How far down the rabbit hole will India go?

They say we all have a book in us and I'm contemplating writing a book and would love to learn more about the future for India. I have a number of topics I would want to cover and wondered what people thought of them. I also would like peoples opinions on these wide reaching topics. I will list them and let me know what you folks think.

I should say that I would be extremely interested as to what Indian's living in India think about the future. I am aware that cultural background acts as a filter for our perceptions of the world but feel here more than anywhere else that will not cloud the issues facing India in the future.The areas I would like to cover are:-

1. The rush to modernisation: what do we keep and discard? Mechanisation effects on rural employment
2. Homogeny of culture: the macdonaldisation of the world
3. Environmental pressures: environmental concern is this just the policies of the well fed. Sustainable wood consumption in the western ghats.The Cauvery river "a sacred resource".
4. Rural and urban Migration: aspiration in rural populations and the ripple effect of road building policy
5. The effect of modernisation on and by youth culture: Bollywood to Hollywood the sacred and profane

This whole subject has played on my mind since I was taken by my girlfriend (who was born in Bangalore) for lunch on my last visit to Chennai. I argued for Saravanna Bhavan but the lady wanted a Subway sandwhich! I began to look around at the changes I was able to notice with my limited knowledge of this beautiful and intoxicating country.

I should say that at this stage I may be taking a new job in Barbados so this book may take a while (if ever). However, I would still be very interested as to what IMers hopes and fears are for the future of India.

Thanx in waiting for all your views. Scott (bhuttaJi)

ps moving to Barbados means putting off my next trip to India

Water, energy and agro pricing...solve these and see the GDP jump!

2. Homogenization of Culture

It's not a given that "progress" will destroy India's culture, turning it into some totally westernized, inert version of McDonald's. Just because western countries abandoned most of the trappings of their cutures at the onset of the industrial age (and forged new, homogenized ones) doesn't mean that India will follow. If anything, globalization has produced a huge cultural and nationalist backlash all over the world (witness even the rise of the BJP during the 1990s). Indian culture is comfortable with contradictions in a way that Anglo-American culture is not. You read occasionally about the chemical engineer studying pollution in the Ganges, for example, who is a devoted Hindu and bathes on the ghats in Varanasi. We westerners think that science obliterates religion (that is, when you find out the truth, belief becomes quaint), but in India (and even now in the US) this isn't the case.

Indian culture, unlike most western cultures, has so many safeguards built into it to keep it from being overrun, even by fierce cultural pressures. Foremost is the intertwining of family and religion. Every marriage propagates Indian values, which are independent of fiber optic cable, satellite TV, credit cards, and Hollywood movies--the things that are usually offered as the great destroyers of local culture. Indians have also taken these things and completely localized them.

In other words, in the great world culture that is allegedly being imposed by Hollywood, McDonalds, and Coca Cola, Indians have rebranded one section of it and are totally comfortable with it, and they don't see it as a threat to local culture. It helps that Bollywood and the rest of Indian pop culture are not hostile to it (as Hollywood is of American "values"). Indeed, they do everything they can to reinforce it.

Most fears about India's homogenization are rooted in observations about American society in the 1950s and 60s, when the Norman Rockwell, Leave it to Beaver idyll was shattered by a cultural revolution, which is still being fought today (and harder than ever). There's really nothing to indicate that this fate awaits any other country, just western egotism getting in the way.

i would suggest that you go through my blogs (there are around 150 of them right now!) with the following link:

http://o3.indiatimes.com/rediscoveringindia

i started writing these pieces since august-2004 and have covered a variety of subjects. you can read these at liesure. you will get answers to many of your questions.

While it is true, things may pan out your way, I wouldn't be so sure. When you have English as one of the mediums of interaction, there is a pressure to assimilate in the larger context of the world. The biggest reason (I think) why you don't see Indians getting assimilated as fast it should generally happen are a combination of poverty, illiteracy and dispersion of villages & townships. In 1950 thereabouts about 70% of the pop. was in the villages, today it's about 50% according to Drucker, Peter.

Then there are government policies which accelerate or diminish integration; the 3 language formula has English as a medium; at the same time West Bengal went as far as /not/ teaching English in Gov. Schools for about 5 years.

All I'm trying to say is this; With about a thousand languages & dialects, we have a small advantage in terms of being independant from undue influence. tHe moment, an individual decides to move towards English, that represents a small step towards being part a faceless crowd.

Take the spread of Hindi, say. If you believe it has succcessfully spread down South, then why can't English & by extension, be the harbinger of cultural assimilation? If it worked for Hindi and by extension that Bollywood(the cultural ersatz face) represents India, then what reasons are there that English won't work?

I concentrate on the language issue first because that's how someone's culture is weakened(France's rear-guard attempt, anyone?).

Get everyone speaking the same tongue, you got them!

Of course, I'm not trying to diss English here, if it was mandarin, I'd be saying the same thing too.

Good points, all.

Regarding English, in the places that I have visited in the Indian diaspora (Trinidad, Guyana, South Africa, and the US to some extent), the subcontinental languages have been lost almost entirely. Hindi survives only in the context of religious services and only in the mouth of the pandit. But these folks are as fiercely Indian as they can be.

It helps, if that is the right word, that in much of the diaspora, Indians are a minority that see their community in opposition to another group, usually blacks. The cultural pressure is to stay united, not to assimilate into something else. But even in richer, more dispersed environments, like the US, Indians can easily tap into the culture of the subcontinent, thanks to satellite TV, the Internet, and the availability of Indian goods at the local markets.

In the Caribbean, for example, during the 1950s and 60s, the cultural force bearing down on the Indian communities was British. In the 70s and 80s, it was American. Now it is Indian. Temples are built using artisans from India. The Indian government offers scholarships for students to study in India and tries to forge business ties in the private sectors. Guyanese kids are enamored of Shah Rukh Khan and don't speak a word of Hindi.

Now is a really good time to be Indian anywhere in the world. Indian culture is forging ahead and asserting itself in many ways that are independent of language.

The ultimate effect of all this? Who knows? But there is no evidence at all, in the face of the cultural onslaught that is part and parcel of globalization, that Indian culture has been in any way diminished. If anything, it is itself a contributor to global culture. The Filipino sailors aboard the container ship departing Shenzhen, China, filled with goods destined for Walmart in the US watch Bollywood VCDs in the crew lounge.

Maybe this homogenization is not all that homogenous as it's cracked up to be. New cultural hybrids will arise, it's a natural development in a way. (That is not to say I don't share a lot of the critique of globalization, it's just that some kind of reversion to a reactionary localism is not the answer I think. Although a defiant solidarious autonomism if you will has my sympathy. Let a thousand cultures bloom indeed.)

The point of language is a good one. Interestingly enough it has been noted that esp. with the rise of the internet English is being bastardized about as quickly as it's spreading. Chances are in a few hundred years we won't recognize English as it's spoken today (any more than we would the language as spoken a few hundred years ago of course), and according to some the way it's going the language may disintegrate into several distinct languages. With English specifically the process has been going on for much longer of course, it having been a major world language for so long now, and a lingua franca for so many colonized peoples.

English in India has a more complex history I'd say, since it was obviously not introduced as a lingua franca as a result of "Americanization" or globalization as we understand the word today, although the latter may now act as a double factor in it. I don't think people's cultures can so easily be eradicated by the language they speak (or the movies they watch, or the hamburgers they eat). There will be an influence of course but it's far more mutual and cultures are often more resilient and adaptive than is thought. India is certainly a case in point (as is Indian English for example, which can be difficult enough to understand for a native speaker of English.)

Where I live kids have developed a street lingo that is heavily influenced by English, Surinamese, Turkish, Moroccan and other languages and which few but they themselves can understand. This is how cultural onslaught gets diverted and perverted if you will. And for all the fears of Americanization, Germany is still not The Netherlands is not the UK is not Spain is not...

So I hold no high hopes for globalization but I do for the human spirit somehow and its capacity for deviation, and in that sense I wouldn't say the situation looks so bleak. It's how you interpret it and the accompanying power structures; internationalism used to be a progressive stance, not a reactionary one. The trick is to maintain your autonomous identity (and identifying such identities is a tricky business in itself as we all know) and to look towards one another at the same time I guess.