With rapidly increasing urbanization, the forces of modernity are well and truly sweeping across large parts of the world-including India. As the social fabric gets stretched in the tug-of-war between tradition and change, new socio-cultural configurations are emerging. Some of these mimic the processes undergone by highly industrialized nations at the time of their modernization; others are unique to our time and place. The author, a branding consultant-cum-academic, analyzes current trends and proposes a new and substantially higher-value role that brands can play in the coming years.
As waves of modernity and urbanization sweep over more and more parts of the globe, each society appears fated to undergo a very similar identity crisis; and its root cause-loss of community. Loss of community was noticed in the highly industrialized nations first, as is evident from the Rolling Stones number, which is by no means, the only reference to this phenomenon in western pop culture. Bob Dylan, Janice Joplin, even the Beatles wrote and sang about urban angst and anomie.
Robert Putnam, a public policy professor at Harvard, in his book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community says, "Studies in the US, Scandinavia and Japan show that socially disconnected people are two to five times more likely to die earlier than individuals who have close ties with family, friends and the community. In a talk, Putnam is even reported to have said, "(Nowadays) most of us watch `Friends' instead of having them."
A 1977 study of a small town called Roseto, carried out by I Kawachi, B P Kennedy and K Lochner found that: "The town... had been something of a medical mystery since the 1950s, when it was first noticed that death rates (here) were substantially lower than that of neighboring communities, yet there were no significant differences in diet or other lifestyle factors. What was noticed were the close-knit relations among residents in the commmunity. In other words, Roseto had high social capital. As time progressed and Roseto's younger inhabitants became more concerned with material wealth than with community relations, social capital declined. Mortality rates in Roseto, particularly the incidence of heart attack, quickly caught up to the level of neighboring communities."
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