The Fun in Bollywood & Hindi Imposition happening Underneath!

I had been to the Village restaurant in Bengaluru recently on a team outing from office. During one of the celebration activities therein, I was requested to witness a celebration of the young(er) people, dancing their minds off to some Hindi movie numbers. I was shocked to see how the dancers teamed up as though ignoring the vulgarities in the songs being played and displayed a fictitious oneness in gender by their rather erotic moves. And when the song ended, no wonder, there were cries of once more.

The youth is being made to "want" more of what it "wants"; in the process it wants less of what it "needs", perhaps.

But beyond this thought, ever thought why Hindi movies tend to carry more dance & frolic driven songs and thereby tend to carry away the young audiences into its reverie?

Its an entirely orchestrated drama. An orchestra arranged by the central government and Hindi movie industry. Why else would Hindi movie artists so easily get the Ratna awards?! Here's an explanation.

It isn't difficult now to say that Bollywood (the Hindi movie industry) and the central government have worked hand-in-hand from a long time - worked to drive the Indian nationality theory into young, unassuming, minds; worked together to successfully impose Hindi on the widely spread, linguistically diverse Indian population.

It is fun & frolic, after all, that the youth likes; after these programmings by the film industry-govt nexus, it is what it craves and demands. Anything that is mundane and more serious, like some of the really thought provoking movies from the non-Hindi industries carrying songs of serious introspection, doesn't carry the cool (or hot!) factor to attract the young audiences. This further catalyzes the Hindi Imposition projects of the central government, but worse still, it seriously erodes the impression young minds have about non-Hindi works of art and non-Hindi forms of entertainment altogether. No wonder, the latter are making only those attempts that make it more resemble the Hindi counterpart, by remaking and dubbing alike.

On the flip side, why there is more frolic in Hindi movies is worth investigating as well. Just like the Hindu Gods are always portrayed to be amid happiness, which in turn makes people flock towards their idols and images seeking their own happiness, the Bollywood industry lets go of 'boring' social messages that it needs to convey and loudly advertises tempting lewdness and conveys messages of fun & frolic to the youth.

It is also the Hindi industry and the Hindi people that are the ultimate beneficiaries in the Indian union, what with all the pro-Hindi policies of the central government and its machinery. With this backdrop, if there's one film industry in India that can really celebrate all through the year, it is the Hindi film industry. And this industry is taking most Indian youth by hypnotizing them towards a virtual state of happiness, night after night.

So: for everything serious, there are non-Hindi movie industries. For everything fun, cool & hot, there is the Hindi movie industry, and that is where people will flock to. Kudos to the creativity of the Hindi imposer!

While You Were Taking an Ad Break!

After watching a recent TV ad for a small car I fell into a reverie, only to come out wondering if my hunch were true, however deep it might seem. It was this shady impression the advertising industry (in this country, or worldwide?) seemed to have about societies in general. Do these ad makers take us for no-brainers? Have they started believing their ads are shaping societies? Are these ad makers blindly plagiarizing ideas from another society? I am talking about how unnatural ads appear today, and what scum they could be holding beneath.

Picture these - An ad about Chevrolet Spark, or a Tata Nano, or a Maruti Alto never fails to meticulously deal with the family that the car enters into, projecting the car as either the most awaited new-comer in the buyer's family or the one that ushers in a new family. But that's not how an ad of the high-end Chevrolet Cruze, or a Tata Aria, or a Suzuki Kizashi portrays the new car to be. These ads on the other hand try their best at keeping the car and people apart. Business as usual, no time for humans!? It appears the makers of the latter ads have a perception that high-end cars and a warm and closely knit family should not co-exist! The buyer, if at all featured in such ads, comes across as a late-coming boyfriend, or a callous husband & father of a newborn whose aloofness towards the family is held in contrast with the family attachment of the small-car buyer. But to anyone's ghastly surprise that seems to be the very chord of pride these ads are striking their note on.

Figure this too - An airline ad - apparently this man can't sleep without a midnight snack, but his wife denies it, arguably for the good health of her husband. The very next moment in the ad, the same person is sitting wide awake in an airplane, and the air-hostess tosses the person some noodles, much to the guy's pleasant surprise! Superb hospitality, eh? The makers of the ad seem to have paid almost zero attention to the reasons behind a wife's denying of noodles at midnight, and that there's a crisp difference between the hospitality of an air-hostess (representing an airplane company driven by profits) and the uncompromising love of a not-for-profit wife (working only for the welfare of her family). Why do these ads have to pick tiny moments in everyday life, package them to their benefit, and then offer an unnecessary alternative of sorts? What are these ads trying to sell after all? Who are they trying to replace in our societies, and with whom?!

Figure this three! - An ad for men's fairness cream. Talk about painting people black, and then painting them white. Either way, the painter makes money, but people are being polarized as the painted and the unpainted classes. And all this because of wrong, skewed (read creative) and ill interpretations of skin proteins and the differing conditions man lives in. Health implications apart, these ads are definitely not serving any good to our societies as much adversities they could be causing, socially.

Oh, by the way, I also saw a hoarding ad the other day announcing a renowned hospital looking for business development managers! Read the italicised words together again.

Where are all these ads headed?!
With few ads available to comment against these trends, it is readily evident that ads such as these are trying to conquer a weird little spot in our societies. It is shocking to realize that these ads are - hinting societal distancing to be the way to affluence, deciding which skin color to be a better tool towards affluence, offering unnecessary, impractical alternatives to long established social relationships etc. In doing so, are these ads making human learnings from millenia of civilizational living appear zero-sum?

Aren't these ads expected to deliver any good (not evil) to our societies at all? Even though there is a body setting advertising standards in India chartered to streamline issues with ads, can we customers lay back without doing our bit? As customers and recipients of these ads why are we letting our social behavior get influenced by such ads? Apart from getting socially programmed, why are we letting these ad makers reign over our needs and convert their projections into our wants? Isn't it time we woke up to realize the boundaries of advertising and their real need, if any? Isn't it time we wrote to makers and sponsors of these ads to mend their methods?

Is Growth about Wanting more or Needing less?

Lately, formation of rural 'economies' is a trending matter and the sad fact is amidst this trend, disguised under the name of growth, Rural India actually seems to be falling off the ever widening gap between people's primary expectations and what they're being delivered - either by means of government undertakings or their newfound proxies - corporate business houses.

This article in BM dated 20th March 2011, refers to a statement made by RBI governor attributing rising inflation to the increase in rural consumption - evidently implying either that increasing village consumerism is bad or that increasing inflation figures are good for the national economy!

With this as background, such relation of rural consumption to rising national inflation comes across as an accusation on the rural peoples and nothing else. But it is interesting to note occasions when the same governments taking pride in terming such rural consumption as 'development' and staking large claims of playing an active enabling role behind such 'developments'. What is not plainly apparent though is the fact that our governments seem to have struck a process of delegating development works to private business houses either under the CSR tag (Corporate Social Responsibility) or in the guise of PPP (Public Private Partnership) models. Now when things appear to be firing back with increased, inflationary and uncontrollable consumption patterns among rural areas, the same governments seem to be pulling back with such allegations as the one above made by the RBI governor. This is primarily because the supply chain created by the private partners is unable to source enough content that the market now demands - a failure on the part of this govt-market alliance.

To cite examples from the article: there is coke (soft drink) available in almost every corner of every street in some villages, but pure drinking water is a scarce commodity even today; there are cars and all kinds of vehicles being bought in these villages, but there's hardly a stretch of good road to drive them. There are cosmetic stores in most big villages, but women of the same village have to travel 30 kilometers (on those bad roads) to reach a hospital.

Are we forgetting our primary needs in the rush to reap modern day benefits, the ones that are created by corporate houses keeping no particular human being's benefit in mind? Are we, without our knowledge getting swept away by this tsunami of wants, uprooting and disconnecting us from our needs? Now, are we to call this a need-deficit, or a want-surplus?

(To be continued...)

Whether you're a citizen, or a customer, there's no Free Lunch!

A couple of posts ago I wrote about markets, democracy, and forces that exist within each of these, and how, in our society, we're finding them wrestle one another, but of course, not helping anyone in the end. Today I continue talking about these two devils - the market and a democracy, in a not very different perspective.

The reason I call them devils is both of them seem to possess a power derived out of our very own lack of wisdom - wisdom as citizens and customers respectively.

Every day in our lives whenever the reason for being represented (reason for democracy i.e.) or the reason for being a customer (reason for a market i.e.) is beyond both extremes, a new problem starts cooking underneath us all. Be it our farmers expecting a government support-price for their produce, or the rice-growers themselves seeking govt. subsidized rice and cereals, they form clear evidence of misunderstood purpose of government. On the other hand an aberration of an individual's needs as wants has led to the typical excessive consumerism syndrome in most urban settlements in our society. All these appear to portray a common issue - that of wrongly placed expectations from both a democracy and the market.

The 'representation misunderstood' problem

Why do the farmers (yield to) expect a govt. support price for their produce when there exists a market craving to consume them? They need to be educated about the purpose of a government, and about the existence of a market. Why do the literate settlers among us believe it to be the handiwork of some political party when petrol prices go up, or why do we feel the govt must fly in like Superman and save the sky-rocketing onion prices? Clearly we need to be informed about the role of government in all such situations.

The 'market misunderstood' problem

Why do the typical urban shoppers yield to consumerism, get seduced by calls of marketers, and forget the elementary difference between the needs and wants of life? Why does a majority of the urban consumer base appear to be buying/consuming stuff that it actually didn't need? Why so especially when those wants hide beneath them grave dangers for mankind? We need to be wary of our needs, and reassurance that discovering one's needs is more important than knowing one's wants. We need to also know that there are memories of the marketer's magic in our mind that make our wants different from our needs. And we need to realize that this disparity between needs & wants is dangerous to our economies and the ecology alike.

Let there be Jaagruti

In summary, aren't we misinterpreting the purpose of a government and a market? Said another way, isn't the government and the market not appearing to take undue advantage of the lack of awareness in people? Is it something in the system that has made the government and the market act that way? Or was it always built that way, expecting always, the constituents of the system to educate themselves so as to avoid disappointment? If latter be true, I guess it is time we realized that in a democracy, like in a market, there's nothing called free-lunch, and the only way to liberation is good education. People need to know what to expect from a government and a market, and not get these two mixed up! After all, education (jaagruti) is what man needs to go after - be as a citizen, or as a customer.