without break by a drone delivering instrument (e.g., the ṭambūra in the established customs), however gives the pitch to which the percussion instruments are tuned. Around the drone pitch there is a constellation of pitches in the melodic modes, or rāgas, which concentrate on the drone through their melodic movement. Appropriately, the association of the universe is typically present in virtually every manifestation of sound in Indian music, connecting music and religion through shared qualities of a typical transcendentalism.

- Identity

- Role Expectation

Indian seem to have unwritten rules between them and they have understood completely not to break those rules. Each of them have role expectations to be seen by people within them. Hence, we will look at several aspects :

Religion

It is not allowed to change religion and it has never happened before, at least officially. If someone does not trust the gods it does not matter but he/she can’t change his/her religion.

Being vegetarian

In Hinduism, people must not eat meat, in any form. Therefore, Hindu people are expected not to eat meat and worship cow as god. But as the time goes on, a lot of modern Hindu are not vegetarians anymore (not eating and using meat as any kind of form) and have eaten meat. Yet, they believe that not eating meat can promote spiritual life. Source: hinduismtoday.com.

Marriage

Hindus are expected to marry people who practice Hinduism too. But, we are at a time where law takes over religion and boundaries. Nowadays a lot of Hindus marry a non Hindus and it is clearly considered as legal.

- Stereotype

In this section, we are going to discuss about what people think about Indian. Taken from humanbreed.com, this post tells about Indians’ work ethics although it is not applied to every Indians but at least this is what most people think about them:

Many Indians are not hardworking and they will do better if they are afraid of their managers. They are also known as people who like to take shortcuts. In a company, Indians don’t like to hire a non-Indian worker and they tend not to teach them anything, which resulting a bad teamwork among them. Otherwise, a hard working Indians are known for their professionalism and high performance. Therefore, it is safe to assume that not all Indians have bad stereotypes in front of other people.

- Religion

- Values

These are some values of Hinduism:

One Supreme