Friday, March 05, 2004
Indian Days
This has been my "discover India" year, it seems. It started when my lovely girlfriend handed me a copy of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things , which is a marvelous and beautiful novel. Then, a close friend of mine, Emily Ostendorf, sent me a book called Junglee Girl by Ginu Kamani, which was published by the small house where she works, Aunt Lute Books.
I'm still digging into Junglee Girl, but my time with The God of Small Things was incredible. This is not my first cultural introduction to Indian art, since I spent quality time with Satyajit Ray's brilliant Apu trilogy. Since my first introduction to Indian art was through film, the part of me that appreciates flow and connectivity relished learning, then, that Arundhati Roy's husband is Pradeep Krishen, a filmmaker himself.
Today I have run into India twice again. Before work I watched Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding. And tonight I encountered a much shorter film, the flash animation for the Singhsons, which I found off the rankings at Blogdex. The second, funny though it be, illustrates a thought the first made beautifully clear: Indian culture is relentlessly modernizing itself, and its capability to synthesize Western influences rivals that of Japanese culture. But, at least to my eyes (and these are, admittedly, quite ignorant eyes), the Indians do it without the wackiness that makes Japanese pop culture so fun, and instead with a supple grace that situates these new things fit beside the ancient ones as though they always meant to be there.
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