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Karan Chadda

Global digital marketing and communications leader

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September 15, 2020

What is cultural appropriation?

Is mindfulness cultural appropriation? 
Taking ancient wisdom,
Gentrifying, then westernising it.
 
What about yoga pants? 
Cladding age old poses,
In a smooth lycra skin.
 
And Swing Low Sweet Chariot?
Transported from cotton plantations,
Chanted atop a fallow cabbage patch.
 
Trendy Polynesian tattoos?
Tracing generations of iconography,
So the hench, can ask, “Do you even lift, bro?”
 
Or what of Disney?
Fencing free moving folk lore,
In a theme park of intellectual property.
 
Christmas! Why leave out Christmas?
Baptising Saturnalia,
So pagans imbibed the Word.
 
And why leave out the Indian flag?
Using Ashoka's over-looked Chakra,
To spin a secular democracy.

Copyright © 2025 Karan Chadda | Views are my own