Update: He didn't show today. I may need to take an earlier train because I don't remember the train ever being as filled as it was today. I get to the platform hoping to see him. 3 mins for the train to come, still no sign of him. 2 mins, nada. 1 min, the song on my iPod is 'Aap Jaisa Koi' and I think, aha! Provenance shall intervene. Didn't happen. He didn't show up instead I sat across a stupid twat of a tween who kept giving me the dirts for no apparent reason. And the song that played next was 'Don't Let Me Down'. Whatever. My burning loins shall will him to me. I'm going to redo experiment by taking the 7:54 am train as opposed to 8:04. Yeah it really fills up in a span of 10 minutes.
Woo hoo Thursday. I have a meeting to attend. Bah. Bumblefuck.
Mad-ia as I call it. Newspapers, at least the English dailies I read or used to get solely for their crosswords, and the news channels, are all ailing from the miasma of mediocrity and worse. Celebrating mediocrity. Bollywood is the main spiritual center for such mindless self-promotion and self-congratulation. It's not the scale of coverage of stories that worries me though that too leaves a lot to be desired, but the analysis that more often than not is supercilious and shallow (ref: The Big Fight on NDTV or We The People on the same. I won't even talk about the Prabhu Chawlas or Sardesais of broadcast journalism because they make my headache) . We're given to paroxysms of hyperbole and little critical engagement with the situation. Sometimes we commit the opposite sin, we read too deep in to stories that mean very little. For instance the hysterical analysis of the T20 cup in Outlook magazine this week. These pronouncements of the redundancy of the 'RSS' combine--Rahul, Sachin and Sourav--and the revolution that this win is anticipated to bring about in Indian cricket are in my opinion premature and from the mind of a three-year old. A slow three-year old on top of that. This search for meaning in situations that do not, arguably, extend themselves beyond the event is frustrating at best and retrogressive at worst. Take Bollywood for instance, each time a Bollywood star gets enshrined in Madame Toussaud in a stoic wax statue (considering we're talking about Bollywoodens here, one could argue these approximate real-life rather admirably) we go in to self-congratulation overdrive. Bollyood's success overseas is not driven by a growing new audience but by a growing and rich expatriate population and a communications revolution essentially. I meet too many non-Indians who're scared of watching Bollywood films of the Karan Johar variety and unfortunately because of the marketing machine that props up such mediocre art (if we can call it that) they are under the impression that that is all our cinema has to offer. I don't blame them, I too am scared of candy-floss cinema and Dia Mirza's hair. I'd rather puff away my life minute by minute with each cigarette I smoke than surrender three precious hours of it to retrograde patriarchal pop culture. Yet I do and come out with either a splitting headache or a splitting headache.
Don't get me wrong, I was overjoyed when we won and I am a big fan of Bollywood cinema but I keep my perspectives on both grounded in reality. Bollywood, for instance, I believe has its own narrative form and zest which make for engaging cinema but it's a form loaded with cultural symbols and is not easily accessible to an outside audience. Too bad for them. Too bad for them also because the movies that get promoted are bad products of this creative form. They've embraced it only in structure but not in spirit. I mean Devdas, Kabhi Pussy Kabhi Bum (please, I'm not going to accord it the respect of calling it by its original title), Mohabbatien etc. There are others that have successfully managed to synthesize both the visceral spirit of a Bollywood film (the quintessential melodrama that I know from having grown up in New Delhi, is an unrelenting part of my domestic domain) and the narrative form of hyperbolic dialogue, song and dance; Rang De Basanti, Lagaan, even the self-referential and comic Main Hoon Na. I've already waxed hyperbole on Sholay, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron but haven't ever talked about Masoom, Mr. India, Waqt, Lamhe, Chaalbaaz, Qurbaani etc to name very few, which are all excellent products of cinema per se and Bollywood specifically. And now there's a new form developing within the current under which I'd consider films such as Chak De, Khosla Ka Ghosla, Bheja Fry, Life in a Metro. They're sans song and dance but they're approximating post-liberalized Indian life that feature characters and situations that are resonant with ones that occupy our own lives and yet they're loaded with the magic of cinema. Village life though has almost entirely disappeared from the Hindi film oeuvre. But it has also disappeared off other mainstream media sources. Or is trapped in the same discursive cliches of poverty, backwardness, naivete and lack of individual agency. Villagers are seldom represented as individuals. I'd asked a friend's mother who runs a school in rural Bengal: what lives and struggles do the young lead in the village? I mean in terms of romance, work and the idealogical struggles each of us is going through in trying to find ourselves. She said that I'd be surprised by the shared nature of our experiences. I was because I too am a product of this mediocre media society we're growing up in. Chhora-chhori channe ke khet mien indeed.
On cricket, politics and business, I find the media coverage wholly dissatisfying. Then again considering the financial and political clout that all three exercise over media enterprises it is hardly surprising that the coverage either panders to the lowest common denominator or simply looks the other way. There was an item I'd watched on AIIMS and casteism on NDTV the other day that reminded me of another story on the trend of vigilante justice in the country. Both 'investigative pieces' failed to do what they had set out to do i.e. investigate. Th AIIMS story was patently loaded with the journalists' personal opinions and failed to present the other side's opinions or investigate the claims of whoever had financed the story (I am sure airtime is bought and sold) as was the story on vigilante justice. I am not talking about the Vaishali lynching but generally this trend of a mass of citizenry getting together and dispatching justice as they would like to. The story went in to some tripe about Indian culture (again we encounter this monolithic, uniform and essentially non-existent 'Indian Culture') rather than considering the state of the criminal justice system and the anxieties each one of us has about its inadequacies. It's an obvious point and I'm amazed that the analysis didn't jump to the obvious for once. Culture certainly is an explanatory variable but there might be a need to historicize it. Especially in smaller more homogeneous communities, societal norms provide the groundwork for norms of justice, right and might and thus dictate the execution of it but in teeming metropolis' like Bombay and Delhi the same logic does not apply. If anything most people here have been uprooted from their established communities and thrust at the mercy of an inefficient, corrupt and a tediously slow judiciary. The expression of angst here perhaps comes from different frustrations.
But this is all conjecture and opinion. I might be wrong about the international audience trends of Bollywood or even the salience of the 'RSS' (the other RSS though I hope is neutered and given a dose of reality with this RamSethu issue) but I am not wrong about the mediocrity of Indian media. Enlish media, cannot comment on the vernacular forms as I am not fluent in any vernacular languages. I wish I could read Kashmiri. I wish for a lot of things. Sexy legs mostly.
End of rant. Was reading Tehelka and all this rose up in a flurry. I like their coverage of Myanmar, anyone interested look up their website.
Woo hoo Thursday. I have a meeting to attend. Bah. Bumblefuck.
Mad-ia as I call it. Newspapers, at least the English dailies I read or used to get solely for their crosswords, and the news channels, are all ailing from the miasma of mediocrity and worse. Celebrating mediocrity. Bollywood is the main spiritual center for such mindless self-promotion and self-congratulation. It's not the scale of coverage of stories that worries me though that too leaves a lot to be desired, but the analysis that more often than not is supercilious and shallow (ref: The Big Fight on NDTV or We The People on the same. I won't even talk about the Prabhu Chawlas or Sardesais of broadcast journalism because they make my headache) . We're given to paroxysms of hyperbole and little critical engagement with the situation. Sometimes we commit the opposite sin, we read too deep in to stories that mean very little. For instance the hysterical analysis of the T20 cup in Outlook magazine this week. These pronouncements of the redundancy of the 'RSS' combine--Rahul, Sachin and Sourav--and the revolution that this win is anticipated to bring about in Indian cricket are in my opinion premature and from the mind of a three-year old. A slow three-year old on top of that. This search for meaning in situations that do not, arguably, extend themselves beyond the event is frustrating at best and retrogressive at worst. Take Bollywood for instance, each time a Bollywood star gets enshrined in Madame Toussaud in a stoic wax statue (considering we're talking about Bollywoodens here, one could argue these approximate real-life rather admirably) we go in to self-congratulation overdrive. Bollyood's success overseas is not driven by a growing new audience but by a growing and rich expatriate population and a communications revolution essentially. I meet too many non-Indians who're scared of watching Bollywood films of the Karan Johar variety and unfortunately because of the marketing machine that props up such mediocre art (if we can call it that) they are under the impression that that is all our cinema has to offer. I don't blame them, I too am scared of candy-floss cinema and Dia Mirza's hair. I'd rather puff away my life minute by minute with each cigarette I smoke than surrender three precious hours of it to retrograde patriarchal pop culture. Yet I do and come out with either a splitting headache or a splitting headache.
Don't get me wrong, I was overjoyed when we won and I am a big fan of Bollywood cinema but I keep my perspectives on both grounded in reality. Bollywood, for instance, I believe has its own narrative form and zest which make for engaging cinema but it's a form loaded with cultural symbols and is not easily accessible to an outside audience. Too bad for them. Too bad for them also because the movies that get promoted are bad products of this creative form. They've embraced it only in structure but not in spirit. I mean Devdas, Kabhi Pussy Kabhi Bum (please, I'm not going to accord it the respect of calling it by its original title), Mohabbatien etc. There are others that have successfully managed to synthesize both the visceral spirit of a Bollywood film (the quintessential melodrama that I know from having grown up in New Delhi, is an unrelenting part of my domestic domain) and the narrative form of hyperbolic dialogue, song and dance; Rang De Basanti, Lagaan, even the self-referential and comic Main Hoon Na. I've already waxed hyperbole on Sholay, Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron but haven't ever talked about Masoom, Mr. India, Waqt, Lamhe, Chaalbaaz, Qurbaani etc to name very few, which are all excellent products of cinema per se and Bollywood specifically. And now there's a new form developing within the current under which I'd consider films such as Chak De, Khosla Ka Ghosla, Bheja Fry, Life in a Metro. They're sans song and dance but they're approximating post-liberalized Indian life that feature characters and situations that are resonant with ones that occupy our own lives and yet they're loaded with the magic of cinema. Village life though has almost entirely disappeared from the Hindi film oeuvre. But it has also disappeared off other mainstream media sources. Or is trapped in the same discursive cliches of poverty, backwardness, naivete and lack of individual agency. Villagers are seldom represented as individuals. I'd asked a friend's mother who runs a school in rural Bengal: what lives and struggles do the young lead in the village? I mean in terms of romance, work and the idealogical struggles each of us is going through in trying to find ourselves. She said that I'd be surprised by the shared nature of our experiences. I was because I too am a product of this mediocre media society we're growing up in. Chhora-chhori channe ke khet mien indeed.
On cricket, politics and business, I find the media coverage wholly dissatisfying. Then again considering the financial and political clout that all three exercise over media enterprises it is hardly surprising that the coverage either panders to the lowest common denominator or simply looks the other way. There was an item I'd watched on AIIMS and casteism on NDTV the other day that reminded me of another story on the trend of vigilante justice in the country. Both 'investigative pieces' failed to do what they had set out to do i.e. investigate. Th AIIMS story was patently loaded with the journalists' personal opinions and failed to present the other side's opinions or investigate the claims of whoever had financed the story (I am sure airtime is bought and sold) as was the story on vigilante justice. I am not talking about the Vaishali lynching but generally this trend of a mass of citizenry getting together and dispatching justice as they would like to. The story went in to some tripe about Indian culture (again we encounter this monolithic, uniform and essentially non-existent 'Indian Culture') rather than considering the state of the criminal justice system and the anxieties each one of us has about its inadequacies. It's an obvious point and I'm amazed that the analysis didn't jump to the obvious for once. Culture certainly is an explanatory variable but there might be a need to historicize it. Especially in smaller more homogeneous communities, societal norms provide the groundwork for norms of justice, right and might and thus dictate the execution of it but in teeming metropolis' like Bombay and Delhi the same logic does not apply. If anything most people here have been uprooted from their established communities and thrust at the mercy of an inefficient, corrupt and a tediously slow judiciary. The expression of angst here perhaps comes from different frustrations.
But this is all conjecture and opinion. I might be wrong about the international audience trends of Bollywood or even the salience of the 'RSS' (the other RSS though I hope is neutered and given a dose of reality with this RamSethu issue) but I am not wrong about the mediocrity of Indian media. Enlish media, cannot comment on the vernacular forms as I am not fluent in any vernacular languages. I wish I could read Kashmiri. I wish for a lot of things. Sexy legs mostly.
End of rant. Was reading Tehelka and all this rose up in a flurry. I like their coverage of Myanmar, anyone interested look up their website.
5 comments:
Paragraphs, please!
happy?
i hate paragraphs.
Thru-out the day the music in my head changes according to the mood... bollywood has got me used to background music. When I type my login name and password, i was singing Sugar.. honey honey because one of those words forms a part of my password.
I have been reading your blog for quite sometime now and I really liked this post.I agree with u that Indian news channels are very superficial in their coverage.And about the AIIMS issue,I think stories that "expose" the "heartless"doctors have huge public interest.The channels taking up cudgels on behalf of the common man.That sounds way better than speaking in support of "overprivileged" doctors.So the channels zoom in on the patients who are being denied attention conveniently ignoring the circumstances that caused the strike.In todays world of listed media companies with yoy profit growth considerations,good oldfashioned balanced and truthful reporting is outdated as far as their strategists are concerned.
Keep up the good work-u write well and u certainly help improve my english(I had to look up hedonistic hobo):-)
if you're in karlsruhe or somewhere around there, i could hook you up with a lovely girl friend of mine, who is most fun, always has pot on her and has the prettiest boys for friends. ja?
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