Understanding our latent drivers

Ask someone from my parents' generation in India, if they have heard of ABBA. If they say yes, then, they would have also likely heard of Boney M and Man Machine.

Similarly, someone from my generation, if they grew up reading Archie comics, they would have also likely read Tintin, Asterix, and books from Mir Publishers. Of course, also Amar Chitra Katha.

 
But, someone analogous from Europe, would have likely heard about ABBA and Asterix/Tintin, but not about Archie or Boney M. Similarly, someone from the US would have either grooved to ABBA or Boney M, but would have likely not heard about Man Machine. And neither of them would have heard of Mir Publishers, let alone Amar Chitra Katha or Chacha Choudhury.

So what is happening here?

India was and is still a relatively poor country with a large population. In other words it is a vast "resource pool" of "human resources" that is of interest to several forces worldwide. And several kinds of interests wish to exploi.. er.. "tap into" this resource pool and exploi.. er.. "use" the potential it holds. 

In the 60s and 70s, Indians were still heady from their new-found freedom after centuries of oppression. We lapped up all these cultural memes without favour or discrimination. 

I remember once, sometime in the early '80s, we had visited a "Festival of Russia" in Cubbon Park in the afternoon, and from there, went on to see a James Bond movie in the evening. The fact that they both were coming to us from two different ends of the Cold War spectrum, and were competing with each other for pushing their worldview onto us, was completely irrelevant. Wonder how many of us even realised they were competing with each other. They both seemed to be eager to get our attention. 

I also remember buying a book on the history of aviation from the above mentioned festival, where it was claimed that the Russians had invented heavier-than-air flying machines before the Wright brothers. While we seriously considered the possibility of several inventors having experimented with heavier-than-air flying machines and not just Wright brothers, of course, for some reason the story of Shivkar Bapuji Talpade was something everybody laughed at. 

But sustained efforts from different fronts are finally beginning to yield results one generation later. Today the fault lines between the different camps are more stark. Each camp has several useful idiots who passionately espouse the worldview they have been indoctrinated with. 

Like this former KGB dude says, it takes 15 years of sustained effort towards indoctrination of a population, before results begin to show: 

Today, the results have begun to show. To understand ourselves, we use some alien terminology like political "left" and "right" that make no sense in traditional Indian worldview. We have reached a stage where it confuses people if someone were to participate in a gay parade, celebrate abrogation of Section 377 that criminalised homosexuality, and yet criticise the ban on fireworks for Diwali and are more or less happy with the way Covid was handled in this country. 

The original "being" that was India, is slowly dying and its worldview relegated to some meaningless "riwaz" while new categories and boundaries are fast taking root. 

The urgency for creating an Indian narrative of who we are and how we view the world, cannot be understated. It is fine to take inputs from everywhere, but these would be beneficial only if it serves to enrich our worldview, and not replace it, and leave us with a dissociative identity disorder.