Givvup Only Are There

Jet Airways has very few domestic planes equipped for inflight entertainment; but it’s inflight entertainment systems completely pwns Kingfisher’s inflight TV (which shows some shady Zee network channels, and horrors of horrors, Kambakht Ishq). You get touch screens, video and music on demand, the flight path interface is nicer; and quite a selection of movies and TV episodes. My dad, who travels Delhi-Chennai and back twice a month these days complains that they haven’t updated the selection in two months, but this was the first time I was traveling on a Jet flight with the entertainment system, so it was all new to me.

I wasn’t interested in either the Hindi or English movies they had, so I went through the TV section. They had an episode of Sarabhai vs Sarabhai, which I liked, but somehow Ravikiran’s raving about it had led me to expect more. Perhaps it was one of the weaker episodes, or perhaps the humour only comes through with multiple episodes. Anyhow. Sarabhai v/s Sarabhai was good, but what was really brilliant was that this flight got me on to Disney Channel shows - notably Sonny With A Chance. I loved Sonny With A Chance. It sent up soap operas, has a nerd-girl who builds catapults, and despite being a kid’s show, the writers sneaked in enough innuendo for a couple of That’s What She Said moments (“Stop blowing. Start talking.”). And they also did something I’m very fond of – setting up a joke in one segment, and then delivering the punchline much later¹ (the setup involves the catapult mentioned earlier). Oh, and this is for Rahul Raguram – according to Wikipedia, Demi Lovato is a fan of symphonic black metal band Dimmu Borgir. All in all, brilliant stuff, and I think I shall thulp the whole season soon.

I also saw The Suite Life on Deck, which was funny in parts (London Tipton! Bwahahhahah!), but not extraordinary; and Hannah Montana, which brings us to the second part of this post.

So… Hannah Montana. In case you don’t already know this, in Hannah Montana Billy Ray Cyrus and his daughter Miley Cyrus play the country singer Robbie Ray Stewart and his daughter Miley Stewart. And Miley Stewart’s secret identity is Hannah Montana, teen pop-star. And frankly, the whole layers and layers of self-reference (or as the darling girlfriend puts it, “self-referencing her ass like yeah“) are a pain to sort out. The only thing worse is reading the Wikipedia entries of professional wrestlers, where trying to work out what the wrestler did as part of kayfabe, what the wrestler did as a side project, and what the wrestler got up to by accident, and what the wrestler does while he (or she) is at home leaves you dizzy.

But of course, Miley Stewart self-referencing Miley Cyrus and then the whole thing becoming a recursive joke through Hannah Montana is no more self-referential than all of Bollywood, especially the Bachchan family and Shah Rukh Khan. Shah Rukh Khan plays Shah Rukh Khan in Billu and Om Shanti Om, all the My Name is Khan promos try to be cute by having them man say that his name is Khan, and so on and so forth. And the father-son in-jokes every time Abhishek and Amitabh Bachchan are in the same movie got tiresome about five minutes after they started. (Here’s an old Jabberwock post on the subject.)

Which actually makes Miley Cyrus not as bad as Bollywood. In her case, one can at least blame the self-referencing on her faceless² corporate handlers at Disney. In Bollywood, there are no such corporate handlers, and the blame is all on the stars and the writers themselves.

The only thing that comes close is how almost every Colin Firth movie contains a reference to his Pride and Prejudice role, and even then, they’re only one off jokes and Colin Firth does not actually play Colin Firth. Except in Bridget Jones’ Diary, but every dog is allowed one bite.

Summing up: Referencing is sexy. Self-referencing is intellectual masturbation. In Bollywood’s case, though, it’s not even intellectual³.

¹: Terry Pratchett is the master of this. In Thief of Time, he sets up the joke by describing the abbot of a monastery having re-incarnated as a fully sentient baby; and then about eighty pages later delivers a punchline about him being in touch with his inner child. And though it’s implausible that he planned it that way, you could argue that he sets up a joke in The Light Fantastic by magically transforming the Librarian into an orang-utan; and then eight books later, in Moving Pictures, he delivers the punchline of having a screaming ape being carried up a tower by a giant woman being pure cinema. Eight books between setup and punchline is hardcore wait-for-it.
²:OK, not actually faceless in the metaphorical sense since Disney has an active brand (many active brands, in fact); and not faceless in the literal sense since it’s very unlikely that people working at Disney don’t have faces. Though the thought of Disney employing an army of featureless golems to manage Miley Cyrus’s career is sort of awesome.
³: Similar to how Professor Ramnath Narayanswamy once told my batch “The majority of you have indulged in creative bullshitting, most of it not even creative.”

written by Aadisht \\ tags: abhishek, amitabh, autofellatio, bachchan, billu, bollywood, catapult, circle jerk, colin firth, creative bullshitting, darcy, demi lovato, disney channel, genre, hai la, ham, hannah montana, helen fielding, inflight entertainment, Jet Airways, JetScreen, librarian, luck by chance, middle class, miley cyrus, om shanti om, pride and prejudice, sarabhai vs sarabhai, soap opera, sonny with a chance, terry pratchett, that's what she said, the suite life, twss, video on demand, wankery, zora

Sagarika Ghose has a blogpost up that can be summarised as follows:

“I went to St. Stephens. I enjoyed it. Therefore I know that the education system is fine, and that all you philistines who did not go to St. Stephens should stop talking about how much the education system sucks, otherwise you will become a nation of idiots.”

When the poor woman has stopped hyperventilating about how appalling it is that her hard-to-obtain education is being devalued by a mere movie, can somebody please tell her that being snobbish about having gone to St. Stephen’s is so twentieth century? These days, you can be snobbish about what you buy if you’re a yuppie, what you do if you’re a hippie, or the size of your SEZ if you’re a lala. Or, given that we’re in the Great Recession, about how frugal you are. And if you must resort to education, please bring at least an Ivy League degree or a PhD to the game. St. Stephen’s just doesn’t cut it any longer – I mean, even Shashi Tharoor went there.

(Note: haven’t actually seen the movie, which is why I’ve refrained from an argument about whether it’s accurate or not.)

written by Aadisht \\ tags: cnn ibn, condescending, condescension, rajkumar hirani, sagarika ghose, shashi tharoor, snobbery, st stephens, three idiots, web 2.0

Samar Halarnkar is pissed off that Indian FM radio stations only play Bollywood songs and puerile PJs (a sentiment I share to some extent) and proposes a solution in the Hindustan Times – putting AIR on steroids.

AIR has found fans like me — though let me confess that before I ‘discovered’ AIR, I was quite addicted to a radio spot in Mumbai called ‘Kamla ka hamla’, the random outpourings of a fast-talking transvestite — not because of a grand plan to counter the explosion of private radio but because it is a public broadcaster that is not beholden to the demands of the mass market.

Ideally, public-service radio must give voice to and reflect the needs of democracy’s silent majorities and minorities. It cannot be left entirely to the whimsical flick of a few hundred million wrists. “Broadcasting,” as Tony Benn, a British socialist politician once observed, “is really too important to be left to the broadcasters.”

…

An AIR with vision and verve could lead India’s radio revival. Imagine if it became a National Public Radio, the wonderful public-radio network in the US. There are many like us, waiting for lively, intelligent radio.

So because Samar Halarnkar is too cheap to buy an iPod and download podcasts (or a Worldspace receiver for that matter), the taxpayers of India must shell out their money to revamp AIR and the brightest people in government must go build a vision and verve for public radio instead of, oh I dunno, fixing the university system or conducting police reform or something.

For this he gets paid to be a columnist?

written by Aadisht \\ tags: cheap guy, does he even know about radio license fees?, he can move to goa or bangalore and put radio indigo, i still miss rj malavika, national public radio, podcast, radio, samar halarnkar

This Independence Day, I achieved two long-standing dreams.

The first was at the Landmark Quiz Chennai. We (me, Skimpy and Kodhi) won it.

The three of us have been taking part in the Landmark or Odyssey quizzes since 2004. We’d do our August 15/ January 26 pilgrimage to Chennai and just miss qualifying, or qualify and then come last. This year, we qualified. We didn’t get knocked out. And we were on brilliant form, cracking questions throughout the quiz and peacefully winning.

We then went into the all-India finals, and ended up losing by one question, but so it goes. No Enthu Da is now established as a quiz team. We have a reputation. Another couple of years like this, and we could start getting name recognition like QED or Mama Machaan Mapillai. Sooner or later, we’ll win the national round too.

That was dream one. The second dream got fulfilled just after the Chennai round, when the three of us were interviewed by the Chennai local news channel.

Reporter: How does it feel to win?

Kodhi: One of the things in life’s to-do list has been checked off.

Reporter: So have you been quizzing lots before this?

Wimp: Yes, we’ve been coming here and trying to win for five years now.

Reporter: So how do you feel on Independence Day? What does Independence Day mean to you?

Me: Freedom is awesome! It’s great that we have freedom and now we should help other countries with freedom too. To the north you have China being high-handed so we should support free Tibet.

Why was this fulfilling a dream? Well, the news channel is a joint venture between NDTV and The Hindu.

Abusing The Hindu in The New Indian Express is one thing. Expressing pro-Tibet opinions on a Hindu owned media outlet is one of the greatest hacks I’ve ever pulled. Now, as with the Landmark Quiz, it’s time to raise the game – the new goals are to win the national Landmark, and to somehow write an anti-China or anti-CPM oped in The Hindu itself.

written by Aadisht \\ tags: chennai, china's national newspaper, chindu, landmark open, landmark quiz, no enthu da, professional quizzer vinod, qed, samanth, swami the ht commie, the hindu

Gideon Haigh has a rant on Cricinfo about Citi Moments of Success and DLF Maximums. (via Udups on Twitter).

Rather than just complain I think we as viewers should empower ourselves by giving our own names to boundaries. I propose the following names for fours and sixes for each of the teams:

• A four hit by the Daredevils will be called a Rashtrapati Bhavan and a six will be called Chandni Chowk
• For the Mumbai Indians, Girgaon and Malabar Hill
• Royal Challengers: Basavangudi and JC Nagar
• Super Kings: Luz Church Road and Cathedral
• Chargers: Khairatabad and Karuwansahu
• Knight Riders: Shyambazar and Beadon Street
• Royals: Arjunlal Sethi Nagar and Bani Park
• Tragically, the Kings XI do not have any special names under this nomenclature system

Admittedly, “What a magnificent Luz Church Road by Hayden” is a bit of a mouthful, and Chandni Chowk can be confused with chauka, but I think this is a small price to pay for sticking it to Lalit Modi (who incidentally has started reminding me of Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler).

(In case you didn’t get it – pssst.)

written by Aadisht \\ tags: corporate sponsorship, corporate whoredom, cut me own throat dibbler, indian premier league, ipl, lalit modi, the man

Continuing my grand tradition of blogging about things long after they take place, I draw your attention to some astoundingly dumb MSM commentary about the Pink Chaddi Campaign.

First is this Pioneer editorial by Kanchan Gupta. It isn’t even worth a fisk – just three questions:

1. Did Kanchan Gupta even bother to visit the facebook group before he wrote this?
2. Does Kanchan Gupta seriously think that the Coalition of Loose etc. Women is actually promoting alcoholism and promiscuity or does he suffer from sarcasm deficiency?
3. Does Kanchan Gupta even know that something called sarcasm exists?

Then, there was Sagarika Ghose’s editorial in the Hindustan Times (linking to IBN site ‘cos the HT site is throwing errors). After spending a considerable amount of time trying to extract meaning from her ramble, I have concluded that she is accusing the Pink Chaddi Campaign of being frivolous,

Which is why the battle for freedom and the battle for progress must be a sensible and a rational one; it can’t be a trivial battle where we fling coloured underwear at maniacs.

the modern youth of today of flaunting their modernity and youth,

Maybe India’s young instead of trying to be like characters from Sex In The City, should try to emulate Sarojini Naidu and Jawaharlal Nehru. While the ghastly cultural hoodlums must be dealt with sternly by the law and handed out exemplary and speedy punishment, the lifestyle norms we choose, especially in public places, must be attuned somewhat at least to our surroundings.

and for good measure, suggests that everyone follow in the footsteps of the elites of the 1950s.

We must learn from the Nehruvians of the 40s and 50s who were incredibly westernised, but deeply rooted; many of whom were rich but lived modest tasteful lives. They drank, they smoked and they romanced, yet they were discreet and embodied a tradition of Indian elitism that was rooted in both excellence as well as tradition.

I suppose that as the senior editor of a channel which has popularised the SMS poll as a form of discourse, and maniacs screaming at each other as a form of debate, Sagarika Ghose is well placed to comment on the frivolity or triviality of a particular exercise.

As far as the point about flaunting modernity or being discreet is concerned, I think it’s a remarkable idea and should be followed to the hilt. If you are fortunate enough to have liberal parents, or rich enough to own your own farmhouse where your servants can tend to all your guests, you can enjoy your drink. If you’re merely aspiring middle class and need to go to public spaces for your leisure – you know, like most of Sagarika Ghose’s viewers – you should just suppress your urges or you might spark off a revolution. (Note: Ravikiran has plaigarised my blogpost and backdated it. Cheater!)

Anyway, to ward off painful arguments in the comments, let me also say:

1. The dichotomy of alcoholism-promiscuity / sobriety-traditionalism was started not by the Pink Chaddiers, but by the Ram Sene. In that case, if people respond to it by saying that they’d pick being drunk, promiscuous and ridiculous to being suppressed and not allowed to exercise their freedom, that’s entirely justified.
2. Yes, the Pink Chaddi Campaign is frivolous. So? Indian public protests are usually trivial and accomplish nothing. At least this one was amusing and creative, which got it much more footage and participation than it would have otherwise. And who’s to say that it won’t be the platform for something much more productive some time down the line? A collection of passionate people has its own value.
3. In case you plan to use the “how would you feel if it was your sister!” argument, please note that a) I don’t have a sister, b) what my hypothetical sister does on her time is not your concern, c) what my hypothetical sister does on her time is not my concern, either.

written by Aadisht \\ tags: bloody mary, daily pioneer, face the nation, frivolity, hindustan times, kanchan gupta, pink chaddi campaign, sagarika ghose, sms poll

Shiv Viswanathan and Sadanand Menon annoy me. They both have columns/ op-eds up about the Mangalore pub incident which hint at some interesting ideas. But these guys can’t seem to realise that writing for newspapers is not the same as academic writing. There’s so academic or generally postmodern jargon in their pieces, that only the most dedicated general reader won’t flee in terror. And even when you have a reader like me who struggles through the piece anyway, there’s a sense of annoyance at the end of it – if there hadn’t been so much jargon, these guys could have spent more of their word limit exploring their genuinely interesting fundaes.

Let’s take a look at Shiv Viswanathan first:

In India, the word ‘culture’ is used in a variety of ways. Culture refers to an identity, an umbilical chord, an epidermis, a pretext for rationalising behaviour, and an everyday habit. It is a second skin. But politicised, it has a different meaning. The historical dictum that nationalism is the last refuge of scoundrels can be extended to culture, which has become the last refuge of every goon wishing to join politics.

This paragraph is just a series of buzzwords. Sure, culture could be an epidermis and an umbilical cord, but how is that relevant to the rest of the article? If I was being charitable to Shiv Viswanathan, I’d think he was writing this in a stream of consciousness style. If I wasn’t, I’d accuse him of faffing.

The park and pub are probably the two public spaces easily available for younger people. Both get disciplined in the name of an imaginary “public” and an imagined “culture”. Let us not dub this as moral policing, a variant of the thought police made legendary by Orwell in 1984. Policing in India is a strange function. Parents, neighbours, peer groups, the crowd, all police you. In fact, policing is performed in India by everyone except police. So moral policing is misleading because it is not an act of censorship. What one witnessed is plain brutality justified in terms of half-baked politics. Beyond exclusion and negation these parties have no programme.

 

This bit is the genuinely interesting one – it has an idea about public spaces, and who actually owns or shares these. But it isn’t built upon. Again, to be fair, it may not have been his main point – he concentrates more on violence and dialogue towards the end – but if he didn’t spend so much time faffing and using jargon he would have more space with which to explore the good ideas.

We face a clash of two limited ideas of culture both claiming a set of virtues. If one claims “freedom” the other claims “duty” and “tradition”. Both are ersatz ideas of culture. Both need a hearing as long as they avoid violence. In fact it is violence that enfeebles the sena idea of culture. The sena idea of politics is what needs to be challenged. Whether as Ram Sene or Shiv Sena, its politics is illiterate and it sees violence as the answer to any dissenting, ethnic, marginal group asserting itself. The police, who probably share these values, watch in complicity. Only the media’s sense of outrage creates it as an event. To legislate on morals and aesthetics through such violence is futile.

(New Indian Express)

Ersatz? Does anybody outside the JNU campus even know what that means? Couldn’t he just have said substitute or phony or proxy? And again, there are far too many repeated statements – he’s saying the same thing over and over again. If there had been an exploration of how the hearing of the two ideas in a non-violent environment was to be conducted, that would actually have been valuable. But no. Shyeah!

Then there’s Sadanand Menon. This is actually one of his less jargon filled pieces. I read his monthly column in Better Photography and my head spins at the language he uses there (and this is a magazine where the majority of the readership probably doesn’t even have English as a first language). But anyway – here are the interesting and the bad bits from his piece:

In Chennai, going to buy liquor from the government controlled TASMAC shops is an utterly anti-civilisational, self-demeaning act. The atmosphere around these shops is filthy beyond description. You have to gingerly manoeuvre your steps between dollops of spit and phlegm, remains of old and fresh vomit, broken bottles, remains of the plastic pouches in which vendors sell kadalai (boiled gram) and pickles, puddles of piss in the corners, drunks lying sprawled in the muck and a general air of depravity and squalor which beggars imagination.

From such a scene of apostasy, which even a Victor Hugo would have been hard put to capture in Les Miserables, to reach say Kathmandu, is a culture shock. Here you can walk into a vegetable or provision store and buy Khukhri Rum at a price that can wean you off water for ever. Or in Panjim, where everything is bright, clean, transparent, open and civilised. Mahe has some of the most stylish and well-designed wine shops.

…

The regime of controls, bans, prohibitions and state monopolies, besides being anti-democratic, never achieves its purpose. It only produces a sort of moral cramping, an aesthetic stunting. Alcohol consumption must be re-invested with the dignity and decency of democratic choice where the State, instead of treating alcohol merely as a source for revenue generation, also acknowledges its potential for mature socialising, conviviality and celebration.

There must also be a parallel movement to offer a peg and a toast to the moral police, which needs to recover the best of Indian civilisation. The dehumanising effects of alcohol (as well as its grotesque retailing) can be offset by the humanising power of freedom and choice and creativity. After all, as Omar Khayyam said, ‘What can a vintner buy, half as precious as what he sells’?

(Business Standard)

written by Aadisht \\ tags: alcohol, culture, freedom, jargon, pub, sadanand menon, shiv viswanathan, tasmac, violence

One last TV/ pop-sociology post, and then I’m done with the topic for a long, long time.

So lala-yuppie-hippie is one framework of classification which separates different shows on TV. But then there are shows which are 100% hippie. And then they sub-classify their characters using some different framework. For example Mind Your Language and it’s Indian ripoff Zabaan Sambhal Ke differentiated characters using national/ regional stereotypes.

These days my cousin and aunt fight over the remote. This is because my aunt wants to watch the aforementioned Radha ki Betiyaan yada yada while my cousin wants to watch Miley Jab Hum Tum, which is  Both are on at the same time. What follows is an attempt to use words to describe the unspeakable horror of Miley Jab Hum Tum.

The unspeakable horror arises because the six main characters (three guys and three girls, of course) are built around stereotypes. This in itself is not a bad thing, but:

1. There is zilch character development beyond the stereotypes
2. The stereotypes are incredibly old and boring.

There are two different stereotype frameworks which have been used. The characters are students in college and are doing the incredibly hippie course Media Studies. (Must… resist… temptation… to sidetrack into the fascinating recursion of characters on television studying about television.)

So the three male leads have been stereotyped into playboy-nerd-dweeb.Playboy-nerd-dweeb was of course a wonderfully fresh and useful classification back in a) the 1960s b) America, when Archie Comics was at its peak. Considering that this classification doesn’t really exist in India, and that even in America teen demographics have split into goths, emos, geeks, and suchlike, why is it being used on Indian television?

The framework stereotypes used for the female leads are as stale, but at least the framework used here is Indian and not quite as old. The female leads have been split into rich bitch, behenji-turned-mod, and behenji. The rich bitch spends all her time trying to humiliate the behenji and behenji-turned-mod, who are sisters from Morena. (By the way, the Wikipedia entry on Morena is a hilarious rant on Tomar victimhood and the wickedness of Jats. In case it’s brought to a Neutral POV by the time you’re reading this, here’s the permalink to the current revision).

But yeah. So the entire premise of the serial is that people from small towns are uncool, people who’re interested in studies can’t dance, people who dance aren’t interested in studies, and that being an idiot is funny. This could of course have worked back in the 1980s, but the stereotypes are so old by now that there’s nothing left to do with them. Naturally, this makes the serial excellent junk/ comfort food for the brain.

Right, people, that closes my pontifications about TV, pseudosociological classifcations, and the like. We now return to our regular arbit fundaes.

written by Aadisht \\ tags: Archie Comics, behenji, behenji-turned-mod, btm, dweeb, eldritch horror, general entertainment channel, jat, miley jab hum tum, mind your language, Morena, nerd, playboy, rich bitch, star one, stereotype, television, tomar, tv, unspeakable horror, zabaan sambhaal ke

In a comment on the no-yuppies-in-TV post, Rajat wrote:

Even if somebody tries to make a yuppie soap, I suspect that market pressures would force it to morph into a saas-bahu saga. I remember this soap called “Sanjeevani” on Star about a hospital. Seemed to be sensible in the beginning. Slowly elements like scheming colleagues, love polygons etc. were added. I think the limit of any desi soap opera as time tends to infinity is a saas-bahu soap opera.

Axshully, the serial about singing dancing doctors I wrote about in that post is called Dill Mill Gaye (yes, yes, I know) and according to its Wikipedia page, it’s a sequel to Sanjivani. Though since there are hardly any common characters it would be more appropriate to say that the two serials take place in the same continuity/ universe.

But anyway. Coming to Rajat’s point about market pressures slowly forcing everything into saas-bahu-soap-opera-dom. There seems to be enough market demand for singing and dancing that Dill Mill Gaye has settled into an equilibrium of background Hindi film music and inter-doctor romance without any scheming and plotting (though it does have the reaction shots). There’s a clip below if you really want to see for yourself. I am not responsible for the four minutes of your life you will never get back.

But just because it’s settled into a singing-dancing-romance equilibrium, doesn’t mean the producers aren’t occasionally tempted to take the exploitation route to higher ratings.

So a week or two after the Delhi blasts, the serial moved from having doctors in louw, to having doctors in louw… and bombs! After an idyllic existence where the doctors sing and dance, and occcasionally prescribe medicines for headache; the doctors suddenly land up in the middle of a bomb blast scene. There are copious entrails and severed limbs all over the screen in a primetime slot usually associated with light fluffy romance and item numbers. The episode ends with the discovery that the female lead has actually been wired to a bomb, and it detonates if she makes any move, not matter how slight. It was bizarre. And it reverted to the normal singing-dancing-romance in two weeks, as if the characters had never been through a near-death experience at all. Even more bizarre.

So the bad news is that even decently performing serials can suddenly veer away from their premise into something completely unexpected. The good news is that it needn’t necessarily be a veer into K-ness.

written by Aadisht \\ tags: bombsploitation, Dill Mill Gaye, exploitation, Sanjivani, soap opera, star one

So what is it about TV that inspired me to write arbit posts defining lalas, yuppies and hippies? Well, it’s like this. Ever since I started watching TV about four months ago (when I moved in with relatives in Mumbai), I’ve realised this about it – all Indian TV (fiction) programming is centred around lalas and hippies. But never yuppies. As far as the people who make Indian TV serials are concerned, yuppies don’t exist.

Now soap operas of the K variety are of course dominated by lalas. From what little I’ve seen of them (fortunately, my relatives in Mumbai are not devotees) they’re centred around gigantic business joint families where everyone is scheming against each other, often for control of the business. Very lala, really. Even when said soap operas are not of the Balaji K-variety, they tend to involve ginormous lala families.

My cousin watched two soap operas earlier in the year. One involved a female who was dark skinned, so she was married off to a spastic guy. As in, literally spastic. I am not making this up. But the spastic guy belonged to a giant lala family and his sister-in-law schemed against this dark-complexioned chick. So full lala fundaes again.

The other soap opera was halfway between hippie and lala. Like I said, these things are intersecting stereotypes on a Venn Diagram rather than properly mutually-exclusive-collective-exhaustive categories. So anyway this one is about a star kid who’s being launched by his bigger movie star (or maybe director or producer) dad. Now being a movie star is as hippie as it gets, but if you’re being launched by your dad than lala fundaes come into play again.

The point is that in all of this, yuppies are missing.

Cut to now. My aunt’s favourite thing on TV these days is this thing on NDTV Imagine called Radha ki Betiyaan Kuchh Kar Ke Dikhayengeen. It regularly scales new heights of hippieness. It’s about this woman from Meerut who packs up and brings her daughters to Mumbai so that they can be successful in life.

What’s amazing is the path to success these daughters take. The accepted path to success is the yuppie one – become an engineer, then become an MBA, then become a finance professional, and pay off your EMIs for the next thirty years. You would think that these daughters would follow it too. But no! The oldest one gets a job at a fashion design house, which is the borderline between hippie and yuppie. But then she quits to enter a dance contest, and abandons all pretensions of yuppieness. And in fact this goes on throughout the show. The three daughters and their mother perpetually have to raise money for some reason or the other. It’s like watching a Sunday morning kids movie every night at primetime. And instead of doing it the yuppie way and becoming management consultants, they do it buy selling songs they’ve written, taking part in dance contests, and providing Hindi tuitions. Something involving Excel, or even maths done with pencil and paper never crosses their minds. It’s amazing.

Then there’s the stuff my cousin watches. There is first this show on Star One about doctors who seem to spend all their time singing and dancing rather than taking care of patients. So you have singing dancing doctors who never worry about the price of bhindi, or how much rent they’re paying. Come to think of it, they don’t seem to have homes – they just sing and dance at hospital. The point is that yuppie concerns of day-to-day minutiae are given the go-by.

Now it would be okay if the total absence of yuppie characters was restricted to television. But it exists in movies also. There are no yuppie characters in Bollywood either. Everyone in a Hindi movie is blissfully unconcerned about where the money is coming from. When will you ever see a Hindi movie character worrying about rent, or who’s going to clean the toilet? Let’s run through some of the movies in 2008:

• Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na: everyone is hippie or lala. Aditi wants to do a course in filmmaking. I mean, come on. How much more hippie can you get? The guy she gets engaged to has a family business and is lala. Her brother is hippiemax. Even Jai never gets around to being a yuppie. To all indications, his mother doesn’t ever bother about rent because she lives in an owned house – lalaness, again.
• Drona and Love Story 2050: Ok, the characters in these don’t fit any stereotype, but it’s still yuppie exclusion.
• Singh is Kinng: Farmer with a heart of gold becomes head of the Australian mafia. Hippie, hippie, hippie.
• Kidnap: Rich daughter of gazillionaire? Lala.

You see my point, yes?

So in all of this, do yuppies get seen at all? Well, yes. But only in the ads, which most people just surf away from. Now, let’s look at this in detail. With YouTube examples!

Usually, the category with the maximum yuppieness is life insurance. Which makes sense. Lalas don’t need life insurance because they’re already rich and have enough assets to take care of their dependents. Or if they do buy life insurance, they’ll buy whatever their CA-moonlighting-as-insurance-agent will sell them, not on the basis of advertising. Hippies don’t make financial decisions and just leave it to their private banker or lala family’s accountant. So you have to pitch to yuppies, who actually live on a month-to-month basis and have to worry about this shit. So it makes sense to have yuppie-focused advertising.

For a long time, the HDFC Standard Life ad was the yuppiest in India:

Consider! It has a daughter buying her father a car, which is the antithesis of regular lala relationships. Buying their parents stuff is probably what every yuppie dreams of. Plus look at all the other yuppie indicators – personalised checkbook from a new age private bank, shirt and pants instead of salwar kameez or sari, hair let down instead of plaited. In fact HDFC Standard’s slogan – Sar Utha Ke Jiyo – is the sort of thing that resonates more with yuppies than anybody else.

So yes. For a very long time, nothing could beat HDFC Standard Life in the yuppieness stakes. And then Airtel unleashed Madhavan and Vidya Balan. First, they established the young and urban part by showing them at an apartment building’s lift:

Having established yuppieness, they then set out to reinforce it:

Once again, we have the yuppie aspiration of giving money to parents instead of the other way around. Plus, check out the furniture. It screams yuppie. But in case you had any doubts at all, the next ad in the series set out to bury them once and for all:

Now prepaid recharges may not seem very yuppie. After all good yuppies have postpaid corporate connections. But set that aside for a while. And look at everything else in the ad. You have Vidya Balan telling Madhavan to make salad and do the household chores. This is the pinnacle of yuppieness. Hippies have domestic help to do the household chores. As for lala families, the woman telling the man to do stuff around the house is an exercise in futility.

But anyway. So there are yuppie characters in ads. But even this is in a very small set of ads. Usually for services, especially the financial sort. FMCG ads are dominated by celebrity endorsements (i.e., hippies). So are laptop ads for some bizarre reason. Confectionary ads have fantasy characters, and Fevicol actually goes so far as to show poor people. And like I said, people mostly surf away from ads, so it doesn’t really count.

So clearly the situation is grim for us yuppies. We get no representation in popular culture, and now the financial crisis is making the real world dark and depressing too. Now, we can only hope that the recent spate of yuppie suicides will mean that Sainath will give us some love. But honestly, who wants that?

PS1: I realise I’m only looking at lalas, yuppies, and hippies and ignoring poor people. But that’s pretty much because there have been no poor people in movies or on TV since the 1980s. People who watched Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and encouraged the secular trend in movies about hippie kids of lala parents, this is your fault.

PS2: Actually, even when there were poor people in the movies, they weren’t really poor. Even if they lived in chawls, rent never seemed to be a factor. Indian cinema and television is a fantasy world where everyone owns their house, no matter how poor or unemployed they are. (Insert subprime crisis/ NINJA mortgage/ Congressman Barney Frank joke here.)

PS3: Actually, there is one Hindi movie this year which has acknowledged the presence of yuppies. In fact it has covered all three stereotypes. But that will be discussed in the next post.

written by Aadisht \\ tags: advertising, airtel, balaji telefilms, barney frank, bollywood, bombsploitation, consumer finance, dance contest, doctors, ekta kapoor, EMI, financial services, hdfc standard life, hindi movie, hippie, house ownership, joint family, k serial, kidnap, lala, life insurance, madhavan, maths, MBA, microsoft excel, ndtv imagine, ninja loan, radha ki betiyan, rent, salary, singh is kinng, soap opera, star one, subprime crisis, Telecom, television, tv, ulcra, vidya balan, yaane tu ya jaane na, yuppie