What is this alien thing?

It all started with my choice of the word of the day. Our sprint team, in an effort to improve our vocabulary, decided to introduce a new word each day at the start of the daily stand up. Using the word during the standup would yield acclamations from one and all. The holy grail was to use more than one or two past words of the day in a single sentence.

That day, my selection of the word of the day was Tachism - a painting style characterized by splattered or splashed paint.

Later, a teammate who prided himself on knowing most of the words of the day that we had introduced thus far, read up a little more about Tachism. His research gave us this nugget - Tachism was a German response to a similar, contemporaneous French style of painting. I may have the details mixed up, maybe Tachism was the French response to a similar German style of painting, but the nub of the matter is that one group of artists decided to respond to another group's art and that response led to the establishment of a certain style of painting now called Tachism.

What transformed the actions of a few (however many they may have been, they had to have been fewer than the world population at that time, so 'few' is appropriate here) artists into a movement deserving its own name?

Does naming something give it legitimacy?

Some Japanese believe in the idea of Wabi-Sabi. Roughly speaking, wabi-sabi is the idea that something imperfect can be beautiful. According to Wikipedia, the wabi in ancient Japan used to refer to the sadness and loneliness of being in wilderness by yourself. In more modern times, a few centuries ago, 'sabi' meant withered or run down. Over time, the meaning associated with both words evolved to mean something more effervescent - wabi-sabi now means the beauty of imperfection, that nothing is ever finished.

The transformation in the meaning of these words was gradual, both words taking centuries to reach their current meanings. What I want to know is what made the Japanese conclude that something imperfect or unfinished could be beautiful. The modern meaning associated with Wabi-sabi would have died a quick death if people had not accepted the beauty inherent in imperfection. What made a country accept wabi-sabi and let it seep into the national identity?

Outside religion and music, why are there so few named things in India?

In politics for instance, right wing, left wing, liberal, or conservative are foreign imports. It feels artificial to hear a native born Indian refer to themselves as a right winger or a liberal. These labels do not have their origin in India. We only vaguely understand what a conservative or a liberal means to a Westerner. Political groupings inside India need their own name and identity.

In Literature, is a book based on the Mahabharat or the life of Gautama Buddha a fantasy or is it fiction or even science fiction? For many Indians, the characters in the Mahabharat and Ramayan are real. To a scientist, they may not exist in the tangible sense but in a total inversion of the apocryphal tree falling in woods unseen by anyone, many Indians see their Gods when they close their eyes. To them, these stories are not fiction or fantasy - they are a fact. I don't even have to go very far to see this in action.

My sister and her husband are followers of Nithyanand - a swami in South India. In 2010, videos surfaced of him having consensual sex with two women. He later claimed the video had been doctored, that it was all a conspiracy to defame him. To the dispassionate observer, this is an absurd claim. There are no obvious tells that the video has been doctored. Forensic labs studying the tape have said that the video appeared to be real. To my sister and brother, what Nithyanand says is true. Their fully internalized, unquestioned reality is that Nithyanand's tape is fake and the person they are seeing on the tape is not Nithyanand. As real as your laptop or mobile phone is to you, it is real to them that the person on the videotape is not Nithyanand. So, would they call a news article about this videotape fact or fiction?

In less pernicious ways, this is the reality that a lot of Indians live with. Yet, we have agreed to use words like fiction to describe some of our literature. Outside India, the question of what is real versus not real is settled. Not so much in India. Portions of the country's population still disagrees with the rest of the country on what is real and what is not real. We need to address that too.