A curious notion has been gaining currency in the media. That people are no longer interested in entertainment and sports. Maybe the statistics reveal new sectors of popular interest. That wouldn’t be surprising after three decades of politics being framed as audio-visual entertainment, even if it’s often of the gothic sort. Leave aside our Bigg Boss-like news TV. It seems only firangs watch that now, strictly for entertainment. (If you haven’t seen that reel of two white men guffawing over Indian war coverage, go google!) There’s plenty of everything gushing around in the online circulatory systems: comedy, tragedy, slasher gore, podcast pedants, QAnon types, globe-trotting lefties, all attracting more footfalls than cinema halls.
One does get the distinct sense that average political engagement levels are much higher among the Twenty20s—the generation in that tender age bracket in this decade—than at any other time before. The explosion of content has sent curiosity skyrocketing. The Uber driver from Agra wants to know about Bhindranwale. Sophomores are asking ChatGPT about Suhrawardy. Kurds may rank higher on search engine stats than curd. The media is obliging. According to this theory, what everyone is consuming the most is this new artefact called explainers: on every possible topic.
Especially “geopolitics”. It used to be a rarefied topic. Even the word was reserved for 5-megaton oped pieces. Not anymore. Not with asymmetric wars becoming as ambient as air pollution, and Donald J Trump emerging as the new mathematical puzzle that even AI can’t solve. The questions mob us from all sides. From the stock market to your sleep, everything is in the red in this Age of Anxiety.
You can’t blame young people for wanting to know why things are so messed up. That has turned us into a textbook nation! Not an ideal one, just one where even adults are now consuming knowledge in easy-to-digest Q&A capsules. In any case, we are society of exam-takers, leak or no leak. So we in the media too turn into a Kota coaching centre.
But who says entertainment has lost its hold on our psyche? The latest successful startup in Indian politics has come via cinema. The entire youthful sap of our ancient Tamil lands was diverted to underwriting the phenomenal rise of Vijay. Talk to anyone beyond their 50s, and you hear stories of them being emotionally blackmailed into voting TVK by their children or grandchildren! The background chatter has it that Vijay came into politics because the scion of the previous dispensation was making it difficult for him to function in the film industry. In short, a filmi fight spilled into the political field. That proves South Indian politics has not quit its long romance with cinema. Even the new Kerala CM scored a few brownie points with the youth by putting out that he was a regular at film festivals!
As for West Bengal, if you think the big fight is ‘The CM vs Mamata Banerjee’, you are wholly wrong. Half the social media space is devoted to ‘The Trolls vs Rachana Banerjee’. The former Bengali actress a.k.a. Jhumjhum—a self-styled Didi No 1 of local TV, and now a Rajya Sabha member—had recently hopped from the real TMC to the rebel TMC. At that point, she stirred the pot saying it takes a bit of class “to stay in Urbana”, referring to her champagne-class Kolkata colony, and made a throwaway remark about a “footpath girl”. You can imagine how that went.
In Punjab, it’s a more sombre story. A stark film failed in a years-long battle with the censors. Unlike the blind film censor in Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Teheran, they actually watched it and pronounced quietus by a thousand cuts. Anyway, it had Diljit Dosanjh, who has a knack of putting the ruling order in a pickle. Suddenly, under the name Satluj, it was put out on OTT. Only to vanish again. Initially, there was no official ban but it soon came. Now it’s on just about every WhatsApp group, being furiously shared, to be watched no later than this weekend. Even gurdwaras are holding screenings.
A generation or two is discovering the fraught history of India through a film. Or through explainers—for, geopolitics isn’t absent. The young were being encouraged to the path of violence by another country. A State crackdown, even if excessive, was made necessary, they say—the Constitution and civil rights sometimes have to kept aside for a little while. In short, the law has to abolish itself so as to uphold the law.
Thus, a nation and its founding paradoxes are meeting in an encounter. KPS Gill’s family, one of whom is otherwise a paragon of liberal thought, is defending the mass burials of Punjab. But the human stories were bound to emerge from the grave like ghosts, in the form of poetry, protest, song or film. The parallels with Bengal are striking. Both states suffered the mayhem of Partition, saw strife with Naxalism and militancy, lost a whole generation to the state’s bullets, and finally rejoined the mainstream—thanks to those bullets, they say. Both states subsequently also saw an economic decline. Even if Punjab looks prosperous on the outside, it is fragile within.
What was the original question? Yes, if politics has become entertainment, the reverse is also true and the proof is probably playing on a small screen near you.
Santwana Bhattacharya | Interest Free
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