Lifestyle of Orissa People
Lifestyle is a term to describe the way a person lives, which was originally coined by Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler in 1929. The current broader sense of the word dates from 1961. A set of behaviors, and the senses of self and belonging which these behaviors represent, are collectively used to define a given lifestyle. The term is defined more broadly when used in politics, marketing, and publishing.
A lifestyle is a characteristic bundle of behaviors that makes sense to both others and oneself in a given time and place, including social relations, consumption, entertainment, and dress. The behaviors and practices within lifestyles are a mixture of habits, conventional ways of doing things, and reasoned actions.
A lifestyle typically also reflects an individual’s attitudes, values or worldview. Therefore, a lifestyle is a means of forging a sense of self and to create cultural symbols that resonate with personal identity. Not all aspects of a lifestyle are entirely voluntaristic. Surrounding social and technical systems can constrain the lifestyle choices available to the individual and the symbols she/he is able to project to others and the self.
The lines between personal identity and the everyday doings that signal a particular lifestyle become blurred in modern society. For example, “green lifestyle” means holding beliefs and engaging in activities that consume fewer resources and produce less harmful waste (i.e. a smaller carbon footprint), and deriving a sense of self from holding these beliefs and engaging in these activities. Some commentators argue that, in modernity, the cornerstone of lifestyle construction is consumption behavior, which offers the possibility to create and further individualize the self with different products or services that signal different ways of life.
Ancient Orissa was a confluence of racial streams. History tells us that the Aryans entered Orissa from the north-east, subjugated the primitive people living there and imposed on them their language and culture. The story could not be so simple; for the people then living in the land were not perhaps all of the primitive type, nor were they subjugated culturally. What might have happened in all Probability was a racial and cultural amalgamation.
Geographically Orissa stands as a coastal corridor between the northern and southern India cut off by the intractable Vindhyas. It is natural therefore that an assimilation of the races and cultures of the Aryans and the Dravidians; must have taken place here in the days of gore.
At the same time successive racial and cultural tides might have surged up from the different sides, rolled in and broken over this Bound culminating in the indo-cultural synthesis.
Orissa, which is largely rural, the traditional values are still kept alive. In general the values have no doubt weakened but they are not lost. Among die innocent Advisees dwelling in the wooded hinterland and forested hill slopes, India’s earliest civilization is retained in its pristine form.
Not only in their secluded hamlets, bet also in the countless thousands of villages in the country sides one can catch a glimpse of the dwindling horizon of humanity, through the innocent and benign outlook of tile villagers.
A sensitive person who happens to be a prisoner of the modern society with its stress and strain will not, while in a typical village, fail to mark the relationship of its common people with God, nature and their fellow men.
