Lagaan
I'm pretty bullish on India. In fact, when I see bad news in the world, or future trends that could be alarming, I think of India, and am reassured.
There was a very popular Indian movie called Lagaan that well summarises why I think Indian influence on the world will be a generally positive thing (spoiler warning, for any planning to watch it one day). The movie is set in 1893, when the British ruled India. The plot's fairly silly but entertaining (hey, it's Bollywood), about a village that gets into a conflict with the local British garrison. To resolve the conflict, it's agreed that a game of cricket will be played. If the British win, the village tax will be doubled. If they lose, the garrison will be withdrawn, and there will be no more British tax. The problem, of course, is that in 1893, none of this village know how to play cricket.
Now in most post-colonial nations, the formula here would be obvious -- the colonials are evil without exception, they will lie, cheat and be generally unlikeable in all regards, so the audience can boo and hiss to their hearts' content.
But Lagaan is different. Sure, the British soldiers who comprise the opposing cricket team are arrogant and cold, but they never cheat, which is the usual writers' trick in such formulas. Furthermore, the Indians are assisted by an English woman at the garrison (a general's daughter or some such, I think) who teaches them the rules, and even falls in unrequited love with the Indian hero. When the game itself is played, some senior English gentlemen in the clubhouse applaud English and Indian players equally, with real enthusiasm when the Indians play well, despite it meaning their own side taking a hit.
Best of all is how the umpires are portrayed. Both are English, as the English are the only ones knowing the rules well enough, and again, the usual cliches demand that the umpires be biased against the Indians. But instead, at the end of the game, the Indians are saved by an umpire -- they need four runs off the last delivery, but the bowler oversteps the line and the umpire calls a no-ball (that's illegal, for you cricketing-know-nothings out there, like a baseball pitcher stepping forward off his mound). The English all celebrate, but see the umpire signaling no-ball, which means the ball must be rebowled.
"Are you sure?" the English captain asks, incredulously.
"Quite sure," says the umpire, with that impeccably English self-assurance. The Indian hero then hits the winning runs off the rebowled final ball, and the Indians win.
This demonstrates an attitude remarkably rare amongst post-colonial nations -- the ability to find praiseworthy qualities in one's oppressors. The invective and self-pity is missing, the victim mentality, the convenient blaming of a nation's problems upon colonial masters to absolve oneself of any responsibility for the nation's present state. It's a very different take on the English than what I would imagine being made in Mugabe's Zimbabwe, for example... or in most Arab nations, who have merely switched their blame-someone-else strategy from England (or other colonial power) to America and Israel.
I think a lot of it is simply that India is so huge, diverse and complex that no matter how strange foreigners of any stripe might be to individual Indians, they'll never be as strange as some other Indians somewhere, from some other part of the country. For Indians, the strange is ordinary, to be tolerated rather than feared. Which makes them seem, to our eyes, chaotic and fractious, but also as a pleasant side effect, amongst the least xenophobic peoples on earth. I think the world's future is quite safe in the hands of people like that. It's the people who are prone to various notions of racial, nationalist, ethnic, religious or ideological purity who worry me. India has all of these, but in such small pockets, and all conflicting against each other, that they cancel each other out.
There was a very popular Indian movie called Lagaan that well summarises why I think Indian influence on the world will be a generally positive thing (spoiler warning, for any planning to watch it one day). The movie is set in 1893, when the British ruled India. The plot's fairly silly but entertaining (hey, it's Bollywood), about a village that gets into a conflict with the local British garrison. To resolve the conflict, it's agreed that a game of cricket will be played. If the British win, the village tax will be doubled. If they lose, the garrison will be withdrawn, and there will be no more British tax. The problem, of course, is that in 1893, none of this village know how to play cricket.
Now in most post-colonial nations, the formula here would be obvious -- the colonials are evil without exception, they will lie, cheat and be generally unlikeable in all regards, so the audience can boo and hiss to their hearts' content.
But Lagaan is different. Sure, the British soldiers who comprise the opposing cricket team are arrogant and cold, but they never cheat, which is the usual writers' trick in such formulas. Furthermore, the Indians are assisted by an English woman at the garrison (a general's daughter or some such, I think) who teaches them the rules, and even falls in unrequited love with the Indian hero. When the game itself is played, some senior English gentlemen in the clubhouse applaud English and Indian players equally, with real enthusiasm when the Indians play well, despite it meaning their own side taking a hit.
Best of all is how the umpires are portrayed. Both are English, as the English are the only ones knowing the rules well enough, and again, the usual cliches demand that the umpires be biased against the Indians. But instead, at the end of the game, the Indians are saved by an umpire -- they need four runs off the last delivery, but the bowler oversteps the line and the umpire calls a no-ball (that's illegal, for you cricketing-know-nothings out there, like a baseball pitcher stepping forward off his mound). The English all celebrate, but see the umpire signaling no-ball, which means the ball must be rebowled.
"Are you sure?" the English captain asks, incredulously.
"Quite sure," says the umpire, with that impeccably English self-assurance. The Indian hero then hits the winning runs off the rebowled final ball, and the Indians win.
This demonstrates an attitude remarkably rare amongst post-colonial nations -- the ability to find praiseworthy qualities in one's oppressors. The invective and self-pity is missing, the victim mentality, the convenient blaming of a nation's problems upon colonial masters to absolve oneself of any responsibility for the nation's present state. It's a very different take on the English than what I would imagine being made in Mugabe's Zimbabwe, for example... or in most Arab nations, who have merely switched their blame-someone-else strategy from England (or other colonial power) to America and Israel.
I think a lot of it is simply that India is so huge, diverse and complex that no matter how strange foreigners of any stripe might be to individual Indians, they'll never be as strange as some other Indians somewhere, from some other part of the country. For Indians, the strange is ordinary, to be tolerated rather than feared. Which makes them seem, to our eyes, chaotic and fractious, but also as a pleasant side effect, amongst the least xenophobic peoples on earth. I think the world's future is quite safe in the hands of people like that. It's the people who are prone to various notions of racial, nationalist, ethnic, religious or ideological purity who worry me. India has all of these, but in such small pockets, and all conflicting against each other, that they cancel each other out.
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