I would straight away start with the answer - No. If you travel through the various parts of india and have a glance of our various artforms, there's a lot for us Indians to be proud of. For centuries, many sculptors and architects have brought life and immense beauty into rocks. We have thousands of dance forms. Many of them like the Kathakali, take over 10 years just to learn. If a danceform requires so much of time and dedication to be learnt, one can just imagine the amount of effort and creativity that has gone to make the dance forms. Our music and literature are also living examples of our creativity
If i'm so confident about our creativity, why do I even come up with such a topic. The answer lies in the shortcomings of our comercial forms of art. Remakes of Hollywood movies and "formula movies" make our heads go down in shame. "Filmi" music or "Bollywood" music are known the world over for "lifting" tunes or their "ins-pirations" as they are commonly known. I shall not leave this opportunity to name Pritam, the great music director who's been winning many awards off lately. He's smart enough to come up with tried and tested music from all around the world.
But there still is hope. We have a handful of Film makers and Music directors who come up with something new all the time. Unfortunately, they're only a handful. Apart from the handful, there are loads of creative geniuses in our country who venture into parallel cinema, classical music, literature and various other forms of art and prefer not to come into the limelight. It would be totally unfair not to mention their efforts. But at the end of the day, what goes out to the public is the commercial forms of art, even if they have nothing artistic about them.
The last decade has seen a decline in "Formula Movies" and the upcoming of slightly more mature commercial films, even though less in numbers. I would also specially like to mention "A R Rahman", 'the mozart from Madras' for doing us proud. There are a lot of international artists who have ripped off his tunes. Now that is a sigh of relief for us. Not jus the fact that our music is copied, but also the fact that ripping music is not specific only to India.
Despite all our creative efforts, we have to understand that commercial art is a reflection of us as a country. Copying Music and movies should be stopped. I'm sure that there are many struggling artists out there who can make a difference. Our entertainment industry should be ready to take more risks. It's high time we realise that the Indian public is yet to receive the deserved amount of credit for its intelligence.
