culture is coming to dominate global culture.
W hen India began opening up its economy and American
corporations w ere able to really start moving in, the first domain
they took over w as advertising. Very quickly, Indian advertising
agencies became subsidiaries of big foreign ones, mostly based in
the U S.
T he public relations industry has alw ays aimed “to regiment the
public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its
soldiers”—in the case of India, to create a system of expectations
and preferences that w ill lead them to prefer foreign commodities
to domestic ones.
T here’s been some resistance to this in India—massive
demonstrations around Kentucky Fried Chicken, for example.
T hat’s true in many places, even w ithin Europe. T here are
moves tow ards creating a common European popular culture,
common media and so on, making society more homogenous and
controlled, but there are also moves in exactly the opposite
direction—tow ards regionalization and the reviving of individual
cultures and languages. T hese tw o movements are going on side-by-
side, all over the w orld.
T he U S has created a global culture, but it’s also created
resistance to it. It’s no more an inevitable process than any of the
others.
In the last couple of years you’ve visited Australia, India, South
America. W hat have you learned from your travels?
It’s not hard to find out w hat’s going on just sitting here in
Boston.
But then you’re just dealing w ith w ords on paper.
You’re right—the colors become a lot more vivid w hen you
actually see it. It’s one thing to read the figures about poverty in
India and another thing to actually see the slums in Bombay and see
people living in hideous, indescribable poverty...and these are