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.