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I recieved this response to my previous post.  It is long but well worth reading. 

I was reading your site articles and saw an article related to sex. If you have time, read some of what I have to say regarding that subject and marriage.

I have some of my friends and … [a relative] studying in… [the USA] and for sure they might be feeling the same way too.  I mean getting used to American culture.

Nobody here talks about sex and they leave it to their children to figure it out by themselves. Now it would not have been a big problem but for the invention of internet and the easily available information regarding sex it is very easy for people to get misguided.

We have a lot of castes with in Hindus; I mean divisions within a division. I will list some here: Gounder, Brahmins, Naykar, Chettiar, Nadaar and many more.

It is not only a sin to have sex before marriage; it is a great sin to marry people from other caste.

For example: My caste is Gounder and if I marry some one from Brahmin caste, I will lose respect and support from my relatives who all will see me as some one who has just committed a crime.

We are not allowed to choose our life partner until after we complete our studies and go for work… [A]t the age of may be 27 or 28 our parents will take our horoscope and go to our caste office where they will have similar horoscopes of men and women who are ready for marriage within our caste only(strictly). And select a suitable match. This matching is done solely based on the word of an astrologer who will look for matching horoscopes (I don’t know how they match but they look at some old astrology books written by sages) and tell our parents.

If we don’t marry them and try to convince our parents of love marriage (…choosing our own partners), even though some times our parents will accept our decision because of their love for us, our relatives wont respect us and wont want to talk to us.

How could they decide who we should live our life with and what if for a girl the guy who was selected was… [of poor] character?  Why should she put up with such a boy, while she has the option of finding the man of her dreams and living life to the fullest?

If you go in to a Brahmin family and look at their life style and…  look at my family’s life style it would be very different, We eat differently, talk the same language with a different slang, it would feel as though you have left… [the] country and entered another one.

…[I]nter-caste marriage does not have the convenience of mother-in-law [or] father-in-law relationships because, a Brahmin will not like the way we live and we won’t like the way they live. If some one goes against the norm and marries outside of the caste they are by themselves for their entire life. This is changing slowly now and people are now trying to learn different cultures, because they have no choice. At least that is what my mother is doing, because she has no other choice. My sister married a Brahmin boy. But the rate of change is very slow.

Now people in India want their daughters and sons to be settled in USA, but want their cultures to be preserved. I don’t understand how this works. They want their children to live in USA because it is a developed country and it gives them a sense of pride to tell everyone that their son has got married to some one in their culture and it is arranged marriage and they are living in USA which is a dream in it’s self for them. But they did not know that, if and when, their son puts his children in an American school he would only follow that culture and this caste differences would vanish. If they want the luxuries and opportunities and the American life style, they have to leave behind their cultural differences.

So slowly due to globalization and because more and more Indians are settling in US and some are coming back, I see that US culture is spreading rapidly in INDIA.

I can understand when you once told me, it will take some time for Indians to wake up to HBI knowledge. Because every one here wants to experience western way of living, which is what they are told when they are very young, they have to go USA for their studies. No one will think about life and its inner meanings until they experience that way of living (American) and which will in turn break away the cultural differences…

Current Western pop culture is limiting our ability to see beauty.  Paraphrased, someone once said enlightenment is the ability to see beauty in all things.  I personally can’t define enlightenment, but I know learning to see beauty is a skill that requires development and we should develop it.

Leonardo Da Vinci has a sketch known as the Vitruvian Man.

Although made famous Renaissance artist Leonardo Da Vinci, the figure known as the Vitruvian Man is actually named for the man who created him, the Roman architect Vitruvius. Vitruvius, a proponent of the Sacred Geometry of Pythagoras, designed temples based on the proportions of the human body, believing them to be perfect. This perfection, wrote Vitruvius, was due to the fact that the extended limbs of a perfectly proportioned human fit into both the circle and the square.

Wikipedia has a higher resolution photo of the sketch.

I want to take Da Vinci’s drawing a put a large red circle around it with a big red slash through the middle.  I object to the idea that perfect proportions apply to people.  But our modern Western consciousness has seized on one version of ideal beauty.  For females, it often involves being Caucasian, blonde, blue-eyed and skinny.  We are bombarded by these images.  When a heroine of pop culture gains a few pounds, she is lambasted in the pop media.

It makes us feel like we lack beauty, that we are not the children of a beautiful God.  We might have longer legs than average or shorter legs than average.  I know this since from a former hobby; setting up bicycles for racing.  Precise leg length measurements are important to prevent overuse injuries.  I know that my legs are shorter than average for a person of my height and of my torso length.  In fact nearly every one in my father’s family has the same proportions.  And this fact always used to bug me.

I recently took a picture of a friend of mine and when I showed it to her; she wanted me to delete it.  She said it made her legs look too long.  In fact she expressed a lot of displeasure at how long her legs were.  My friend is beautiful, both inside and out.  And I couldn’t believe that she was so focused on an aspect that she perceived as a flaw.  I’m sure there are people who would kill to have legs that long.

We have to learn to see the beauty in all proportions, colors of skin, ethnic backgrounds, and all types of other human features.  The beauty is not in the object we look at, but in the way we look.  This is a skill that must be learned.

There are other things that have beauty that I think are acquired tastes.  Impressionist art, Jazz, beer are all things that people do not take to right away.  They have to develop their eye, or their ear or their palate to appreciate the beauty.

I want all of you to start developing your beauty for people… all people.

Check out on an interesting article on cultural mores on sex called  My Strange Relationship With Sex.

An Indian epic, the Mahabharata, has a story describing a wise prince who was given a riddle by a Sphinx-like demon. The demon asked, “What is the greatest mystery in the world?” The prince answered, “The fact that we all have to die, but we spend our lives denying it”. If I had to answer the question today, I’d say, “The fact that sex is such a fundamental part of human existence, yet we refuse to talk about it”. As my struggle with writing this article has shown, sex is a difficult topic even for somewhat liberated people to discuss. It should not be that way.