ust over 75 years ago, the
great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore remarked that
"European culture has come to us not only with its knowledge
but with its speed." Today that speed is accelerating in
every direction all at once. What has changed in the past
half-century is not just Asian culture (which is more and
more American) and not just American culture (which is more
and more Asian) but the intertwining of the two: as people
and images flash across the globe at laser speed, our
exposure to Asia in the West has mounted, and with it our
understanding has matured. Air travel has meant that we can
no longer regard Japan as a quaint little land of cherry
blossoms and geisha; technology has given us access, in East
and West, to the same spaghetti westerns and Bombay talkies.
Only 10 years ago, India had just one television station,
which was government run and intermittent; now even
villagers in Bihar can choose between "Hard Copy" and MTV,
and there is a whole new Silicon Valley growing around
Bangalore. Asian culture is no longer "exotic" but something
we can take for granted.
On the simplest level, then, people in San
Francisco, Toronto, Sydney and London are all conversant now
with sushi and Tai Chi, and have expanded their private
vocabularies to take in Shiatsu and kung fu. Not just the
larger Asian cultures but the smaller ones too are all about
us, as every other town seems to offer pad Thai and ginseng.
More than just Western lifestyles, Western minds and souls
have stretched to the point where karma, say, is as common
in many people's thinking as the Taoist ideas behind yin and
yang.
Thus what used to be merely "Asian" culture is now at the Cineplex, in the supermarket and at the Bombay Company in the mall, and the man whose voice merges with Eddie Vedder's in the swampy Louisiana movie "Dead Man Walking" is the Pakistani-born singer of qawwali, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Even the forms we take to be "established" -- and Western -- are more and more filtered through Asian eyes and ears: lovers of Mahler and Dvorak now get their music through a bewildering lexicon of Asian names, from Mehta and Ozawa to Midori and Ma. Connoisseurs of haute couture turn to the Comme des Garçons stylings of a Japanese woman. The world is so mixed up these days that Hollywood is importing Hong Kong moviemakers to shoot the Western action films that Hong Kong has long copied.
