In my last post I mentioned what it means to be Indian in mind , spirit and practice.Now that I relook at the question again it feels it doesn’t do justice to the time we live in .We live in a time where the world is coming closer through globalisation .We are experiencing a mix of cultures and identities .I don’t necessarily have a single identity anymore.I have multiple identities and being an Indian is just one of them. The clothes that I wear or most of us wear are not traditionally Indian, so then how can I tone down my entire existence to an Indian in spirit, practice and mind, because I have adapted and evolved in the plethora of cultures that I have been exposed to due to globalisation. Maybe 40-50 years ago to question what it meant to be Indian would have been more apt as we were lost in the foreign environment that was created for us by our rulers. But in our attempt to modernise or create a completely different identity for ourselves we tried to respond climatically , politically and rationally. Chandigarh, the first planned city felt an attempt in that direction.That was our step towards becoming modern or global but today we are mindlessly adapting to the ‘western’ techniques or say what’s globally considered modern.
One of the major differences in Bangladesh and India is that Bangladesh being a relatively poorer nation with comparatively lesser resources and everything that runs in the country even the government is financed by aid, actually works in the favor of the people who are responsible for constructing a habitable environment.They have to optimize the use of the immediate resources because they dont have a lot but that helps as it leads to creation of an environment that benefits the people and benefits the country.That is modernisation.What we are doing with our resources is producing glazed building because that’s what the developed nation’s are doing.They do that because they work with light and we work with shadows because our climatic conditions dictate that.We have to modernise and globalize and adapt multiple ideas and philosophies but we have to tweak it to suit our context otherwise we are no better than where we were when we started to modernise.
Weekly Musings 
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