How Cultures Clashhh!!! (or, When my Greataunt saw Juno)

Excerpt from text-based Gtalk conversation:

cousin: so I took it [noo-ly acquired laptop] to them to show it off, hehe, and since I had a copy of Juno on it, we watched it.
Rimi: of all films!
cousin: oh god, don't remind me. Had to pause it every five minutes and translate the accent.
Rimi: serves you right. Juno indeed. Little cowardly piece of cheap happymaking propogandist rubbish.
cousin: hahaha, you just ask her what she thought of the film. Hahahahahahahaha. Just you ask.

Next day, on Skype: [conensed and mostly translated]
Rimi: eije, shunlam toom Yammarikan fillim dekhta? (Been wotching American films, eh?)
Greataunt (slowly): I am still not quite sure...I didn't even believe it was in English at first. I just couldn't understand anything they were saying.
Rimi: (soothingly) right you are. It was American. They're quite distinct.
G: hoom, American.
R: you don't approve of Americans?
G: I am sure they are just fine... it's just that I cannot imagine these radical new ideas against abortion are actually popular.
R: wot??? :-o
G: I mean, young people can have these fluffy idealistic notions about, "oh, my child is so important". And all the rubbish about "don't kill it!", as if a one month foetus can be "killed". But that's not how the world works. Isn't it their parents duty to make them understand what the right choice is? All the adults in the film seems so... strange. They seem happy about this child's [meaning Juno's] completely irresponsible, and frankly immoral, decision.
R: actually, here...
G (talking over me): you know I am not as conservative as most of my generation. Okay, I was a little surprised at how easily everyone accepted the children being, er, intimate. But then this was in America. And also, when I was young people married very young, and most women became, er, active.... very soon after they started to, er, you know.
R: (hurriedly) yesyes. Of course, of course.
G: but I will still say this, Rimi: sometimes touting personal freedom just for the sake of it is hardly being progressive or liberal.
R: (desperately) but it's not...
G: wait. I know what you will probably say. But having a child for either the sheer novelty of it, or, or... or just because some silly immature schoolgirl-group tells you it is the "right thing to do" -- isn't it rather selfish and self-absorbed? Maane you can't bring a child into the world just because you were careless and because you think your, er, er, genes are too precious to be destroyed. And you cannot just give away a child! What is a baby, an extra bowl of food you cooked?
R: (inexplicably starts feeling like a chastised pro-lifer who has seen the silliness of her ways)
G: oh, no no no, my dear! I didn't mean to scold you. You have always been such a sensible girl. I try to keep up with your generation's ideas, but this villianisation of abortion is unacceptably selfish and self-indulgent. Conceive, feel righteous about having a child -- which makes no sense, then give it away shamelessly. What is the film saying to children like, you know, B? Never mind the destructive population growth, you do just what you feel like, and never mind parental responsibility. Never mind that there is an age for everything, never mind that when you have children you are bound to care for them the best you can and teach them the right things...you just hand over your child to an orphanage or some waiting person and run off to "live my life"!

Pause for breath. I twiddle my thumbs.

G (suddenly refocusing): have they ever seen an orphanage? How the children live, what they eat? Do they even know that hardly anyone is adopted at all? Or are American orphanages very different?
R: well I haven't of course...
G: because I have heard American jails are much better than ours.
R: er. Yes. Maybe. Anything is better than ours, I suppose.
G (hopelessly): but that isn't the point, is it. I was watching the film and thinking, how fast will this new fad spread all over thr world? Will people stop thinking about consequences completely? Will no one use their common sense at all? And then I thought, maybe I am being an old fogie, because these days I cannot decide if what we were taught was right or whether ideas you people come up with are more right.
R: awww, J!

And I hadn't the heart, anymore, to correct her. I like to think of my great aunt as a cheerful woman of solid, old-fashioned common sense, who has adapted from the British era to the Partition era to the ethnic-tension era to the naxal era to the industrial lock-down era to this modern, miraculous, globalised, ethically homogenised, financially wobbly, religiously fundamentalist Alice-in-Wonderland era, with a few wars thrown in for good measure. And if her traditional values are shocked by the silly self-righteous logic of "have conceived, will ruin a future life" poster-film, and she takes comfort in thinking this "villianisation" of abortion in a "dangerously over-populated" world is a crazy new idea of the self-obsessed, morally vague, and consequence-blind young (and that it shall die a natural death in a few years)... who am I to take her little piece of make-believe comfort away?