Are WE Becoming a Nation Bereft of Creativity?

I believe that cinema and television is a mirror of the society. Movies are influenced by the society and movies influence society. All the art that is created is nothing but a product of the time it is created in and reflects that time deliberately or otherwise. This belief and two recent events led to the creation of this entry:

1. Watching Delhi Belly and seeing it becoming a success and then have Amitabh performing in Buddha Hoga Tera Bap. Success of Delhi Belly represents to me the bankruptcy of ideas and creativity in contemporary Bollywood. A movie so coarse and tasteless goes on to become a big success and would probably inspire a number of such movies in near future. What is surprising is that the very people who used to denounce the comedy genre of David Dhawan and Govinda are gaga over this movie on social network and all other possible mediums. Probably the same jokes become acceptable in English or may be the dearth of entertainment options makes any mediocre flick a good one? What made me convinced of this was to see Amitabh once again give his best to a hopeless script. It is unbelievable that we do not have the script-writing talent in our country that can do justice to a performer like Amitabh. May be we do have the scriptwriting talent but do not have enough producers willing to put money into anything but Delhi Belly genre. In any case, it is unfortunate that we keep seeing Amitabh wasting himself in this era of mediocre and copycat writers, producers and directors. Whenever I see short series like ‘You don’t know Jack’ and ‘Mildred Pierce’ produced by HBO that have lead characters perfectly written for greats like Al Pacino and Kate Winslet, I wonder if I would ever get to something like that in my home country for greats like Amitabh, Anupam Kher, Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi and others.

2. From Bollywood to its small screen cousin, the television. I watched the Coke Studio on YouTube after reading rave reviews of some of the performances on social network. I then did some reading and figured that this format was invented in our next door neighbor and we gladly copied it. Reading some of the usual exchange of views of Indian and Pakistani bloggers, it appeared the Coke Studio of Pakistan produced much better music and that the Indian version should hopefully soon catch up. That got me thinking – when was the last time we had an original format of our own on TV? I could think of the entire ‘Saas Bahu’ genre invented by Ekta Kapoor in 2000. That innovation led to hundreds of copycat and even today this genre continues to dominate the Indian television. All the reality TV we see is an adoption of formats invented in the west in the local context. While I do understand and agree with the notion that in a rapidly globalizing world where audience tends to have a global taste for entertainment, adoption is not only commercially sensible but also a necessity, I can’t understand how we can completely sidetrack innovation. In a country that is home to one of the world’s oldest civilizations, is home to all the great religions of the world, has both the worlds richest and the worse destitute group and has an immensely diverse landscape, I fail to understand how come we do not have anything that sounds ‘Originally Indian’.

I understand I am asking a strong question based on two events that are highly subjective and may be brushed aside as too serious a take on something that’s just plain simple stupid entertainment. So tell me what you think.

Mumbai Blasts - time for action is now.

As the news of Mumbai attacks started pouring in with the start of my day, I started wondering if our government placed any value of the Human Life. Just the other day, we read the unfortunate news of two major train accidents in which more than 67 people died and hundred were left injured.

Reaction of our government was predictable - spineless condemnation of the attacks in the strongest possible words. However what was extremely frustrating was the remarks of Home Minister and Rahul Gandhi. We can ignore the comments of Rahul Gandhi as naivete but Chidambram's reading of the situation was unfortunate and reflected the bankruptcy of grit in this Congress led government. Chidambram's shameless chest-thumping of the fact Mumbai was safe for more than 31 months till the last night and that there was no intelligence failure reflects the lack of accountability that prevails in this government starting with the Prime Ministers office.

I searched for the history of major terrorist attacks in India and was shocked to realize that our country has been hit 14 times since 1993 - that makes it almost one major attack each year. Starting with the Mumbai serial blasts in 1993 till last nights bombings. 11 of these 14 major attacks have occurred during the Congress led or Congress supported government. During 6 years of BJP government, we had 3 major attacks - Parliament attack in 2001, the Akshardham temple attack in 2002 and Gateway of India attack in 2003. Since this Congress led government came to power in 2004, we have had 9 major attacks - more than 1 major attack each year. To me, this cannot be explained as anything but a failure of the government.

As always we were promised that these attacks would be relentlessly investigated and culprits would be brought to justice. We all know what would happen. The never ending conflict with Pakistan has provided our politician an easy way out. We would soon hear the often repeated outcome that this attack had its epicenter across the border. Dossiers would be sent, fingers would be pointed, heated words exchanged and nothing would happen till another attack takes place and the whole sequence repeats itself.

While we would never know if Pakistan really had a role to play in this attack or those in the past, we do know for a fact that we have not been able to secure our borders nor have we been able to build a smart intelligence network. Our military and economy outnumbers that of Pakistan by a few times and despite that if we cannot shut them out, then it is a failure on our side. There is no point blaming them. We all know Pakistani government is not in control of their military and the religious extremists. Even if they wanted to help us beat these terrorists, they cant. This leaves us with two simple solutions - either we secure our borders and strengthen our intelligence to a point where these terrorists become helpless. Or, we do what the US decided to do - to unilaterally take out these terrorists. We all know Dawood Ibrahim lives a luxurious life in Karachi and there are training camps across the border. Lets just take them out without any fuss. Secondly, the government needs to rise above the vote bank politics when it comes to terrorist attacks. We need to make sure that perpetrators are investigated regardless of their affiliation to any religious institution. If this means we need to take out some of the Madarsas spreading radical Islam within our borders, we would need to go for it. If it means, we need to rein in the small but growing influence of violence within some of the Hindu organizations like Bajrang Dal, we need to go for it.

We need to make sure we make this government take responsibility this time and take concrete steps. I do hope BJP rises to the occasion - it is time that Narendra Modi is brought to the front at National Level. Advani and oldies seem to have lost their vigour to provide effective opposition and provide the people a leadership that is so desperately required.