It must be conceded to her that she did hold forth on that theme the other day in her run-down Lucknow drawing room. My niece, a precocious girl of seven, and her two younger brothers aged five and three, sat around the TV set as around an altar or a God.

Having obtained possession of the remote control after a minor scuffle with her younger brothers, my niece surfed channels. When everyone in the drawing room were looking elsewhere, she settled for one of the more salacious sequences in an American serial focused heavily on passion and infidelity.

This licentious state of affairs invited my mother's intervention. It assumed theform of an extensive monologue on what she called the decline of `culture', the invasion of TV and so on.

As always, she fell back excessively on nostalgia. Her great grandmother who regaled her with stories of `Malika Toria' (Queen Victoria), could read but not write. Reading of carefully monitored literature would keep the ladies entertained. Writing was considered subversive because it might encourage them to write letters to, say, men.

But surely she was not holding up her great grandmother's half literate status as some sort of a model? No, she said. She was simply trying to establish an extreme contrast with the permissiveness her granddaughter was exposed to even as we talked. She was recommending neither of the two extremes.

In her own homespun way, I suspect, what she was trying to say was this: the cultural evolution from her great grandmother's day had been managed and determined by ourselves. Obviously we were, in each generation, responding to our respective environments. For example, mygrandmother knew everything about halwa, pindi, kheer (I heard of firni much later), muzafar (sweet rice in saffron), but she had never heard of a thing called `pudding'. Nor, for that matter, had my mother.

So, one day when she baked what she called `putteeng', it startled us with the suddenness of revelation. What was the agency for this interference with our traditional cuisine? My mother's best friend had a great philanderer for a husband who in turn had picked up a taste for bread pudding from his Anglo-Indian girl friends. This is how the `western' art of making `bread pudding' entered our lives.

It was the Indian cinema which constituted the first assault on our musical tastes. Songstresses, rather disparagingly called Miriasans, were frequently in residence for marriages and sundry celebrations. Verses sung during Moharram were also set to classical ragas. All India Radio provided the range.

`Filmi' music was resisted as impure, but the generation of my parents, under peer pressure, accordedacceptance to New Theatres, headquartered in Calcutta. Barua, Kanan Bala, K.C. Dey became acceptable. Then came that phenomenon: K.L. Sehgal. He, to this day, remains the only Punjabi that Bengal accepted. So did my parents.

When music directors like Naushad appeared on the scene they were stoutly resisted. Piano, clarinets, trumpets, violins were all new to Indian orchestration. How did Naushad and other music directors of his ilk get acquainted with western instruments in the '40s and the '50s?. Anglo-Indian crooners and musicians at various clubs and restaurants may well have provided the first links.

It has taken an entire generation for us to realise the contributions made by Naushad, Madan Mohan, O.P. Nayar and S.D. Burman to Indian music: they popularised classical and folk traditions; they enriched our orchestra by incorporating western instruments; they were the first to provide a forum in popular cinema to poets like Kumar Barabankavi, Majrooh Sultanpuri and Sahir Ludhianvi.

All these changesin tastes (call it culture) were gradual and manageable. ``Putteeng'' was an occasionally exotic addition to the fare. It did not replace the halwa. But when my seven-year old niece surfs channels and pauses only on fiery love, or violence, it is time to ponder. This, roughly, is what my mother is trying to say.

The question, however, is whether our anxieties are exclusively our own or is there a common thread on concerns articulated in Ottawa. Canada is worried because 60 percent of all books sold in the country come from the US. Over 70 percent of all music played on Canadian radio is not Canadian. Over 90 percent of the films are foreign -- mostly Hollywood.

My great grandmother knew no foreign language but my niece knows English. In fact our entire elite is either English speaking or communicates across linguistic barriers within the country only in that language.

It would be parochial and protectionist to complain. That is the conventional wisdom. But how does one explain Britain participating inthat 20-nation meet in Ottawa? Are my mother's concerns becoming universal? Must culture be insulated from unrestrained trade? It is not such an unfashionable discussion after all.