Pari's Blog

There’s this fear among Indians that India is being heavily influenced by western pop-culture. Where “western pop-culture” seems to imply everything that is bad or “sinful” (night clubs, dancing, partying, night life, drinking, dating, kissing in public, pre-marital sex,…). Regardless of how “sinful” this western influence is, my question is to what extent is this true? Let’s settle it with some statistics:

Population of India: 1.2 billion (4x that of the USA and represents 1/6th of the worlds population)

Population of the big 5 cosmopolitan cities:

• Mumbai – 18 million
• Kolkata – 13 million
• Delhi – 11.6 million
• Chennai – 6.6 million
• Bangalore – 5.5 million

Let’s start with what we know: most of the pop-culture following occurs as a small percentage of the upper middle class and above, in the big 5 cities. How much is that in figures? Let’s compute this:

1. Total population of the big 5 metropolitan cities (Mumbai, Kolkata, New Delhi, Chennai, and Bangalore) is 54.7 million
2. Let’s generously assume that 30% of this represents the upper middle class and above. That’s 17 million.
3. Of this, we can generously assume that 10% are pop-culture influenced – 1.7 million

So, that’s 1.7 million out of 1.2 billion Indians. We need to take the percentage (as the numbers are meaningless as it doesn’t take into account age distributions). That comes to less than 0.15%.

Most of the media attention and alarm about the displacement of Indian values by western pop-culture is focused on this 0.15%.

Hindu culture has shown itself to be very vibrant, strong, and resilient, and has shown to have the ability to absorb and assimilate encroaching cultures without displacing its value system, as it has done for over 6,000 years. What gives it its resilience is that it is very knowledge centric and still woven with a spiritual fabric intact (somewhat similar to European mystic culture that survived until it met the face of religion (Christianity and Islam)).

And who are these 0.15%? mostly (i.e. not all, but most) the “lower” rank of the IT industry: call centers, data entry (medical transcription, etc.), IT infrastructure (human resources, administrative personal, etc.). These are folks, coming from a lower middle class, probably the first in their family to get a white collar job, probably have never seen such huge salaries. Now they suddenly find themselves catapulted to upper-middle class, with a lot of money to spend. They get bombarded with extrasensory experience (consumerism, mass market pop-culture) – to be cool, fashionable, hip (influenced by what they see on the big screen): brand names, discotheques, night clubs, dating, drinking, smoking, etc.