Cultural Regeneration

“Sharing values, sharing visions, sharing the economics, I think it’s the easiest way to work, this is the magic of style. It’s the magic of art. It’s the magic of the design” said Metsavaht- a famous filmmaker, physician, artist, entrepreneur, creator of fashion band Osklen and founder of Om Arts. While the world engages in diffusion of ideas, let’s reflect on the controversial, though ever masked impediment like Cultural Appropriation. This boggling misnomer for cultural mis-appropriation, according to Urban dictionary defines it by ‘the ridiculous notion that being of a different culture or race means that you are not allowed to adopt things from other cultures. This does nothing but support segregation and hinders progress in the world. All it serves to do is to promote segregation and racism.’
The debatable socio-political issue is seen sweeping the global entertainment industry targeting stars like Beyonce, Iggy or Kylie for their desi adoptions in their music videos. The South Asian online community blatantly engaged in contentious arguments over reducing their culture into a global trend. Other communities like the blacks and Native Americans have raised voices against cultural appropriation.
While one school of thought legitimizes it as it helps in improvising indigenous culture to a global platform thereby giving a sense of recognition to it, the other side claims it to reflect stark similarities with colonial characteristics of making cultural ideologies marketable and viable for the global majority standards.
The hara zakhm on notions of nationalism is put to another titration experiment with Selena Gomez sporting a bindi and Coldplay walking around Mumbai streets with eerily decorated auto-rickshaws. A proper understanding of what we are and what we want is not established. While India struggles to find equality for “dark skinned” Indians, we have Hollywood celebrities, followed by self acclaimed fashion police enjoying the kind of fashion that operates beyond national boundaries. A social democracy attained with the bilateral flow of culture empowers by broadening our lifestyle choices leaving ample room for growth favored development. Any culture emerges from the people who do their best after navigating different places. A culture should break intrinsic boundaries and posses its virtue of uniqueness. With due credit to the undisturbed, unadulterated religious ideologies dwelling in each kin in this world, I
believe 21 st century entertainment is a century of exploring culture. Today, the quest to find and adapt bleakest of all ideologies continue to fit it to sustain the fashion curve at the highest position. Not just in fashion, but cultural appropriation perpetuates in food and beverage industry as well. Pasta is a result to culturally appropriate Chinese noodles. Now tell me if you are against pasta. Tell me that. Cultural appropriation, if taken positively, promotes technological diffusion, innovative product outcomes, revives creative hunger in people and also satisfies it, generates audience for immigrant entrepreneurs, and last but not the least helps people belonging to one cultural community to empathize with other. So when A. R Rahman adopts variations from a genre like Blues, we do not accuse him of cultural
appropriation, rather compliment his genius of creative mutation from the Afro-Americans and be one of the best composers in innovative music. Before the fairly recent invention of intellectual property, imitation and copying was taken as a compliment, as an acknowledgment on their work of art or craft.
If you like one’s music- imitate it, one’s fashion- wear it, one’s way of rearing children- adopt it, and one’s language, then speak it. I advice one and all to recognize this contemporary evolution and be part of it. Permutation and combination of elements from different cultures is guaranteed to give birth to something worldly interesting, if nothing else.