All cultures change. That doesn’t mean that they are creating breakdown all the while. Many aspects of Indian culture are under stress, but it doesn’t mean that it is collapsing….A hundred TV channels and urban communications of various kinds do not bring down a culture that easily. But after saying that, I must say that the little cultures of India, the cultures that are not pan Indian, but ones which are confined to communities and sectors of the Indian population, they are under tremendous stress and their life support systems in many cases have collapsed. And I suspect that these free floating individuals who have been uprooted and policed out of their cultures and not found a new normative system and have not internalized it—because that takes generations—are a kind of a floating muck available for political mobilization at a massive scale.
Ashis Nandy
