Dear Friends,
The Oriental Civilization is no less richer than the Western civilization which is dominant across the world these days. Many Western values have been guiding us through in our daily lives. For the last five hundred years or more explicitly since the Renaissance in Europe, they have gone far ahead. They ruled the world in terms of military power followed by the global expansion of market resulted from the industrial revolution.
However, the globalization and explicit cultural intrusion of the West in the Oriental cultures came after the Second World war. We have been injected the virus of so-called modernity, demolished or forgotten our cultural values and beliefs. Media as the agent of 'modernization' are at the top. The global expansion of news agencies, advent and expansion of 24/7 news channels since the 1990s, globalization of media ownership, market and content have largely contributed in promoting the world order which is vertical from West to East and North to South.
Though, there have become some efforts to bring about balance in this vertical flow if Information and cultural products, they have been less than enough. It may be an ideal period in the history to redefine our Eastern standards as the Eurocentric Western philosophy (And in the latter days, US Centric) is falling apart. And the world is turning to Asia, Africa and the Latin America- to India, China, Singapore, South Africa, Venezuela and Cuba. However, the odd is that when the West is turning to the East, we are just following their olden trends and trying to 'modernize' ourselves. This is ridiculous, impeaching and an impediment to the self development.
So, through this blog, I would like to invite the intelligentsia for the renewed discourses in Oriental philosophy and particularly globalization of media and cultural production.
Dhaka, November 14, 2008
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