Recently I saw a documentary, which was about Jeremy Piven(small time TV actor from USA) exploring India.
It starts with Jeremy traveling some exquisite monuments like Red Fort, Taj mahal and goes onto visiting a Guru in Rishikesh.
Well, it was another stereotypical portrayal of India, which ends on a monkey, an ashram and a foreigner in awe of mystique Indian life.
Arguably spirituality is India's best selling point in tourism market but I feel its time when we stop showing India only as a country of cows wandering on the street, yoga schools and ashrams flooded by foreigners.
I have lived in the holy city of Varanasi for 4 years and though I myself felt the eerie vibrations in those ghats and temples, I don't think that spirituality itself is the soul representation of India. I strongly believe that life, characterized at best by hardships yet ironically content, with firm belief in spirituality is the right manifestation of Indian life.
An Indian man is no longer just a snake charmer or a sadhu or an intriguing soul from the third world, nor he is just a profound thinker or a worshiped artist or a science virtuoso. An Indian life consists of the perfect amalgam of heart and mind, a life which is driven by ambitions but its defining turns are catalyzed by feelings.
In outside world, average Indian life is construed as poverty ridden, full of inequalities but what fuels this life to prevail?
According to Neo, this is how cultural ambassadors want to depict India, and that's how people in the west perceive it.
Neo is correct because this image fits perfectly in the kaleidoscope of global market. Emotion is the best selling commodity in the world and media is championing in
commercializing it.
Probably I need to ask the stalwarts of theater, arts and literature, what paints the image of India correctly, a charismatic guru, ridiculing worldliness and uttering
the religious rhetoric or a 15 year old boy, working diligently in a local factory in daytime and later attending night school to learn computers, determined to script his own destiny.