On the bus to work today, I was reading through the March 21st issue of India Today. The magazine featured articles of speakers from the Indian Tomorrow 2005 Conclave: Perception VS reality conference. It seems the speakers proved realities coexist with perceptions in India.

I was particularly impressed by the speches of V. S Naipaul, Amitabh Bachchan and William Dalrymple.

The edited speeches are available in the magazine (subscription required). So I'll just type in here parts of the speech.

Moreover, the big uncertainity in the years to come, it seems to me, is whether it will continue to be Indians in India mediating this country for the global audience of Englsih speaking readers - or whether it will the NRI's. In Britain and the US in the past few years, the waves have been made less by authors from South Asia, so much so US-born Asians such as Jumpha Lahiri and Meera Syal, or what Rushdie might call "chutneyfied" authors of mixed backgrounds - Hari Kunzru, Zadie Smith and Monica Ali.This seems to be the trend in music and film as well: if in the 60's it was Ravi Shankar and Satyajit Ray who presented the arts of India to the world, now it is Gurinder Chadha, Talvin Singh and Panjabi MC. none of whom was born in South Asia.

So if the 1990's were about the Empire writing back, about the the East to West transmission of culture, and showing how pallid British writing was compared to the hotter, spicier writers of the subcontinent, this deacde it has been the NRIS who have to some extent been reversing the flow, and exporting chutneyfied cultural influences West to East.- William Dalrymple

Scientific migration is not really a loss. The world of science is for most part an international world and the work done by Indian scientists abroad, like the work of Indian writers abroad, is accessible to people here. - V.S Naipaul

How can fiction possible compete with the stories scripted by real life? Life has become so strange, its convolutions so mindboggling that it is a kind of embarrassment to one's meagre imagination. Is life becoming a movie? Are we living in the republic of entertainment.

The often-derided mainstream films have been one of the common thread in binding the diaspora. Admittedly, the earlier films often had a literary base. Of late, the packaging or the visual sheen has improved vastly. Yet, there is an alarming trend to find shortcuts by ransacking ideas from the West.

There is no need for us to dream of the spotlight at the Academy awards. We are okay, they are okay. Amitabh Bachchan