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ShareWatching Obama play host to an increasingly grandfatherly Manmohan Singh, made one thing very clear to me: No longer can one just be an Indian, or for that matter English, or German or Brazilian.The world is shrinking faster than a polar bear can swim to the nearest detaching ice floe, and we have to adapt...it is the quintessential requirement for a 21st Century Fox. But what of indigenous culture and tradition, you ask.
I have never been a very cultured person. In fact, I believe those who sit in coffee shops and niche bars and expound on the virtues of the latest cubist from a pentagonal firmament are posers that would make David cover up in shame. If you want to discuss the nuances of Pollock, or even better, Caspar Friedrich, why not do it over shots of bourbon in a noisy bar, where you've got to scream above a crowd singing along to Al Stewart's Time Passages. Why do we need to meet in conspiratorial circles over crepes and coffee, with Earl Klugh boring you witless in the background? Rousseau was meant to be discussed when the blood was high; Dylan Thomas read when the mood floated on a liquid mellow, with your raging voice the buoy to which every thought swam; Masaccio appreciated after the fifth round, so one could discuss his religion without being ignorantly bound to it. That is the global citizen.
But have I become a mercenary, so to speak? Surely there are some things that can't be bought...like integrity and moral fortitude? Hogwash! If you believe that, you'll believe anything. You see, man is an intrinsic opportunist. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing.
Opportunism is a direct offshoot of instinct, which in turn is pretty much what makes us tick.
The first three centuries of the third millennium will probably see life and civilisation as we know it change irrevocably. I won't be around to see it, and neither will you. We'll be minute, but immensely essential, atoms floating around in the vast vacuum of the cosmos; grasping at a molecule, hoping it may connect us to a compound that leads to an intelligent lattice.
Religion and life as we know it today is in its death throes, and it's dying the way it was born...violently, and praying its one true dogma rings true: ignorance is bliss. I am not ignorant for I am a global citizen. But religions have always died and been reborn in a different form. The modern religions made short work of the gods that went before: Zeus, Jupiter, Isis, Odin...all gone, felled beneath the dexterous hand that writes. Arthur C Clarke wrote in Childhood's End, "Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the non-existence of Zeus or Thor -- but they have few followers now."
And as the atom rises, fact shall battle fiction and win. Not because it's more powerful, but because it has to. Why? Because in the end all we have left is what we were born with...instinct.
