When I first saw this incredible picture of the Hindu God Ganesha as Spiderman, my belief that India is set to become the new ideas capital of the world ratcheted up a notch. With China such a looming presence in business these days, it is easy to overlook the extraordinary growing power of the Indian continent. I put a big part of the future of India’s success down to their incredible ability to give new meaning to and/and. Over the last 50 or so years we have come through a culture of either/or, this/that, my way or the highway, to a world of more exciting possibilities exemplified by the term and/and. As the Indians so intuitively understand, we now live in a new world of hybridization. The principle is simple. Put two elements together with equal passion and no compromise and you get something you never thought possible. This is what has made mashing such an influential process in the current idea generation. New ideas rarely completely replace old ones. What happens is both the old and the new run parallel for a while until the best of both are absorbed into the new way of thinking. It’s and/and. Spiderman and Ganesha.
