From, Carvalho elisabeth_car at yahoo.com
Mon Mar 31 02:12:07 PDT 2008
Where is the question of our own culture being under
threat by the West, when Bollywood Item girls prance
about in shorty-shorts at cricket stadiums gyrating to
the delight of sweaty men, our cosmetic counters are
giving way from the weight of fairness creams, our
girls are told that to be successful they have to be
fair, models on TV are Eurasian prototypes (gone are
the days of heavy-set dusky beauty from the South),
Mario adds:
Many Indians have always been, and still are, obsessed
by the West. Others are xenophobic and paranoid about
western culture. This dichotomy is probably the case
in all colonial cultures and a legacy of colonialism.
Actually, our culture is also making a significant
impact on the west as our children begin to assimilate
into their new surroundings, notwithstanding the
handwringing by some about maintaining the Goan
identity in the diaspora. This appeal is about as
likely to be successful as King Canute was.
The growing inroads made by Indian culture can clearly
be seen in the USA with the growing appreciation for
our educational objectives and competitive work ethic,
the growing popularity of our cuisine and music, and
the creeping incorporation of Indian fabrics and
colors and designs into the mainstream western
marketplace. Some of the most ornate new Hindu
Temples in the world are now in the USA.
Indians of darker hues are far more attractive to many
Americans than they may be to their fellow Indians
with their obsession with fairness. For any Indian
in America to try and become fairer would be like a
sick joke within the diverse American spectrum of skin
colors.
Selma wrote:
We are a culture obsessed with and thoroughly engaged
the West, so for Goans to sit on the beach and
postulate about being morally superior is most
unbecoming.
Mario responds:
The adjective for such Goans is pecksniffian:-))
However, has being unbecoming ever stopped them
before? Indians always pretend to be morally superior
to others while letting their own cultural problems
fester, sometimes for millenia. I still wonder at a
supposedly sophisticated modern Indian like Rajdeep
Sardesai of all people, writing apparently with a
straight face about Charles Correia, proud of his
pretense of a Saraswat Brahmin heritage, clad in a
kurta and Kolhapuri chappals, protesting an Air India
calendar showing Goans getting married in western
garb. I wonder if Charles Correia wore Indian garb at
his own wedding. What Goa is he pretending to be
concerned about? Is this any less unbecoming that
those Goans fulminating on the beach?
In the Scarlett Keeling tragedy we had a bunch of Goan
guys, brought up in some dark underbelly of Goan
Catholic culture, who sequentially drugged, molested,
raped and killed, or left to die, an English teenager,
and the notion that this can be spun, not as a
breakdown of Goan culture, but as the fault of the
firangi and her western culture is what I find more
than just unbecoming. I find it reprehensible.
