The audacious curiosity of an outsider

What moulds us, what brings kindred spirits together, what makes cultures territorial? What makes one an outsider? Can one REALLY ever blend in if one tried?


The variegated scope of culture has always fascinated me. It is evolving. It is polychotomous, and multidimensional, and yet you can pretend to trace the roots to one origin. It binds. It divides. It is dynamic and yet its character remains constant, to "go back" to or borrow from. It is that safe place that you can retreat to, to calm the chaos in your life.

I have been drawn to new cultures and its people. I have been an observer and an implementer of cultures; always beginning as an outsider, trying to learn the ways of the people within, trying to take in what i can, in an effort to make it act with my own nascent elements. Its always been an exercize that involved effort, and left a rewarding soreness in the parts of my mind that I rarely acknowledged.

I've enjoyed being the outsider. I have loved the feeling of being foreign, unrecognized, unanswerable, and unpredictable. And then the feeling of being malleable, mouldable, adaptable, changeable. But then an outsider is a dirty word; someone who is a threat or a disturbance to harmony. The wanderlust in me usually places me in that spot. But somehow although it has been a setback, and a frustrating one at that, i have never been deterred by the stigma to hesitate from stepping into newer waters and pre-inhabited spaces. It has amused me that in new societies I am eyed with curiosity, disgust, wonderment, awe even. It scares me in retrospect that my defences are not in place where they should be in untread territory. A friend once called it courage, i believe it is naievete. Fed by curiosity. I continue to explore cultures unabashedly, with no respect for defences, impressions, opinions or consequence.