![In the wake of the latest scandal to befall India, Anand Giridharadas, in a recent article, laments the unmooring of the Indian soul. He approvingly quotes Sonia Gandhi, president of the Congress Party, who would seem to have a good grasp of the problem. “Our economy may be increasingly dynamic,” Gandhi says, “but our moral universe seems to be shrinking.” It’s shrinking in China, too, apparently, as revealed in a few choice quotes from Chinese entrepreneurs.
In Indian and Chinese “thrivers,” Giridhadas can detect a search for meaning:
[A]mong those who have arrived, we may see a rising tendency toward self-scrutiny. It could take disparate forms: Indians and Chinese turning down lucrative jobs to join think tanks, become journalists, activists or otherwise play their part in the public sphere; young people digging into these two ancient cultures to find ideas of what to wear, read and eat, after the feverish years of Westernization; sobering media that interrogate growth instead of just giving evidence of it; philosophers guiding these nations toward new constellations of values.
If only it were true. I snapped the above photo of a billboard standing on the side of a road in Bangalore this summer. I’ve spent a lot of time in Bangalore these past few years, in fact. In my travels across the city and in other parts of the country, speaking to hundreds of people from all walks of life, I sensed a stronger drive for attaining money and other material possessions than anything else.
I can appreciate the efforts by Giridhadas to suggest that something else is now under way, but it would appear that even he is doubtful, when he writes:
A relentless futurism has gripped two societies that long prided themselves on reverence for the past. A migration from the countryside to the city is changing their essential characters, with restless, rootless urbanites replacing villagers as the cultural center of gravity.
Social upheavals that took decades, even centuries, in the West — from feminism to gay rights to the rise of respect for the young — are happening in a historical flash. Parents are finding themselves unforeseeably abandoned in their final earthbound years. Founding heroes whose faces adorn currency — in China, Mao; in India, Gandhi — no longer inspire the same fervor, but new heroes are nowhere to be found.
Sadly, I think this is closer to the mark: billions of people with the recurring dream to land a million dollars and thereby shape their respective country after their own image, the way they “see it.” Not so bright a future, I don’t think.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lclzk4ttfm1qa2y0jo1_500.jpg)
In the wake of the latest scandal to befall India, Anand Giridharadas, in a recent article, laments the unmooring of the Indian soul. He approvingly quotes Sonia Gandhi, president of the Congress Party, who would seem to have a good grasp of the problem. “Our economy may be increasingly dynamic,” Gandhi says, “but our moral universe seems to be shrinking.” It’s shrinking in China, too, apparently, as revealed in a few choice quotes from Chinese entrepreneurs.
In Indian and Chinese “thrivers,” Giridhadas can detect a search for meaning:
[A]mong those who have arrived, we may see a rising tendency toward self-scrutiny. It could take disparate forms: Indians and Chinese turning down lucrative jobs to join think tanks, become journalists, activists or otherwise play their part in the public sphere; young people digging into these two ancient cultures to find ideas of what to wear, read and eat, after the feverish years of Westernization; sobering media that interrogate growth instead of just giving evidence of it; philosophers guiding these nations toward new constellations of values.
If only it were true. I snapped the above photo of a billboard standing on the side of a road in Bangalore this summer. I’ve spent a lot of time in Bangalore these past few years, in fact. In my travels across the city and in other parts of the country, speaking to hundreds of people from all walks of life, I sensed a stronger drive for attaining money and other material possessions than anything else.
I can appreciate the efforts by Giridhadas to suggest that something else is now under way, but it would appear that even he is doubtful, when he writes:
A relentless futurism has gripped two societies that long prided themselves on reverence for the past. A migration from the countryside to the city is changing their essential characters, with restless, rootless urbanites replacing villagers as the cultural center of gravity.
Social upheavals that took decades, even centuries, in the West — from feminism to gay rights to the rise of respect for the young — are happening in a historical flash. Parents are finding themselves unforeseeably abandoned in their final earthbound years. Founding heroes whose faces adorn currency — in China, Mao; in India, Gandhi — no longer inspire the same fervor, but new heroes are nowhere to be found.
Sadly, I think this is closer to the mark: billions of people with the recurring dream to land a million dollars and thereby shape their respective country after their own image, the way they “see it.” Not so bright a future, I don’t think.
