It's new year, fireworks were exploding in a distance from my house. Inspired by the party mood, I decided to put on some CDs of party music. But I simply don't have much to suit the occasion, all I could dig out was a couple of hits collections of Shubha Mudgal and Hans Raj Hans. Anyway it's fun listening to some upbeat music I don't listen to on a regular basis. I guess I also happened to be a bit in a mood for Bhangra as I was watching Rang De Basanti on VCD that night. I have been taking a long time to watch the movie, not able to decide whether I love or hate it. My instinctive reaction was to resent the unlikely story of a British girl coming to India to direct a film on India's freedom fighter Bhagat Singh. It sounded like a lame excuse to put a blonde girl in an Indian movie for its own sake, I already hated such a formula when I saw Kisna. But on the other hand, it's also quite clever the way Rang De Basanti uses the British character to reflect on the Indian mentality, the tendency to kill one another for the smallest sectarian differences, and the fatalistic attitude of resigning to the present situation, preferring to 'adjust' instead of making changes. It's like heroic deeds belong to history and mythology and not to life as we know it.

It's very easy to contrast the western belief in progress and action with the Asian attitude of resigning to fate, the attitude that you can't stop good things or bad things from happening anyway since it's all karma. You may call it an over-simplified stereotype, but it's useful to magnify cultural differences sometimes just to learn something from it. Of course I'm not saying the western model is all perfect and ideal. Western ideas of progress are often not sustainable and have caused harm many a times. British thinker John Gray pointed out in his book Heresies that the western secular world view, what may be termed liberal humanism, is "simply the Christian view of the world with God left out", whereby humans are unique while other animals sharing the earth have no value in themselves, so "the earth is simply a mass of resources for human use". The same people would believe that with power over nature through science, they can create a better world than what existed before. The Marxist idea of the end of history, 'in which communism triumphs and destructive conflict then vanishes from the world, is transparently a secular mutation of Christain apocalyptic beliefs', Gray noted, the same true of 'Francis Fukuyama's equally absurd belief in universal salvation through 'global democratic capitalism'... what we have is myth masquerading as science". Today, the new faith is in technology rather than political action for better distribution of wealth. Governments are looking at intensive agriculture and genetically modified crops to feed the hungry, and imagining that economic growth will automatically remove poverty. But what the governments are implying is that we can all forget about political changes, when that is something that cannot be replaced by technology.

At the same time, John Gray observed that people may be getting cynical about politics due to its worst evils, for "if an absurdity like the Iraq war cannot be prevented, what hope is there of governments eradicating hunger?" The number of people who died in the September 11 attack has incidentally just been exceeded by Americans dying in Iraq. And that again is insignificant if you consider that 3,000 is the number of Iraqis who have been dying on a monthly basis in this war. With Saddam Hussein's execution, more conflicts can now be expected in Iraq, not less. Once again people in an Asian country will be killing one other to the advantage of the shrewd western powers. The same story as it has been in the colonial history of India and Southeast Asia.

I really meant to say a 'Happy New Year' to anybody who may be reading this, so maybe I should end with some humour. Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, was once asked in an interview whether he thought there is evidence of intelligence in outer space. He replied: is there evidence of intelligence on earth?