Tween TV and Self-Reference

February 13, 2010

Jet Airways has very few domestic planes equipped for inflight entertainment; but it’s inflight entertainment systems completely pwns Kingfisher’s inflight TV (which shows some shady Zee network channels, and horrors of horrors, Kambakht Ishq). You get touch screens, video and music on demand, the flight path interface is nicer; and quite a selection of movies and TV episodes. My dad, who travels Delhi-Chennai and back twice a month these days complains that they haven’t updated the selection in two months, but this was the first time I was traveling on a Jet flight with the entertainment system, so it was all new to me.

I wasn’t interested in either the Hindi or English movies they had, so I went through the TV section. They had an episode of Sarabhai vs Sarabhai, which I liked, but somehow Ravikiran‘s raving about it had led me to expect more. Perhaps it was one of the weaker episodes, or perhaps the humour only comes through with multiple episodes. Anyhow. Sarabhai v/s Sarabhai was good, but what was really brilliant was that this flight got me on to Disney Channel shows – notably Sonny With A Chance. I loved Sonny With A Chance. It sent up soap operas, has a nerd-girl who builds catapults, and despite being a kid’s show, the writers sneaked in enough innuendo for a couple of That’s What She Said moments (“Stop blowing. Start talking.”). And they also did something I’m very fond of – setting up a joke in one segment, and then delivering the punchline much later1 (the setup involves the catapult mentioned earlier). Oh, and this is for Rahul Raguram – according to Wikipedia, Demi Lovato is a fan of symphonic black metal band Dimmu Borgir. All in all, brilliant stuff, and I think I shall thulp the whole season soon.

I also saw The Suite Life on Deck, which was funny in parts (London Tipton! Bwahahhahah!), but not extraordinary; and Hannah Montana, which brings us to the second part of this post.

So… Hannah Montana. In case you don’t already know this, in Hannah Montana Billy Ray Cyrus and his daughter Miley Cyrus play the country singer Robbie Ray Stewart and his daughter Miley Stewart. And Miley Stewart’s secret identity is Hannah Montana, teen pop-star. And frankly, the whole layers and layers of self-reference (or as the darling girlfriend puts it, “self-referencing her ass like yeah“) are a pain to sort out. The only thing worse is reading the Wikipedia entries of professional wrestlers, where trying to work out what the wrestler did as part of kayfabe, what the wrestler did as a side project, and what the wrestler got up to by accident, and what the wrestler does while he (or she) is at home leaves you dizzy.

But of course, Miley Stewart self-referencing Miley Cyrus and then the whole thing becoming a recursive joke through Hannah Montana is no more self-referential than all of Bollywood, especially the Bachchan family and Shah Rukh Khan. Shah Rukh Khan plays Shah Rukh Khan in Billu and Om Shanti Om, all the My Name is Khan promos try to be cute by having them man say that his name is Khan, and so on and so forth. And the father-son in-jokes every time Abhishek and Amitabh Bachchan are in the same movie got tiresome about five minutes after they started. (Here’s an old Jabberwock post on the subject.)

Which actually makes Miley Cyrus not as bad as Bollywood. In her case, one can at least blame the self-referencing on her faceless2 corporate handlers at Disney. In Bollywood, there are no such corporate handlers, and the blame is all on the stars and the writers themselves.

The only thing that comes close is how almost every Colin Firth movie contains a reference to his Pride and Prejudice role, and even then, they’re only one off jokes and Colin Firth does not actually play Colin Firth. Except in Bridget Jones’ Diary, but every dog is allowed one bite.

Summing up: Referencing is sexy. Self-referencing is intellectual masturbation. In Bollywood’s case, though, it’s not even intellectual3.

1: Terry Pratchett is the master of this. In Thief of Time, he sets up the joke by describing the abbot of a monastery having re-incarnated as a fully sentient baby; and then about eighty pages later delivers a punchline about him being in touch with his inner child. And though it’s implausible that he planned it that way, you could argue that he sets up a joke in The Light Fantastic by magically transforming the Librarian into an orang-utan; and then eight books later, in Moving Pictures, he delivers the punchline of having a screaming ape being carried up a tower by a giant woman being pure cinema. Eight books between setup and punchline is hardcore wait-for-it.
2:OK, not actually faceless in the metaphorical sense since Disney has an active brand (many active brands, in fact); and not faceless in the literal sense since it’s very unlikely that people working at Disney don’t have faces. Though the thought of Disney employing an army of featureless golems to manage Miley Cyrus’s career is sort of awesome.
3: Similar to how Professor Ramnath Narayanswamy once told my batch “The majority of you have indulged in creative bullshitting, most of it not even creative.”


The Middle Class Myth

May 29, 2009

In the last post, I said that middle class voter apathy was a myth. In fact the problem is worse. Where India is concerned, the middle class is itself a myth, which is why I used the scare quotes. It’s neither middle, nor a class.

Let’s look at ‘middle’ first. What Barkha Dutt and similar luminaries call a ‘middle class Delhi audience’ is by no means in the middle of anything – it’s probably in the top 20% of all income earners, if not top 10% or even top 5%. Considering at least 15% of the population is below a poverty line which is drawn incredibly low, and another 20% is struggling above it, people with five figure salaries and cars are very very far above the middle.

Next, ‘class’. Using the word class implies that there are mostly shared characteristics. But how shared the characteristics are depend on how flexible or granular you go. They’re split mostly evenly between the Congress and the BJP. You could call it a preference for national parties, but isn’t that a bit of a stretch?

Occupationally – the middle class includes salaried people working for MNCs, salaried people working in Indian family owned businesses or publicly listed professionaly managed IT firms, family business owners, traders, successful artists and performers, and SME owners. They all have different incomes and different agendas. One single middle class. Really?

The middle class has social liberals who send pink chaddis to Muthalik and social conservatives who go on Rediff and abuse the liberals for supporting drunkenness and immorality. It has vocal supporters of karza maafis and vocal opponents of government waste. One single middle class?

The middle class includes IAS officers who set up the Sanskriti school so that their kids don’t have to go to Kendriya Vidyalayas and people who do dharnas to protest school fee hikes. More pertinently, it includes people who have government employees in their family and can tap on a network of government servants, and people who don’t have that access and have to either spend huge amounts of time or money or both when they need to get anything done. One middle class, eh?

So speaking or writing about the middle class is not terribly productive. There are many middle classes, and unless you talk about which one you mean – salary-earners in IT companies and MNCs, SME or public sector employees with much smaller earnings, the self-employed – you’ll trip up. If you don’t control for regional and caste differences you’ll trip up again.

What classification you do chose is up to you. You can flatter me by using my hippie-yuppie-lala behavioural categorisation. You can go with the NCAER’s classification of people along consumption patterns – Destitute, Aspirants, Climbers, Consuming Class, and Rich. You can invent your own. But as long as you talk about the middle class, your argument will be muddled.


The Middle Class Apathy Myth

May 11, 2009

It’s pretty much an article of faith in India that the educated middle class doesn’t vote. (Some recent blogposts and articles that touch on this: SainathThe Acorn and Great Bong) But this election is beginning to shake up that assumption.

Yes, the super-rich South Bombay had a 44% turnout rate, the lowest in Bombay. But Delhi’s most “middle” “class” constituency, New Delhi managed 56%, the highest in any Delhi constituency. But forget that. Patna had a turnout of 37%. Lucknow had 35%. Are Lucknow and Patna really full of middle class Barista-visiting dilettantes? According to Google’s Lok Sabha portal, New Delhi’s poverty rate is 15%, Lucknow’s is 18% and Patna Saheb’s is 49%. That means that at least half of New Delhi’s richer-than-poor voted, and at least a third of Patna’s poor didn’t.

I don’t think middle class apathy is a complete myth, but the Patna and New Delhi counterfactuals seem to show that blaming all low voter turnout on middle class apathy is not feasible. If someone ran the numbers, it could show that the urban poor too are disinclined to vote, or that middle class apathy is true in some constituencies or circumstances but not all of them. Just breaking the cliche would be a very worthwhile activity.

I think the cliche has two origins – the first is that middle class apathy is much more visible than the apathy of the poor simply because the middle class is much more visible. The second is that condescension and sanctimony are definitive Indian middle class traits, and talking about how you vote but everyone else in your class doesn’t allows you to express this very effectively.

By the way, I didn’t vote. But that was because my name wasn’t on the list even though I registered in time. How apathetic does that make me according to Sainath?


Infy Public School

December 12, 2007

Raiders Lost the Arc, the idiotically titled and idiotically written Outlook cover story on how IT is ruining Bangalore, has been debunked and fisked enough elsewhere on the blogosphere (Churumuri rebuts CNR Rao hereNitin points out what the Outlook story missed here). Sugata Srinivasraju doesn’t ever blame IT junta for ruining infrastructure himself, but he conveniently forgets that infrastructure is the government’s responsibility, not the IT industry’s. When developers try to make infrastructure their own responsibility, as in the Bangalore-Mysore Infrastructure Corridor, the government has gone after them with a hatchet.

However, it’s undeniable that there is an influx of immigrants into Bangalore (me included), and that this is leading to new cultural forms (which still does not translate to a destruction of the old culture and values of the city).  But there’s something interesting about this wave of migration.

Uptil now, whenever there’s been internal migration in India, the migrants have alsways carried their culture along with them and ghettoised themselves. So Gujrati Jains and Marwaris used to set up their own schools and colleges wherever they went. Mumbai has DG Ruparel College and lots of other Gujew colleges (which are mocked regularly in JAM), and even more Gujrati dominated schools. Even Bangalore has a Gujrati medium school near City Market. Other communities don’t migrate as prodigiously as the Gujratis and Marwaris, but they still cluster. So you have Bongs coalescing in Chittaranjan Park in Delhi, Punjews sending their kids to DAV schools all across UP, and Tams setting up Sangam associations in Delhi and Mumbai. And this is before they extend the ghettoization by marrying somebody from the homelands.

But the IT migration to Bangalore (and Pune and other hotspots) is different. The migrants are united by profession, not by community. And while within the overall migrant community they’ll still form sub-clusters based on language and community affiliations, the ghettoisation is not as extreme as it was when Marwari traders flocked to Chikpet and created their own temples and schools there.

So what I’m eagerly waiting to see is what happens when the IT professionals’ kids go to school – and where they go to school. If migrants’ kids and ‘old-Bangaloreans” kids grow up together, the clash of cultures is probably not going to be as acute.

This could of course go all pear shaped if:

  1. New schools don’t come up fast enough to cater to the Bengalooru baby boomlet – this worries me the most.
  2. New schools which do come up price themselves out of reach of the old middle class. Even so, if they do, they’ll price themselves out of reach of a substantial number of IT workers as well, so cultural intermingling would still happen, just in old, cheap schools instead of new, expensive ones. I somewhat doubt this will happen. This is India. People will find the money to educate their kids.
  3. Cultural factors mean schools end up as IT/ non-IT kids ghettos also. I greatly doubt this will happen. Schools compete for students, just as students compete for schools. If the kid is smart, the school isn’t going to care about the parents (at least at the post Class-10 level). And if the school is really good, the parents aren’t going to care much about who the other parents are.

How this plays out is going to be interesting.