IPL, trophies, Indian definition of beauty...

Tishani Doshi, IPL-Page2-Cricinfo

...everything typical of a particular elite echelon of modern India. It is ostentatious, crass, bereft of any redeeming aesthetic qualities, and unashamed of all the above. To me it screams of insecurity. "Look!" it's trying to say, "I'm going to show you who's the boss now!" Count up those diamonds baby.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for breaking off the shackles of colonisation and proving to the world that the money and ideas are where we're at. But I think it's pointless doing it without any sense of style. Especially when we come from a tradition where the very concept of beauty, or saundarya, has been codified and explored for centuries. I mean, this is a country where every context of beauty is covered, from the simple Kutchi village woman embroidering in her skirts, to a lovesick king depleting the state treasury to build a marble mausoleum for his dead wife. Beauty in India was in the day-to-day. It was not something artistic or out of reach, it was utilitarian. People surrounded themselves with ordinary objects of beauty because it was more pleasing to live that way.

All this has changed with modernity in India. We have been assaulted by a massive attack of ugliness. We have not only whole-heartedly taken to plastic and mass-production, we also seem to have lost all sense of proportion and design and relegated all our concepts of rasa and shringar to dusty textbooks. Walk around any Indian city now and you'll see how it suffers from this malaise of ugliness. It's in the glass high-rises directly copied from a street in New York; it's in the billboards, the dearth of trees, the lack of civic consciousness, and worse, in the innate belief that beauty is something to be bought or borrowed.