Cultural Appropriation

Made friends with a German colleague. We ended up attending a kirtan together. An Indian devotional singing tradition, call-and-response, rhythmic, mildly hypnotic, designed to make even skeptics accidentally feel something.

What I didn’t register at first, because I was busy floating along in the melodies, was that everyone present, including the person leading it, was Caucasian.

The kirtan itself was genuinely beautiful. Emotions carried cleanly through the hymns. But a few cracks showed through the incense. Pronunciations drifted into creative territory. Some mythological anecdotes sounded suspiciously improvised, bent just enough to serve the philosophical point of the evening. Gods, apparently, are flexible when the narrative needs better marketing.

At the end, signup sheets appeared for the facilitator’s upcoming workshop. Spiritual rapture flowed seamlessly into lead generation.

I hadn’t seen it that way while I was absorbed in the rhythm. But in hindsight, the whole thing did resemble a well-packaged export of “Asian exotic soft power.” Ancient mysticism, lightly accented, spiritually sanitized, and conveniently monetized.