Chapter 30: A Cross Cultural Comparison

The youngest of all the animal species living on the earth is thehuman species. The present species of human beings—the Homo sapiens —is hardly fifty thousand years old which is considered to be very short in the history of evolution. Within this short period, social evolution of humans has been much faster than his organic evolution. Today, the societies are so diverse with very complicated customs, beliefs, traditions, value systems etc. which makes the ordinary person think that all societies do not have a common origin. But on the contrary, some societies which are entirely different– racially, geographically and psychologically—have some very important traditions in common. This is precisely the case with Bhutanese and Dravidian societies—specially the Tamil society. These two are nearly four thousand kilometres apart on the face of the earth, falling in two different geographical regions and evolving from two entirely different races. The kinds of similarities that exist make us believe that human societies do have a common root. In this paper, an attempt has been made to note down two of the apparent commonalities from a lay-man’s view point.