Recently, I
read a complaint by an Indian reader at a website that it was devoting
excessive space and attention to stories about Bollywood. The site editors
answered that those stories registered the most hits and hoped that those
enticed thus, would devote some of their time to reading other more
serious or important offerings. It reminds me of a story about a small
caste ridden, male progeny obsessed, village in India. A local brahmin
elder had four sons. The first three became a doctor, engineer and lawyer
respectively, and the youngest devoid of mental skills opted to become a
barber. The elderly father was incessantly castigated by the Sa-Varna
fellow villagers for having brought everlasting shame to his caste, class
and "Kula" and the village elders unanimously recommended that the father
throw the youngest son out of the house. The honest father truthfully
replied, "You don’t understand. I can’t do that because the income of the
barber supports the whole family". So much for my defense of the highbrow
intellectuals and their discourses and my denigration of yahoos. The
website technique is a modification of one often used by stores when they
advertise goods at below market prices (loss leaders) to lure shoppers,
who will end up buying other goods marked up higher, because they are
already in the store and want to finish their shopping in one stop. An
illegal lure of this kind is called bait and switch and is a punishable
offense.
The technique may work for stores because it depends on the laziness and
stupidity of the average shopper, but it doesn’t work in the case of web
surfers. This is because it takes little time and effort to move from one
website to another and the surfers basically come in mostly two
categories, those with very short attention span and those who are
obsessed with a specific type of content. The forum at Boloji reveals the
single minded obsession with nudity and sex of many of the comment posters
by their overwhelming numerical predominance. This is not unnatural, as
evolution has fashioned us to be even lethally passionate about sex as the
male Black Widow spider proves. I am more of an evolutionist than a
moralist and have no wish to cast any stones at any of my fellow
lascivious and promiscuous sex maniacs. My objection is to the vicarious
and perverted pleasure they derive from anonymous confession of their
outlandish proclivities. This does not guarantee them a passport to
immortality or enhanced and ecstatic orgasmic bliss. It just proclaims
their prurience and fear of public shame to the world as confirmed by
their pseudonyms and anonymous identities. I am of the school that
experience is better than idle daydreaming. If one is constrained by
circumstances and meets the Satyr’s satirical definition of a consultant
being one who knows sixty-four ways of making love but has never met a
woman, armchair voyeurism is hardly a sensible way out; unless it leads to
a flimsy but more concrete basis for solving problems of one’s mind with a
solution in one’s hand.
Anyway let us come to the more serious matter at hand. The obsession with
Bollywood is not unnatural to a certain extent and many of us fortunate
enough to be domiciled in Bombay during our youth, spent hours waiting for
a reasonably close glimpse of glamorous film-stars for a few moments. To
the best of my recollection and unscientific polling amongst my age
cohorts, our interest was primarily in those of the opposite sex, to
indulge in our fantasies at a later time. The interest in those stars of
our own sex was based on reluctant admiration heavily laden with envy. The
idea of worship to the point of building fan clubs or temples to those
whose religious orientation did not even permitting them to praying in or
entering a temple would have struck my generation as patently absurd,
obscene, unthinkable and abasing to the point of lacking self-esteem and
sense. The ever expandable Hindu pantheon and incredibly shrinking mind
have no limits. This is not to belittle the artistic talents of actors,
singers etc. or the hormone driven non-reflective brains of youth, but
there have to be limits even to the irrationality of the young. I am not
setting myself as some moral police, but bemoan the waste of generations
of the young and their vast resources of energy that could be at least
partially diverted to their own benefit or that of the community and
nation.
In a similar manner, I am all for hours of actively playing poor cricket
rather than prolonged armchair viewing, which is the current form of Roman
Empire circuses and arenas. I am not against admiration of skill and high
compensation for it, though I admit I am bothered by the fact that a top
scientist’s rewards are a pittance in comparison. Spectator sports are a
form of voyeurism and when they become obsessive and time consuming, they
rot the mind. Incidentally this pathological obsession with armchair
voyeurism for sports and stars is equally prevalent in America, but it
doesn’t seem to herd the majority into a one channel blind alley to the
same extent. In India, the youth and thus later in time, the older
population are ignorant of history, science, arts, music and are single
mindedly focused on survival at different levels of affluence and ascent
along that ladder. It is this small but critical differential makeup of
the population that spells the national outcomes of becoming colonizers or
colonized.
Boloji.com is owned and managed by
Boloji Media Inc Privacy Policy |
Disclaimer No part of this Internet site may
be reproduced without prior written permission of the copyright holder.
