go west?

November 16, 2007 at 12:25 pm (branding, culture, india, psychology, the media, the world)

There’s a fat blanket of smog hanging over rapidly industrializing India, absorbing sunlight that would otherwise filter on to the subcontinent. This is according to a study recently published in the New Scientist and it’s not surprising. 

“It turns out that smog produced by US and Europe until about 1980 had resulted in similar dimming across the world. But when the West cleaned up its act in the 1980s and 1990s – just as India and China were starting to spew – clearer skies returned across much of the world.“

Clearly, it’s important for India to learn from the cycles that more developed parts of the world have gone through already.

But think of the blind acceptance of Western consumerism that we are seeing in India today. An ad for Zeiss opticals – now available in India – shows a girl in an office expressing condescension towards a coworker for wearing glasses with no brand name. The tagline is “Brand nahi to style/naam nahi” or something like it. Basically, it signals that without brands to show off with, a person can make no impact. How tasteless and how untrue!

India, beware. The unthinking brand of capitalism the West embraces just isn’t cutting it anymore and the sociopolitical state of America is good evidence. We don’t have to go stir crazy on brands in India to realize that rampant consumerism - just like the grey smog that now envelops us - is damaging. Indians need to be wary of the retail therapy trap.

(Of course brands – and the businesses they represent - need to start being more responsible with their messaging too but that’s a story from another day.)

A recent article by Francois Gautier captures well some of my sentiment. I’m not sure that spirituality is the answer to India’s problems. But sitting up and taking a look at the West more objectively is certainly in order.

“Today, there is a sense of deep satisfaction, of gloating even, in India. The economy is booming, there are more and more cars on the roads, shares are soaring, a plane is taking off every six seconds, hotels are full, shops do roaring business… But if one looks closer at what is happening here… India is veering blindly, without restraint, towards total globalisation and Westernisation… Yes, there are great values in the Western world: Freedom, democracy, equality (not always though), respect for the environment, less corruption. And India must, and has already borrowed from these qualities. But… it seems the Indian political and intellectual mind is pushing these qualities to an illogical extreme, as if it wants to prove to the West that ‘we are as democratic, as liberal, as free as you are’… India must achieve its liberalisation and industrialisation, by taking the best of the West, but preserving what is good, pure, wise in her own culture.”