We love being entertained. The sillier the flick, the more we flock to it. From Laxmi Mittal to Lord Meghnad Desai, everyone’s a fan of Bollywood. It’s getting bigger, brighter, stupider. But who cares? We are busy boasting about size, scale, budgets and star fees as the average shelf life of our movies has dropped to a week and a half, and the House Full sign is as rare as the unicorn.
Our festivals are also becoming tamashas. They have less to do with faith and religion, more to do with spectacle and celebration. There’s no scope left for intimate conversations with God. It’s all about fancy rituals and noisy worship, lots of song and dance. The same is true for politics. The nation’s biggest spectacle today is the elections. For weeks before that, movie stars, singers, squint-eyed comics, poets, musicians and charismatic criminals crisscross India selling ideology and candidates to mesmerised audiences. We no longer vote for issues. We vote for the spectacle. If you can’t bring a star on your campaign trail, you may as well not contest.
We are converting everything into entertainment these days. Take sports. Cricket’s no longer the charming but dreary game it once was. It’s a carnival today spanning live events with cheerleaders, round the clock live TV coverage, branding, merchandising, million dollar sponsorships and (ofcourse) illegal gambling. Even the village idiot knows where the maximum money’s made. Those who drive the game now are the ubiquitous movie stars, businessmen and politicians. The IPL has taken away forever whatever little claim cricket had left to sporting activity. Now it’s full on tamasha and the stakes are huge. My guess is you will soon see many more sports emulate this profitable model. The next step will be to legalise gambling. With the BCCI’s enormous clout I don’t see that as a problem.
But the big new tamasha on the scene is the Budget. For weeks before, the media builds it up to look like the year’s most dramatic event. Yet nothing really happens on Budget day that’s ever impacted our lives for the better. Yes, sometimes it hurts us bad but then we attribute it to the evil ways of politics and move on with our lives. You can chuck as many stones as you want, burn as many buses you choose to. But that’s not going to make the slightest difference. The vested interests at play are far too strong for the Government to make changes for our sake. Every decision taken in the budget is meant to benefit someone. The big boys of the corporate world play these games either directly or, when that’s not possible, through their political friends who proffer all the apt ideological arguments required for these decisions. Only an ass believes the Budget is meant for you and me. It’s meant for the guys who keep the ruling party in power. The Budget’s their payback time.
The fun is in watching how this non-event has become such a fantastic tamasha. TV has taken my friend Palkivala’s place. The great Government PR machine works overtime through its pet journalists to create the right atmosphere for tough decisions to be taken. Weeks before the Budget you begin to see articles argue with great ardour that difficult decisions are critical for the nation and the Government must not shirk from taking them. As Budget day comes closer, the stories get more high pitched. Keep a careful watch and you will know exactly what’s likely to happen. All the clues are there over the preceding weeks. Ultimately, the silliest decisions taken, from reducing the price of latex to the tax on balloons, appear to be in the nation’s vital interest. You can scream your lungs out but the nation has been already primed by the media to welcome the Budget. If however the outcry is too much or the stock market suddenly collapses, Plan B comes into operation. A few token rollbacks will instantly show how responsive the Government is to public opinion. It’s all pre-planned.
That’s why the tamasha. It masks the serious issues and allows us the pleasure of dumbing down everything to the level of popular, brainless entertainment. Our movies have gone that way. Theatre too. TV as well. Our sports, our politics. Why not our Budget? Why not environmental issues? Why not conduct foreign affairs as tamasha? Why not reduce everything to nonsense? That will ensure the Government can get away with anything. Farmers are committing suicide in Vidarbha? Let’s build a huge Shivaji statue in Mumbai, in the middle of the Arabian Sea. A few more million families have slid below the poverty line? Let’s offer 3G to the nation. Cost of basic food items going up? No issue. Let’s make cell phones cheaper. Healthcare’s unaffordable. Hospitals are a mess. Let’s make balloons excise free. Jobs are vanishing? No problem. Let’s allot Rs 3000 crore in the Budget to give everyone an ID card. Every problem has an equal and irrelevant response in our time.
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