Our missing inspiration

I'M LUCKY, in that I get to travel a lot, mostly for work. Travel is tiring and often lonely but nevertheless enlightening. Trips to countries less developed than ours I find the most educational. They make me question what it means to be developed.

I recently made a short trip to India. Now that's a country with problems. They have a huge population, grinding poverty in many parts of the country, a bloated bureaucracy, hostile neighbours, AIDS, everything.

At the same time, it is a vibrant country able to produce award-winning internationally-renowned authors, wonderful music, gorgeous art and textiles and even its own Silicon Valley.

Despite its far from exemplary reputation as a place insensitive to women, I met some outstanding women who are intelligent, articulate and unafraid to state their views about women's rights. One of them was HIV-positive and she stood before TV cameras to make her case for better prevention to women in a calm and gentle voice that impressed everyone present.

It makes you wonder. On the face of it, we are better off over here. We have tall buildings, highways, computers, giant shopping malls and all the accoutrements of a developed country.

But creativity, of the kind that stimulates and inspires, is missing. Yes we have talent but so rarely does this talent really make us awestruck. When did we last have an author that really made us gasp at the sheer genius in the use of words? When was an art event considered really important by the entire country, not just an elite few? When was an artist universally admired because his/her talent was so obvious?

The fact is, creativity can only flourish in certain environments, where you can do really crazy and different things. All the people who have truly transformed life as we know it did things which other people thought were just nuts.

But the point is, they had the freedom to be nuts and out of that some really great things happened. When you look at the really amazing innovations in the IT industry, they've all come from people who were never conventional at all. Here if you come to work with long hair and shorts, people would immediately think you're a drug addict instead of a genius.

If we live in an environment where everything has to follow rules and regulations, we'll never have creativity. If we have a situation where only those who follow all the rules are allowed to perform or exhibit, then we just have boring stuff.

Boring stuff kills off audiences and ultimately you have to have a willing audience. Rules which dictate what conforms to "our" culture and "our" values mean that creativity is suppressed and fossilised because it is forced to bow to values dictated by a few who believe they should never change--despite the fact that everything else around us changes.

It is amazing that we still have these people, the self-appointed guardians of our culture who are constantly warning us about threats to it. Nobody defines what "our" culture is supposed to be but these people assume that they know what it is and whatever is defined by them is what's right for everybody. I haven't yet met a self-appointed moral guardian whom I wanted to emulate.

All that this shows up is an incredible insecurity about who we are, that we see threats around every corner. Yet countries much poorer than us feel no threat from change and from new things because they know exactly who they are. It doesn't even matter where they live, they remain true to their cultures. But us, we don't even feel safe on our homeground.

The most laughable thing of course is that they're worrying about the impact of traditional media on our poor unformed minds while at the same time, the Internet is just about the most subversive force there is. Here we are in the new millenium and you wouldn't know it from listening to these people.

After India, I went to Indonesia, a country made up of, according to some people, lazy immoral people with low self-esteem. Yet again, that country has a vibrant creativity which you see everywhere, from its handicrafts and textiles to its music (I know one young Indonesian composer who is currently scoring an opera in New York), its writers and even in very small measure, its film. I once saw a movie there called Daun Di Atas Bantal, about street children, which is so gritty in its realism that I can't imagine it ever being shown here, let alone ever being made here.

When I was last in Jakarta recently, there was an international performance art festival going on. All sorts of strange performances by artistes from many countries were put on, including some which had barely any costumes or even any at all. People (okay, the elite arty-farty types) went and were amazed but appreciated that these were artistes who expressed themselves in certain ways.

I'm not a fan of performance art but still I was impressed. There was no hue and cry, nobody raised red flags about how their values were going down the tubes. People had things in perspective. Now that's a culturally secure people. We wouldn't even have allowed such a festival in the first place (not least because some bureaucrat will insist on seeing all the performances first and then appointing himself the sole arbiter of our tastes).

But of course I forget. We are well-off and they aren't and in these times, that's all that matters. Poverty of the pocket cannot be tolerated though poverty of the soul is okay. We can go and buy our designer duds and don't have to clean other people's houses abroad. But we can't leave our old clothes to anyone while music and art lives forever. You have to wonder what sort of legacy we will really leave behind.

I appreciate our development and never want to go back to the days before e-mail and cellphones. But I wish our minds would develop at the same pace.

Otherwise we're going to find that there are some people who live in this stultified world that we see and then there's a whole generation who live in a virtual world where, unrestricted by dinosaur-age opinions, they run riot with creativity, all for the benefit of everyone else in the world.