Friday, February 4, 2011
Hinduism Aims: Pleasure and Community Service
Pleasure was the most prominent aim, and the easiest to find. I think this is because in today's society everyone is more focused on short term goals of happiness that will satisfy them only for a short while. Not to mention that sex, drugs and alcohol have been emphasized and seen pretty much anywhere now. What surprised me about this experiment was actually that I found it easier than I thought it would be to find songs that had to do with community service. When I think about that I keep thinking about songs about picking up trash on the side of the road, which would be a possibility; but I broadened my view of what community service could be and found that it could mean helping others, so I picked songs that reminded me of Gandhi or things that he would have emphasized like world peace or working together. I think a difference from the American pop music and the Hindu understanding of the four aims could be that as far as community service go, the songs I found focused on world peace and helping people who were not in America; it would not focus on one community or a class of people like Hindu community service might. Also, in America where Christianity is the most common religion; indulging oneself on pleasures such as drugs, sex and alcohol would be seen as going against the rules of the religion, where in Hinduism it is encouraged.
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I really liked your idea about expanding your thought of community service in order to find more examples of this in our pop culture. I had to do the same thing with my project in order to find more songs. I liked how you related the hindu aims back to christianity as it is the most prevalent religion in america and it does have an impact on how we view pleasure and helping others.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree with Brittney. I think that a lot of us probably took the idea of community service rather literally when beginning this assignment but had to expand on the concept in order to find enough songs (and we only had to find five!). However, I'm not sure that it's necessarily a bad thing that there aren't tons of songs about service in the sense of picking up trash on the highway or serving food to the homeless. Personally, I think the songs that are more ambiguous in their lyrics and meaning are more effective. In general, we're more likely to be moved by a song that speaks to our emotions and humanity than one that simply describes the motions of a charitable act.
ReplyDeleteI agree with both of y'all. When I found out we had to find songs about community service, I laughed and thought where am I going to find a song about somebody going to a soup kitchen etc. After researching, I decided to broaden my search and found a lot of songs that have a deeper meaning and are a more 'emotional' sense of community service (as in healing the world and stopping gang violence etc.).
ReplyDeleteYou finding songs about community service easy amaze me. It took me forever to find songs. I was thinking to myself nobody EVER to my knowledge made a song about cleaning up streets, feeding homeless people, etc. So I decided to broaden my view as well. I decided to pick songs that inspired change in the community dealing with suicide over alternative lifestyles which has been increasing over the past couple of months and years.
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