KARACHI, March 3: Those who set out to fuse cultures, ashamed of or undervaluing their unique and distinct characteristics, end up producing an unconvincing and undigested mess of modish, cultural gestures.

This was the thrust of a talk delivered by former BBC World Service managing director Sir John Tusa at the Aga Khan University on Thursday afternoon. His talk was titled "East is East and West is West and a Good Thing too."

"Even if achieved, the fusion of cultures contributes little, apart from making some people feel good and culturally inclusive. Worse still, globalization of culture - as if economic globalization were of itself a model to ape - which such activity leads to, is a code word for domination and all too often suppresses or destroys local cultures," he argued.

Currently managing director of the prestigious Barbican Centre, London, Sir Tusa said his fear was that stylistic homogenization of cultures merged only forms, colours and omitted any real blending of substance.

"Like fusion cooking, the odd exotic flavour from one cuisine dropped into another becomes just a bit of palate tickling. Worse still, such a melange is too like the inter-breeding of a horse and a donkey - breeding the stubborn sterility of a mule.

So my conclusion, a reluctant one in some ways, is that stylistic crossing is a sterile process leading nowhere but doing so in a highly professional accomplished way.

East and West merge all right, but perhaps all it shows is that their differences, their distinctness are too great for the blend to create something greater than the sum of its parts," he said.

Sir Tusa explained that the idea that western notions of time and space in the arts were very different from Asian notions and artistic practice, was put forward by Professor Stanley Lai of the Taipei National University of the Arts.

"In detailed exploration Professor Lai says that western narrative has a very specific notion of time, one that is linear, very strictly defined, and as it were precisely measured and put into units of existence.

Time is much vaster in the Buddhist scheme of cause, condition and effect, and to see how cause and effect really work, one must see a unit longer than a single lifetime," he said.

Sir Tusa argued that some of the most powerful interpretations of Shakespeare - on stage and screen - came from Japanese directors. "Kurosawa's version of 'King Lear' - his film 'Ran' - or his version of 'Macbeth' - 'Throne of Blood' - have put these most English of artistic expressions through the trans-formative prism of Japanese psychology, aesthetic and stage traditions.

The works stood revealed as new not because Kurosawa tried to conceal the intensity of the Japanese imprint on these English works but because he did so without any attempt at concealment.

To have made his films less Japanese would have rendered them artistically compromised and worthless," he said. The talk was followed by a question-answer session. The programme was conducted by Dr Nadir Ali Syed, convener of the AKU special lecture series.