Indian Renaissance

[Mariyam]

For a given set of people - 'renaissance' is nothing but natural progression towards top layer of: [Maslow's Hierarchy of needs] and ground reality is, as a country, majority of us are still in the process of crossing bottom layers. There is small fragment of people who are already there at the top layer. And they have responsibility of guide the people below them and thus facilitate the 'renaissance' at bigger level.

I'm by this triangle. It lists 'sex' at the bottom (physiological need), but 'sexual intimacy' as a higher order (love /belonging) need. Whats the difference? PS: NO WISECRACKS. Answer to the point

[Prakat]

I'm by this triangle. It lists 'sex' at the bottom (physiological need), but 'sexual intimacy' as a higher order (love /belonging need). Whats the difference? PS: NO WISECRACKS. Answer to the point

Seriously?

[Mariyam]

Seriously?

Isn't 'sexual intimacy' a subset of 'sex'? Unless of course you've had a different experience? :P joke. Little difficult to have sex without being intimate, I think. Its like saying, cricket is a lower order need, but batting is higher order need. etc

[Prakat]

Isn't 'sexual intimacy' a subset of 'sex'? Unless of course you've had a different experience? :P joke. Little difficult to have sex without being intimate, I think. Its like saying, cricket is a lower order need, but batting is higher order need. etc

Good point. But sexual intimacy is also a subset of a mature, open, trusting, generous and loving relationship. This, as a rule, comes more naturally to women than to men - who have to grow towards this state of vulnerability. You being a grown girl, I thought you would know the difference between a basic humper and a loving man. ;) Ask around, and you will find a lot of women - especially in arranged marriages - who experience sex without intimacy.

[akshayxyz]

Isn't 'sexual intimacy' a subset of 'sex'? Unless of course you've had a different experience? :P joke. Little difficult to have sex without being intimate, I think. Its like saying, cricket is a lower order need, but batting is higher order need. etc

I am no Maslow. Anyway its not very difficult to see, here is my interpretation. Bottom most layer is about physiological needs - from wiki - "If these requirements are not met, the human body simply cannot continue to function." So, 'sex' at bottom layer is about sex for procreation - maintaining a birth rate adequate to survival of the species. As for the intimacy part - sex at that level is an expression (or outcome) of love and belonging. Which is clearly a psychological need. And sex is just one of the many ways of expressing/maintaining feelings of love/belonging. They should have used some more specific words instead of generic word 'sex'.

[Lurker]

Needs to happen .... We need folks to write some great books (which get translated to different languages)' date= paint some great pictures, create new ideas (not of cost saving), go clean and grean, create great archicture, make some great films that everyone around the world wants to see either dubbed or w/ subtitles, create great original music. From what I recall, one in every 6th person walking the planet is of Bharatiya origin but I don't see much contribution towards arts and culture .... Is this something that needs to be developed at the school level? Ind needs to develop a culture where creativity is promoted and encouraged For example: when you think of countries like - Brazil ----> You hear Samba beats in your brains and visualize someone going past 3-4 players w/ excellent footwork and score a goal - Italy ----> Fashion, High end sports cars, Da Vinci, Great Architecture, Football Yes we are good at math and making softwares. We speak decent enough English for the English speaking countries to set up their customer service call centers but we (as a community) need to be more than that.

Topics like these can go two ways on a MB. One would be that of a deeper engaging going at the roots social studies to actual figure out what has happpened OR missing forest for trees as I suspect is already going on here with arguments about Project Management to sexual intimacy. Not being judgemental but just saying. Still if someone is interested in the topic here is my 0.02c. a) Picking up on Arts and culture first. The issue there is more than one of course. A few that I can think of: 1) Indians lack of pride in their own culture and traditions. Literature for example. Sure we dont have earth shattering writers today but we did have them say a century earlier, folks ranging from Bankim Chand Chatterjee to Tagore, Premchand to Manto, Rajinder Singh Bedi to Mohan Rakesh. If you read most of these gentlemen the grew into what they became by reading their predecessors. Now look around and wonder how many of your siblings, friends at work, colleagues etc follow the literary greats or past. Probably none. The last of the Hindi movie genius Sampoorna Singh Gulzar often quotes the works of Baba Farid, Baba Bulle Shah, Mir taki Mir and of course Ghalib. Half of these names, maybe all of them are unknown to modern "educated" Indians these days. So do we really expect a Gulzar from Gen Y? I dont, and if we do find him that would be a miracle. 2) Our eagerness for disming our own history. If you want to see how our cultural "demise" has progressed over the years just look at the Indian movie industry in general. Does not matter which language really but for sake of simplicity lets say Hindi movies. Our golden era has been possibly 1960s to early 1980s with some of the most terrific actors, actresses, great music, lyricist. A movie like Sholay is a classic because everything came together. Everything is the key. That means we had everything to start with. A story writer combo - Salim-Javed, a terrific actor actor cast Amitabh-Dharamendra-Amjad-Sanjeev-Jaya-Hema, a grear music background (RD Burman) etc. Now who can you think of that will replace any of these pillars? Javed Akhtar once said how in his initial years he went to meet a movie Producer who showed him a map of India and then made a giant circle around Indian midland, UP-MP-Bihar-Maharastra and said "This is what my movie would be about". I suspect if the same thing happens today the circle would be made around North America and UK. 3) Examples like Brazil, Spain, China etc is redudant. Amongst other common themes they also have a common language. India's strength, diversity, is also its weakness. Non-Hindi speakers love to hate Hindi (even if they can speak it at times), but love to love English even if its not Indian. It is fascinating, and possibly embarassing, that Indians tend to communicate in English in high society of India and certainly when abroad. A Pakistani girl once gave me a beautiful insight into this - Indians love to chat in English unless they get real close with someone, thats when they start speaking in Hindi (or Tamil or Telugu). Its like being a prostitute who would do it to make a buck but only kiss people who she actually likes. For the record I do appreciate Pakistanis willingness to come across as total uneducated jackass when it comes to speaking in English, but communicate with each other in Urdu or Punjabi laced with Urdu. b) Professionaly, Indian companies are too short sighted. We are more intersted in making quick money. Somebody mentioned Apple. Well Apple did not score iPhone right away. For the longest time, in 80s and 90s, they were only a niche company with 2% market. But they kept pouring money into product developlment and finally scored a mass winner in iPod, after which they took off brilliantly. Which Indian company do you think can wait for 20 years to score a product like that? TCS? Infosys? Reliance? The software companies in particular have been around for 3 decades or more now and there KPI is simply more billing hours, more revenue etc..nothing on product front. xxx

[CSK Fan]

Thanks. I have no input and/or understanding of the business level decisions the higher guys make. They come to me and go: "We want you to build this, you got 1 week to do it. Prepare a demo of what you've done".

There is a readon the higher ups are paid as much as they do. Doesnt matter if R&D discovers even kryptonite. Without the higher guys, you will still end up not selling anything

[punjabi_khota]

There is a readon the higher ups are paid as much as they do. Doesnt matter if R&D discovers even kryptonite. Without the higher guys' date=' you will still end up not selling anything[/quote'] O' reilly :yikes: MBA

[zen]

Topics like these can go two ways on a MB. One would be that of a deeper engaging going at the roots social studies to actual figure out what has happpened OR missing forest for trees as I suspect is already going on here with arguments about Project Management to sexual intimacy. Not being judgemental but just saying. Still if someone is interested in the topic here is my 0.02c. a) Picking up on Arts and culture first. The issue there is more than one of course. A few that I can think of: 1) Indians lack of pride in their own culture and traditions. Literature for example. Sure we dont have earth shattering writers today but we did have them say a century earlier, folks ranging from Bankim Chand Chatterjee to Tagore, Premchand to Manto, Rajinder Singh Bedi to Mohan Rakesh. If you read most of these gentlemen the grew into what they became by reading their predecessors. Now look around and wonder how many of your siblings, friends at work, colleagues etc follow the literary greats or past. Probably none. The last of the Hindi movie genius Sampoorna Singh Gulzar often quotes the works of Baba Farid, Baba Bulle Shah, Mir taki Mir and of course Ghalib. Half of these names, maybe all of them are unknown to modern "educated" Indians these days. So do we really expect a Gulzar from Gen Y? I dont, and if we do find him that would be a miracle. 2) Our eagerness for disming our own history. If you want to see how our cultural "demise" has progressed over the years just look at the Indian movie industry in general. Does not matter which language really but for sake of simplicity lets say Hindi movies. Our golden era has been possibly 1960s to early 1980s with some of the most terrific actors, actresses, great music, lyricist. A movie like Sholay is a classic because everything came together. Everything is the key. That means we had everything to start with. A story writer combo - Salim-Javed, a terrific actor actor cast Amitabh-Dharamendra-Amjad-Sanjeev-Jaya-Hema, a grear music background (RD Burman) etc. Now who can you think of that will replace any of these pillars? Javed Akhtar once said how in his initial years he went to meet a movie Producer who showed him a map of India and then made a giant circle around Indian midland, UP-MP-Bihar-Maharastra and said "This is what my movie would be about". I suspect if the same thing happens today the circle would be made around North America and UK. 3) Examples like Brazil, Spain, China etc is redudant. Amongst other common themes they also have a common language. India's strength, diversity, is also its weakness. Non-Hindi speakers love to hate Hindi (even if they can speak it at times), but love to love English even if its not Indian. It is fascinating, and possibly embarassing, that Indians tend to communicate in English in high society of India and certainly when abroad. A Pakistani girl once gave me a beautiful insight into this - Indians love to chat in English unless they get real close with someone, thats when they start speaking in Hindi (or Tamil or Telugu). Its like being a prostitute who would do it to make a buck but only kiss people who she actually likes. For the record I do appreciate Pakistanis willingness to come across as total uneducated jackass when it comes to speaking in English, but communicate with each other in Urdu or Punjabi laced with Urdu. b) Professionaly, Indian companies are too short sighted. We are more intersted in making quick money. Somebody mentioned Apple. Well Apple did not score iPhone right away. For the longest time, in 80s and 90s, they were only a niche company with 2% market. But they kept pouring money into product developlment and finally scored a mass winner in iPod, after which they took off brilliantly. Which Indian company do you think can wait for 20 years to score a product like that? TCS? Infosys? Reliance? The software companies in particular have been around for 3 decades or more now and there KPI is simply more billing hours, more revenue etc..nothing on product front. xxx

Thanks for your inputs .... below is my opinion on the interesting points that you made: 1. Creativity and interest in Arts seem to be fading. Yup, hard to imagine a Galib or Tagore coming up 2. I watched Awara some time back and couldn't believe how brilliantly it was made. So much so that even today concepts are copied from it. It appears as if creativity is being replaced by recycling and what's sad is that audiences haven't matured enough to ask for more original works 3. Not having a common language shouldn't be a barrier to creativity. At the end of the day language is a medium of expressing your ideas, it does not shape them. Even if we have authors write some great stuff in English that would be great. If we get inspired to speak in English, why not get inspired by Shakespeare 4. That short-sightedness and uni-dimensional attitude of many of our companies stem up from how we have neglected art and creativity in favor of learning more about math, science and being proficient in English. As I said in one of my posts, today the kids go to school 6 days a week and then many of them probably go to tuition too leaving them with little time to be inspired by artists, authors, etc. (What's art for them is dancing around to bollywood tunes at weddings, clubs, festivals, etc) How can you expect these kids to grow up and focus on creativity, innovation, etc. The central idea is that Indian renaissance needs to happen. And how do we make it happen. How do we develop a culture that encourages this? We need to have parents asking their kids to do something beyond homework and mastering the multiplication table. Our culture has become so one-directional that we work and go to school for 6 days a week. Is this turning us more into computer, calculator, typewriter like than a musical instrument, a paint brush, an open page, a tool that creates something out of nothing

[Mariyam]

@ Lurker, point noted. My question on the difference between 'sex' and 'sexual intimacy' were diversions and I apologize for that. But the gist of renaissance is questioning what is in front of you without blind acceptance, and thats what I was doing. :P The renaissance, literally means re-birth. In the context of Europe, it was a re-birth because the Europeans were for a more than a century under the iron grip of the dogmatic ways of the church. It was re-birth because the Europeans went back to the questioning ways of science and reason as they had in the Greek and Romans times. ( Wiki tells me all this). In our context, we need a naissance and not a renaissance, simply because we don't have ( because of our history and tremendous diversity) this one common period where we can all as Indians agree and call as golden or worth emulating. While I agree broadly with the points you made, I think you are being excessively harsh on contemporary Indian artists. On literature: You've cited quite a few Indian literary giants from the early 1900s. Tagore, Bankim Chandra, Sahni, Mohan Rakesh etc. We just don't know how their contemporaries rated them. We are rating them after a gap of 80+ years. One could argue the same way about Russia. She produced Dostovetsky, Tolstoy, Chekov, Pushkin, Asimov etc just 200-100 years ago and no one of note in the last 20-30 years. And I could say the same about the USA. Unless one considers Danielle Steele and Sidney Sheldon as literary greats :P As you mentioned that the language of communication has changed in India over the last 2 generations. This makes it difficult for us to produce an Amir Khusrau or a Mirza Ghalib, but we do have some contemporary greats (English and other languages) in Nissim Ezeikel, Dom Moraes, Amrita Pritam, Arun Kolatkar, Khundmiri. After a span of a few decades, though these guys may not be in the same league as a Tagore, but they definitely will leave their mark and inspire the new generation of poets/writers. My point mainly being that we now are in no position to judge contemporary writers. Let the sands of time judge their legacy.

[Mariyam]

Professionaly, Indian companies are too short sighted. We are more intersted in making quick money. Somebody mentioned Apple. Well Apple did not score iPhone right away. For the longest time, in 80s and 90s, they were only a niche company with 2% market. But they kept pouring money into product developlment and finally scored a mass winner in iPod, after which they took off brilliantly. Which Indian company do you think can wait for 20 years to score a product like that? TCS? Infosys? Reliance? The software companies in particular have been around for 3 decades or more now and there KPI is simply more billing hours, more revenue etc..nothing on product front.

I'm not much of a tech or a management person, but I find the above very hard to believe. For a company to survive for that long earning the profits that it does, definitely requires some anticipation of long term problems. If they were that short sighted, they wouldn't have lasted for so long. And mind you, they haven't just lasted, they've grown leaps and bounds- our IT firms that is. In the case of Apple, the end product is a tangible I-Pod or a Mac. In the case of our IT giants, the end product isn't something that is tangible to a common person. Maybe they have come up with a software/service that is revolutionary. Don't know. Just saying.

xxx

[zen]

I'm not much of a tech or a management person, but I find the above very hard to believe. For a company to survive for that long earning the profits that it does, definitely requires some anticipation of long term problems. If they were that short sighted, they wouldn't have lasted for so long. And mind you, they haven't just lasted, they've grown leaps and bounds- our IT firms that is. In the case of Apple, the end product is a tangible I-Pod or a Mac. In the case of our IT giants, the end product isn't something that is tangible to a common person. Maybe they have come up with a software/service that is revolutionary. Don't know. Just saying.

I think what's being talked about is short-sightedness in terms of investing in R&D, visualizing new products, anticipating customer needs, etc .... The ability to understand what the customers want before the customers know what they want. It takes a lot more than market research to know that. Market research usually tells you what the customers want today. India lacks creativity and high-level of engineering know how like China, Taiwan, Korea for example. Countries like Israel have made a name for themselves as knowledge centers of the world when it comes to R&D .... India IT firms like the call-centers have been successful because of Indians better command over English than some of the other nations and availability of cheap labor. What you are probably referring to is 'kaizen', which is process improvement, making something more efficient. What we are talking about is new ideas and innovation! List of patents granted 50 most innovative companies - 2010

[Vijay.Sharma]

Per me, our rennaisance has already begun. But the only sad part, if you want to call it that, is that it has been given thrust from the people who are not originally Indians. I think people all over the world are discovering and realizing the greatness of Indian culture and its achievements of yore. In a way Indian culture is at the fore front in both science and spirituality. Science is shedding it's materialistic view and opening itself to view existence from a perspective that is not as narrow as the physical perspective. Culture is borrowing many philosophies from ancient India. Being a student of History I can understand why we needed outside support to assert ourselves. It is very difficult to get rid of the psychological scars of a 1000 year repression starting from Mohd of Gauri to the British. But yes, we are getting there. Give it another 50-60 yrs and we will return to the golden age of Bharatvarsha. One thing I am proud of is that inspite of the 1000 year loot and rape of our culture, we have found a way to live together (mostly). I think that is the most important and biggest virtue of Bharatvarsha - tolerance to different povs. If you are a student of History, or even otherwise, you will notice this pattern in human development. Everytime two civilizations met, the civilization that "won" or was better off managed to eradicate the previous culture. Examples - the whole of North America and South America are christians now when they had their own religions. The whole of Africa are either Christians or Muslims...hardly any of the original Afro religions exist. The whole of South East Europe and North Africa and West Asia are Muslims. No trace of Parsis in Iran. The whole of South East Asia are either Christian or Islamic. Whereas India hasn't lost it's original traditions...what more she has given a unique expression to both Islam and Christianity...a very tolerant, and anti-evangelist expression. It clearly means that Bharatvarsha's culture was way more advanced and logical than the invaders who brought Islam and Christianity to the land. The Christians tried so shamelessly to convert Hindus and Muslims in the 18th century and 19th century that it is not a joke and yet we haven't lost our identity. The generation before mine...ppl in their 40s... you guys dared to dream big and try to show the world who we are. My generation..ppl in the 30s we took that one level ahead and delivered results with confidence. The generation after mine...the guys in their 20s, have no memory of any scars and they are super confident, the next generation...guys in the teens will have a swagger about themselves. But, we 40s and 30s folks have a job to do...we need to ensure that our kids (the ones in the teens) have a sense of History and get a perspective about our nation and what all it has been thru with special focus on the golden periods. We need to impress upon them that they belong to a great legacy and it is their duty to shape the legacy in whichever way they feel is right without disrespecting it.

[Lurker]

I'm not much of a tech or a management person' date=' but I find the above very hard to believe. For a company to survive for that long earning the profits that it does, definitely requires some anticipation of long term problems. If they were that short sighted, they wouldn't have lasted for so long. [b']And mind you, they haven't just lasted, they've grown leaps and bounds- our IT firms that is. In the case of Apple, the end product is a tangible I-Pod or a Mac. In the case of our IT giants, the end product isn't something that is tangible to a common person. Maybe they have come up with a software/service that is revolutionary. Don't know. Just saying.

I hate to be absolutely brutal on Indian IT firm, but they represent exactly what has happened in Indian economic "revolution" since 90s. Indian IT giants have basically been in the right-place-at-the-right-time. Period. Yes it very romantic to hear how FC Kohli worked his tails off in 70s and early 80s to get simple IT contracts for TCS, or how Narayan Moorthi had to wait for months to get a phone connection in 80s of license raaj, but really at the end of it all after 30 years of odd establishment Indian IT giants are hardly reputed in areas aside from Outsourcing and Service Providing. Indian IT giants benefitted immensly from how the world changes in late 90s. The Internet technology combined with huge developments in fibre optics and telecommunication simply meant people did not have to be in the same place to do the job. Hence the concept of off-shoring. Indian IT companies have leveraged the demand from the West and the supply of highly educated folks coming out of India and made Billions. But if you stop to look back and see the backbone of this huge shift(technology wise), none of that (Internet, fibre optics, cable and telecommunication technology) have come out of India. The worrying trend is this has been picked up in West as well. Apple and Google are exceptions, bulk of the company (including software giants) have adopted the same model to be limited in long term product development and more focus on short term growth...which is not entirely unexpected as these days every company tends to look at Stock market growth every day and not really looking into a 10 year old plan. Coming back to India, take Real Estate developer for example. Companies like DLF are now amongst the richest in the world, if not the richest. I think we can all also agree on the fact that DLF is hardly the world's foremost company considered when building a skyscraper in Manhattan or bridge over Shanghai. Like software they just happened to be in the right place at the right time (read Delhi-Gurgaon-Mohali sector) xxx (means finito...xoxoxo would be with love...old school Brit writing etc)

[Lurker]

On literature: You've cited quite a few Indian literary giants from the early 1900s. Tagore, Bankim Chandra, Sahni, Mohan Rakesh etc. We just don't know how their contemporaries rated them. We are rating them after a gap of 80+ years. One could argue the same way about Russia. She produced Dostovetsky, Tolstoy, Chekov, Pushkin, Asimov etc just 200-100 years ago and no one of note in the last 20-30 years. And I could say the same about the USA. Unless one considers Danielle Steele and Sidney Sheldon as literary greats :P

Actually I concur with you. This dearth, if you will, of ideas is not plagueing India only. It is pretty omnipresent these days. Fairly recently I was stumped when on this MB I asked a poster if he would compare Shakespeare with JK Rawling (Harry Potter) and received the answer Why not. Go figure. But yeah your point about literary greats missing these days is right on. This is partly explained by decline of arts and literature in average day life (unless you consider reality TV an art), but also the fact that smartest brains these days have moved away from the subjects and effectively went into Science/Technology/Finance. So clearly this area has taken a hit. And no I do not expect a quick revival based on how short sentences are getting these days with LOLs and how an office email these days is devoid of proper writing ettiquette and often has entire message in subject itself. So yeah I wasnt being critical on Indian Gen Y only, although in the context of this thread my criticism was definitely more towards Indians.

As you mentioned that the language of communication has changed in India over the last 2 generations. This makes it difficult for us to produce an Amir Khusrau or a Mirza Ghalib, but we do have some contemporary greats (English and other languages) in Nissim Ezeikel, Dom Moraes, Amrita Pritam, Arun Kolatkar, Khundmiri. After a span of a few decades, though these guys may not be in the same league as a Tagore, but they definitely will leave their mark and inspire the new generation of poets/writers.

Oh come on many of these are old names. Amrita Pritam belongs to days of Manto and Saahir. Her most brilliant work would be between 50s to 70s, possibly 80s. I missed out on mentioning RK Laxman earlier who is againt a brilliant giant we have produced. Now you may be right that history will judge many such greats and they may get better known later on life, but surely it would be very different from the likes of Majaz and Ghalin, Tagore and Manto who folks knew in their time only. Possibly because of the fact that their work was read? Can we argue against the fact that these days reading itself is on decline? xxx

[Lurker]

2. I watched Awara some time back and couldn't believe how brilliantly it was made. So much so that even today concepts are copied from it. It appears as if creativity is being replaced by recycling and what's sad is that audiences haven't matured enough to ask for more original works

Awaara is a milestone because of the same reason as Sholay, it had everything that you would expect in a masterpiece. A great story teller (KA Abbas), a creative director (Raj Kapoor) who had an amazing penchant for great writers, musicians and lyricist and hence the gems from the movie penned by Hasrat and Shailendra and given to life by Shankar Jaikishen. Then of course was the small matter of on-screen conflct of Raj kapoor with Prithviraj Kapoor. You can not expect the same results when you have all the parts missing. By the by the situation is not entirely different in Hollywood these days either.

3. Not having a common language shouldn't be a barrier to creativity. At the end of the day language is a medium of expressing your ideas, it does not shape them. Even if we have authors write some great stuff in English that would be great. If we get inspired to speak in English, why not get inspired by Shakespeare

I have heard that many times before, mostly by English proponents but I have never been convinced. For starters to me language is lot more than simple medium of expression. There is a reason why Gulzar wrote (in Dil se) - Woh Yaar hai jo khusboo ki tarah, jiski jubaan Urdu ki tarah...With all respect had he written jiski jubaan Malayalam ki tarah most folks would have gone WTF? Some of the great scenes in Hindi cinema, again using as a reference, would be those laced in Urdu and well Hindi. Try translating "Ek sau solak chaand ki raatein ek tumhare kaandhe ka til " (Mera Kuch saaman). Something always gets lost in translation. While we are on the subject one of the reason for the demise of arts and culture is the slow death of languages like Urdu. The golden era of Indian arts, in past few centuries of course, coincides with golden era of Urdu. Be it shayari, story telling or movie with songs.

4. That short-sightedness and uni-dimensional attitude of many of our companies stem up from how we have neglected art and creativity in favor of learning more about math, science and being proficient in English. As I said in one of my posts, today the kids go to school 6 days a week and then many of them probably go to tuition too leaving them with little time to be inspired by artists, authors, etc. (What's art for them is dancing around to bollywood tunes at weddings, clubs, festivals, etc) How can you expect these kids to grow up and focus on creativity, innovation, etc.

Quite right about complete disillusionment of average junta towards Arts and Literature. Everything is technology driven these days. Better to be a Call center person than a writer. Thats just the way it is. That being said there remains a lot of talent that erupts in form of maqbool, rang de basanti, hazaar kwhaishen aisi etc from time to time. So not exactly a lost case me thinks. xxx

[Vijay.Sharma]

One thing I can notice in this thread is that there seems to be a view that 'old is gold'. Indian cinema, Indian culture before the 90s was way better than what it is now. I'll not get into better/worse because fundamentally I believe there are no absolutes. Things become better or worse in space, time, perspective, and context. Maybe the 'oldies' (dont mean it in any disrespectful way) will do well to be aware of the fact that a "culture" is never stationary. A culture evolves constantly. I think our kids are doing mostly good in ensuring that some core values are still maintained in our national culture but that's just my pov. I can't help but feel that a lot of the pandering for the good old days of the 50s, 60s, and 70s has got more to do with perceived superiority arising from colonial hangover (u know like...damn my English and my knowledge of European and American culture is awesome). But hey we all eventually die. I just hope that when we die our kids throw such notions out for good. Again my pov is neither better nor worse than anyone else's. I think the day isn't far when India will totally accept it's own sovereignty and cultural integrity. And her culture will be influenced by world culture and specie consciousness. I hope our kids keep this in mind -

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long supressed, finds utterance. It is fitting that at this solemn moment we take the pledge of dedication to the service of Inida and her people and to the still larger cause of humanity .... ... And so we have to labour and to work, and work hard, to give reality to our dreams. Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this One World that can no longer be split into isolated fragments. ... ... The future beckons to us. Whither do we go and what shall be our endeavour? To bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease; to build up a prosperous, democratic and progressive nation, and to create social, economic and political institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman

[zen]

^ Bhai, once again you are blowing the wrong trumphet .... This is not about old being gold but discussing the golden period, as far as cinema is concerned, which happened to be during 50s-70s .... That period is refered to as the golden period of Indian cinema

[Vijay.Sharma]

^ Golden period by whom? By a few individuals who believe things were the best 'back in the day'? If you look at it from an unbiased view, it is the emotion of 'nostalgia' in play here. And nostalgia is one of the very best emotions, really. In the 50s to 70s there were hardly any movies about off beat topics, or even popular topics like political ills, biographies, etc. You would still find some gems like Anand, Do Aankhen Bara Haath, and the one about Indira Gandhi, etc but they were few and far between. But again, to each his own. I love the songs of the 60s and 70s and a few movies from then but in all honesty, when I strip myself of all bias I think the 'boldness' shown by directors and actors today is quite refreshing. The worst period, per me, as far as Indian cinema is concerned was the 80s - all bloody Jitendra-Jaya Pradha-Sridevi-family crap.

[zen]

Golden age of Indian Cinema