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Indian popular culture can be a very mystifying being. Most sociological studies on culture acknowledge the existence of hierarchical tiers within culture, evident amongst them is a high culture and a low culture. Popular culture would, in most cases, be consigned to the lower culture stratum. Forgive me for resorting to cliches, but India is bursting at the seams with the copious amounts of culture, high or otherwise, available for consumption. Although, more often than not, Indian culture has been condensed to certain dominant forces. To the untrained eye (this is not to say that I am in any sort of way trained to spot cultural trends - apart from the basic understanding of culture that is imbibed just by living in India) popular culture of the Indian variety can be boiled down to two things, Hindi cinema and the glorious-ness that is Cricket.

Now, regardless of individual preference, movies are the national pass time and Cricket is the national religion. It is not hard to imagine why they emerge as the representative forms of Indian popular culture. However, in endowing Cricket and Bollywood with the ability to represent what India is about, we end up losing a lot of what India is. Personally, I love Bollywood and I worship Tendulkar (in spite of recent loss of form), but I also have high regard for Hindi and Urdu poetry, for Indian secular ideals, for Indian music, literature, history, dance, theatre, the list is endless. I am not trying to encompass Indian culture in the very limited space of this single blog, neither am I an expert of cultural studies, so some of my observations might seem extremely naive and ignorant. I am just someone who holds India and everything that defines it, very close to my heart. I am just trying to express (as best I can) what it all means to me and give the age old cultural debates a fresh perspective. Cricket, Bollywood, poetry, history all included.