The age of uniformity

What is common to the teenager in L.A, the teenager in Japan and that teenager (yeah the guy with the bag over his shoulder ) in mumbai? A lot actually, they probably wear tommy, listen to music on an ipod, debate the right/wrong of the war in Iraq ( yeah at least i want to dream that they might be discussing that because i don't) and are thinking about building exactly similar lives. So, this is the new globalized era - whats new? And of course I am an idiot to compress complex cultural explosions in a few lines.

But then, how far can i be? This is the new India, you have young people who are looking to conquer the world having been brought up on dreams. All of them have put in significant effort to get on the path to utopia, and you will find the utopia could be remarkably similar. Its a gross over simplification, like I always tend to find that south indian engineers remarkably have similar topics of interests ( the actual pool of interests would be mind boggling, but the broad way of thinking) and you find more and more people moving to small multiplex movies. The movies itself are good, but look around you, you will find a similar kind of audience. Of course this trend goes on a give you almost a choke, the kind of similarity you find among the crowd of south Bombay.

What we are seeing is homogenization of culture, remarkable purely because of the rapidity with which it is taking over the country. India could end up being the land of the liberals, because there is nothing else to look to. Even though the craze for Advaita might mike it cool someday, till then the phrases of philosophical texts might go into oblivion, making way for talk about the next episode of lost or the next news event or the next environmental problem.

If everybody is the same, what would be the cost of competition? Not much, it would eventually be like running on a treadmill, you can run all you want but you aint getting nowhere. The average intelligence would go down ( well the individuals could be well rounded because of the more information available, but if were to purely look at it in terms how we would stack up against the early 20th century populace), the systems and the processes would take care of the intelligence part. Eventually the population might even start looking the same ( thats not difficult either with genetic modifications), sex would be free ( yeah thats an important part of why societies are structured in the way they are, the primary motive of any society is self preservation & propagation )

Welcome to the brave new world.