From, Carvalho elisabeth_car at yahoo.com Mon Mar 31 02:12:07 PDT 2008 > Where is the question of our own culture being under threat by the West, when Bollywood Item girls prance about in shorty-shorts at cricket stadiums gyrating to the delight of sweaty men, our cosmetic counters are giving way from the weight of fairness creams, our girls are told that to be successful they have to be fair, models on TV are Eurasian prototypes (gone are the days of heavy-set dusky beauty from the South), > Mario adds: > Many Indians have always been, and still are, obsessed by the West. Others are xenophobic and paranoid about western culture. This dichotomy is probably the case in all colonial cultures and a legacy of colonialism. > Actually, our culture is also making a significant impact on the west as our children begin to assimilate into their new surroundings, notwithstanding the handwringing by some about maintaining the Goan identity in the diaspora. This appeal is about as likely to be successful as King Canute was. > The growing inroads made by Indian culture can clearly be seen in the USA with the growing appreciation for our educational objectives and competitive work ethic, the growing popularity of our cuisine and music, and the creeping incorporation of Indian fabrics and colors and designs into the mainstream western marketplace. Some of the most ornate new Hindu Temples in the world are now in the USA. > Indians of darker hues are far more attractive to many Americans than they may be to their fellow Indians with their obsession with "fairness". For any Indian in America to try and become "fairer" would be like a sick joke within the diverse American spectrum of skin colors. > Selma wrote: > We are a culture obsessed with and thoroughly engaged the West, so for Goans to sit on the beach and postulate about being morally superior is most unbecoming. > Mario responds: > The adjective for such Goans is "pecksniffian":-)) > However, has being unbecoming ever stopped them before? Indians always pretend to be morally superior to others while letting their own cultural problems fester, sometimes for millenia. I still wonder at a supposedly sophisticated modern Indian like Rajdeep Sardesai of all people, writing apparently with a straight face about Charles Correia, proud of his pretense of a Saraswat Brahmin heritage, clad in a kurta and Kolhapuri chappals, protesting an Air India calendar showing Goans getting married in western garb. I wonder if Charles Correia wore Indian garb at his own wedding. What Goa is he pretending to be concerned about? Is this any less unbecoming that those Goans fulminating on the beach? > In the Scarlett Keeling tragedy we had a bunch of Goan guys, brought up in some dark underbelly of Goan Catholic culture, who sequentially drugged, molested, raped and killed, or left to die, an English teenager, and the notion that this can be spun, not as a breakdown of Goan culture, but as the fault of the firangi and her western culture is what I find more than just unbecoming. I find it reprehensible. >