Intellectual Inertia of the Indian Intelligentsia

It is 9:00 in the night and you are going to have a nice little dinner with your family. You sit down in a comfortable chair and press the red button that sends the television blaring its cacophony at 73 decibles of ear-shredding noise. You hope to be entertained but what you find on the screen is one of the now infamous genre of family conspiracy serials, dished out with ample amounts of glitter and phoney morals and sweet yammering, crying bahus and vixenesque saases and mutely submissive, disgustingly foolish males and plots contrived and impossible enough to send those 5 working neurons in your head into a state of shock induced coma. From then onwards, you assume the role of one of those sub-18 year olds during election times. Nobody cares what you think of the serial. Your family is too disgustingly engrossed in the trash to see that one of their close relatives is about to choke on suffocating mediocrity. And you begin to think, what is wrong with Indian television or more importantly with Indian cultural and artistic expression in general ?

The fact of the matter is that television and movies today constitute a herculean chunk of the artistic facade of any society. Their immense reach far outweighs any other vehicle of cultural expression. Therefore, their content can safely be taken to principally represent the creative quotient of the entire society in general. If this is the case, I am afraid to say, but the country has seldom found itself so devoid of originality of ideas, and the will of creation.

Whereas on one hand the small screen is content at providing airtime to the convoluted, disfigured fantasies of the likes of Ekta kapoor, the silver screen meekly bends down to the whims and fancies of cry-baby directors like Karan Johar and Chopra family. Whereas the small screen blatantly copies every american success story (yes, KBC, Indian laughter challenge and all those reality competitions are shameless copies), imagination and creativity seem to be giving way to obscene vulgarity and violence on the big screen. I am not saying that vulgarity and violence should be wholly abhorred. I am just saying that they should not act as veils to hide the sheer ineptitude of directors at using whatever little grey matter they have been blessed with. I fondly remember the days when a Sunday morning on Doordarshan used to be a worthwhile waiting experience. And I miss the brilliance of a Hrishikesh Mukherjee at weaving a complex interplay of human emotions.

I hardly hate anything more than creations which have to take the support of cheap populist gimmicks to get accepted by the society. Art is a sacred profession. It is so much more personal than technology. Its creation should not be governed by something as vulgar as societal acceptance and money. Sadly, this is what seems to be happening to the entertainment industry in India. Movies and serials try to play into the hands of the college going, big city student populace most of whom think that their last breakup was the worst thing to have hit the society in the last 50 years and who are blessed with stupid enough parents with deep enough pockets to have any kind of discriminatory power anyways. Or they go to the other extreme and try to gain the acceptance of those over-the-middle age parents, who somehow have forgotten what good entertainment used to taste like and have now become numb enough not to raise an eyebrow when an Ekta Kapoor sends any army of intermarried, conniving, glossy and fake actors to throw them into what can only be described as a state of mental anesthesia.

Hats off to those who claim to be the spearheads of Indian imagination. I can only imagine, if the bayonet is so blunt, how ineffective the rifle has become.