Culture
In spite of being relatively conservative in nature, Mandi Bahauddin city remains a cultural mix up of old and modern tendencies. In 2006 it got its first FM Broadcast Radio Station, aptly named "Hamara MandiBahuddin FM98" (Our MandiBahuddin FM98: www.hamarafm.com.pk): the station has greatly helped gel people of varying cultural mixes into one district. The radio broadcasts music and infotainment for each segment of the social mix. The city enjoyed its purely agrarian and mercantile culture before the Partition of India in 1947. The local Jat culture, an offshoot of Punjabi culture, however, received a heavy influence of central Indian culture with the migrants reaching Mandi Bahauddin from different parts of India after the Partition. Today, Punjabi is the only widely spoken and understood language of the city, whereas a goodly number of individuals understand and speak Urdu and English.
Mandi Bahauddin was home to three diverse religious communities before the Partition, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. The simultaneous existence of all three religions promoted the air of coexistence and religious tolerance and the city continued to grow in relative peace. Even today, Hindu and Sikh temples and the old buildings evacuated by the Hindus and Sikhs can be seen in the length and breadth of the city.
A vibrant diaspora of half a million represents Mandi Bahauddin all over the globe, particularly in USA, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece and Gulf States. Mandi Bahauddin underwent unprecedented modernisation from the year 2000 to 2010, which was, in turn, a result of outstanding business growth witnessed by the city during the decade. Plaza states rapidly emerged with superstores and multinationals owing to a heavy influx of money from other countries. Remittances sent by expatriates have been the lifeline of the city over the years and the city life still owes its prosperity and profundity to these remittances. As a natural result of prosperity, the city doubled its size within the same decade giving a supreme boost to real state industry.
Today, Mandi Bahauddin district has many civil servants and judges serving throughout the country. This improvement has greatly changed the local culture shifting from a purely agrarian to a business and bourgeois society.
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“It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses this imbalance, puts him among equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)