We will talk about the sad-state-of-affairs only on a day that we do good

It was Woody Allen who famously said, “Life doesn’t imitate art, actually, it imitates bad television.” Earlier, I would stumble away from some homes where you wondered if the saas-bahu, devrani-jethani, ‘co-brothers’, etc dynamics were actual, real, or whether people were mouthing dialogues from Marathi and Hindi TV.

In the last some weeks, it has been worse: life is not so much imitating the soap opera dramas as it is the Big Fight and We the People and other such Indian TV news (and full-to entertainment under the name of news) programmes. Go into any sitting room these days, and you will hear everyone present being judge, jury, hangman, statistician, economist and sociologist and psychologist. In right-royal Indian ‘intelligentsia’ style, everyone talks at the same time, shouts loudly, and does a very good imitation of being on some panel discussion of experts. From crimes against women, to poverty, to corruption, to police, to politician, to caste, to class, to family values, to Indian-ness, to Sheila Dixit et al, the topics go round and round and round, with the same kind of brash, confident declarations, theories and prognostications that we see on TV.  

Pontification about ‘rural youth’, based on a single one-day visit circa 1994 to ‘the villages’, or based on what we glean from the domestic help, is trotted out, and everyone feels so good about being connected to the ‘real India’. Sanctimoniously people nod at each other and ‘admit’ to each other in shocked sincere tones: “You know, we live in such bubbles, but caste DOES exist, you know...” Eh? I want to say? Ehh?? That’s not living in a bubble, it’s living on another planet.

The other thing about these living-room debates, is that no one talks ordinarily anymore, with any kind of tentativeness, no one asks questions or listens to the other. With TV channels becoming our life-coaches, everyone in these living room debates simply must say their ‘piece to camera’, just like they do on TV, and talk right through the other person who may want to get his or her two-paisa’s worth in. People even act the part, punching the air, making mundane point upon point, throwing in micro-miniaturized testimonials (when I was in so-and-so city, when My kids were small, when My maid this, and when I went to get a license for that), and generally creating sound bytes rather than exploring a topic. Obviously I do not have any idea about the rules-of-engagement at such dos. I find that no one listens to anything that I may want to say, and I am best left to wander around looking at the host’s paintings and partaking of his/her hospitality.  Delhi is of course the worst kind of place for such a thing, where your invisibility and inaudibility becomes something of an amusement to yourself. You could well sit in a corner and sing an entire Yaman Kalyan right from alaap, jod, bada khayal, drut, tarana and on to a light thumri in Mishra Khamaj, and no one will notice you in a room such as this, full of theorizers and ‘opinion-makers’. Try it. If you can’t sing a raga, then try saying the multiplication table from 12 to 20. No one will notice.

Mumbai is slightly better, but only slightly. At least the room full of people will stop and look curiously at you if you start doing something strange, and THEN you will get a chance to contribute to the Big Fight with your very own theories about life in India. But Pune living rooms seem new to all of this, and never mind if hardly anyone out of these Great Debaters shows up at condolence meetings or protests, they retain the armchair right to rage on about Current Affairs.

Perhaps one new year resolution will do us much more good: Talk about the rotten state of Indian public, private, street, school and home life, only on the day that you have done some small thing that makes life more bearable for you and for one other person who is not related to you – even if it is the smallest of gestures. It has to be something that is directly related to and impacts all those things that we sit around wagging our heads in despair about.

Gouri Dange

Pune Mirror