Are we losing it?

Today one of my Parisian friends asked me that he wants to visit India and a random thought hit me - what would he see in India ? Not that there is not much to see in India but of course the question is are we making sufficient efforts to preserve what we have? I agree that is equally important to build infrastructures like airports and malls, however, anybody who is traveling from a developed world would prefer seeing the real soul of India - our religion and spirituality (of course not just in yoga), festivals, food and clothing, art, dance and music (beyond Bollywood), and our cities beyond those brick and mortar malls!

It doesn't matter where we grew up, in Delhi or in Bangalore, but we grew up hearing and sharing stories about our culture and heritage.It doesn't matter where we live and what language we speak, we need to share our culture with the world. Its just that terrorism and corruption are taking so much space of our intellectual and personal life that we are almost forgetting other aspects that should also be important to us.

If every body understand in terms of growth and GDP then why not to do it their way? Why not generate jobs from rich heritage too?  An Indian friend who is doing her Masters in heritage and culture preservation says that she doesn't want to go back to India because their is not much scope of such expertise in our country. In fact her reason to be in Paris is that there is a dearth of such courses in India. I wonder- why shouldn't we be gearing up to preserve what we have - our heritage, culture and those beautiful shades of Chandni Chowk in New Delhi, Walled City in Ahmadabad, Old streets of Kolkata or the Royal palaces of Mysore and many more such in almost every corner of India - there are such small treasures hidden everywhere in India.

Why shouldn't the entire world experience our country, and in the process, fall in love with it - probably this will be a way we can come out of the "Slumdog Millionaire" and "Peepli Live" cliche often used for India!