Gandhi Don’t Surf

These two ads are from Denmark and were picked up by a friend of mine, Dennis. They make one wonder what the world would have been like if Gandhi and Madela had just ‘gone surfin’ instead of fought for their beliefs.

This made me think about what we say about the developing world in Citizen Renaissance in Chapter 7 the section ‘Sharing Growth Globally’. Often people hold up the hoards of Chinese and Indians who threaten out lifestyles in the west by attempting (how dare they) to emulate them. Is it inevitable that they will want to? Dennis has spent time in China and suggests in some of his work that Maoism may not have killed off completely Confucian and Buddhist values which might hold China back from a wholehearted carbon-copying of our mistakes. OK so the signs are not great. Chinese capitalism seems set to make our version look positively restrained.

I was reading recently in National Geographic about India’s GQ. It’s not a magazine but a highway across India. And it’s changing the face of the country and setting in stone a love affair with the kind of auto-centric way of life America is now suffering from. The article shows clearly the choice countries like India have – choices which will affect not only themselves but all of us – ‘Yet the GQ has also brought old and new India into jarring proximity, challenging the moral and cultural underpinnings of a nation founded on Gandhian principles of austerity, brotherhood, and spirituality’.

It’s sharpened India’s appetite for material possessions—especially cars—and many Indians, especially those over 30, have a hard time recognising the India they see advertised on television and billboards, which comes in a wide choice of designer colours and does zero to sixty in under ten seconds.

“I see the GQ as a metaphor for modern India, speeding along today at a hundred miles an hour,” says historian Ramachandra Guha, author of India After Gandhi. “Imagine we stop at a traffic light and roll down the window. There’s a path next to the highway, and a little old guy riding past on a bicycle. As we wait impatiently for the light to change, he calls to us to watch out, slow down, don’t be so reckless and single-minded in our pursuit of growth and affluence and material goods. Well, that chap on the bicycle is Gandhi. He’s our conscience, and even with all that’s changed in India, he cannot be ignored.”