Indian Commonly Culture

In an environment dominated by government-sponsored nationalistic jingoism, writing about the following two Indian cultural phenomena of world domination is rather strange for me. But it’s worth writing about them because of their unique commonly nature and to some degree of their discrediting of the government-sponsored nationalistic cultural advocacies.

The first phenomenon is that of the popularity of the Indian cinema world over. Indian songs and dance patterns have been percolating in the western performing arts for a while now, interfused and disguised as remixes with western art forms like wrappers.

In my trip to Kazakhstan in Central Asia, I was stunned by the extent of the viewership of the Indian films by the locals of all cadres. Every time I met some one new, the topic of Indian films was brought up by the native, as if to impress upon me the depth of his or her knowledge on the topic. In one group surrounding, the otherwise somewhat dull chitchat quickly turned into a lively all inclusive conversation when this topic came up in the discussion. One participant mentioned that her grandmother also used to watch Raj Kapoor films during the Soviet era. The point was that Indian cinema viewing has been a well established Kazaki entertainment indigenized activity for generations. It was rather embarrassing for me then that I had much less knowledge of Indian Cinema than the natives and therefore sought to deflect the conversation to some other topic.

The second phenomenon is that of the sport of Cricket. There is an article in the recent ‘The Economist’ magazine issue about IPL matches. The league now not just resembles the NFL in the US and football Premier league in the UK in style and form, but that it’s only second to the NFL in media rights value. Gone are the days of the government-managed sport with four or five days match formats as the only game in town. Cricket, which used to be the colonial legacy game is now a quintessentially Indian phenomena, just as the Tuesday butter chicken curry is in the UK.

Unfortunately, just like the Indian cinema, I am not much of a fan of the IPL. To my defense, I am not as much a fan of American baseball either and at most a fair weather enthusiast of the local NFL team. My movie watching also in general is limited to the long haul International flights where I get most of my film-watching quota of world cinema.

What I like with these two cultural phenomenon however is, as I mentioned before, both of them are established independent of or perhaps despite the government interference and span multiple government periods. Now that is something to sing and dance about.