Sir John Tusa on 'East is East and West is West'

In his evocative discourse entitled 'East is East and West is West and a Good Thing Too', Sir John Tusa, managing director of Barbican Centre, London, and former managing director of BBC World Service, enthralled distinguished guests, members of the public, and faculty, staff and students of AKU at the University Auditorium in March 2005.

He was invited as a guest speaker in the Special Lecture Series, which is part of AKU's multidisciplinary and broad-based approach to education to enrich students' understanding of the humanities and social sciences. Sir John Tusa explained that being modern did not entail surrendering one's own cultural experience. "Recognising and owning your own cultural and artistic traditions is an essential aspect of cultural identity. Equally and essentially, openness to other cultures is a necessary part of modernity, a vital ingredient of innovation. But setting out to fuse those cultures, being ashamed of and undervaluing their unique characteristics, usually produces an unconvincing and undigested mess of modish cultural gestures…" He warned that globalisation of culture was "a code word for domination and all too often suppresses or destroys local cultures."