Pandemic: A pandemic (from Greek πᾶν, pan, “all” and δῆμος, demos, “local people” the ‘crowd’) is an epidemic of an infectious disease that has spread across a large region, for instance multiple continents or worldwide, affecting a substantial number of people.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia rounds it up quite perfectly, in one line, what the word Pandemic means. Sure enough the term infectious disease has been mentioned, and rightly so. In the strictest sense, pandemic is a medical term which deals with a mass medical condition and nothing else.
However, let us for the shortest period of time, stretch one part of the definition a little and I will present to you another quite similar condition which is not medical in nature, however is a malaise which affects the nation as a whole anyway.
Supposedly a cultural superpower even in the twenty-first century, India is still stupifiengly in love with all aspects of its culture. We love our literature, our writers, our laureates, our poets, our songs, our singers our dance and of course, our cinemas! The paragon and very much the summation of all our cultural panorama – the cinema.
The golden days of Indian Cinema is behind us, and let us face it, the golden days of Indian culture is behind us too. What remains is very much gold dust compared to what used to be, and gold dust is not the final product but a waste material for the goldsmith.
However, this gold-dust, which is the song and dance culture in the modern context, is very much the mainstay of Indian soft-power in the twenty-first century. Not only is it the much advertised attractor which brings in the attention of people in far-off lands towards our nation, but also a thrall which holds a huge influence over the populace of this subcontinent.
It is this thrall aspect of the song-and-dance culture which vexes me and perhaps a good many number of people like you who has had enough of this idiocy. It is one thing to cultivate art and propagate it for the enjoyment and the enlightenment of the society. It is quite another to host dance shows with underage children performing to songs with lyrics full of sexual innuendos. The Indian prime time television on weekdays and weekends are filled with shows which glorify and repeat the song and dance culture. It is, apparently, an hour filled with Indians coming from various walks of life (read poor classes), with supposedly immense but hidden talent, who come and present their crooning and gyrating skills for other Indians to marvel at and gloat at our huge repertoire of talent – which could have apparently ruled the world, if not for the invisible foreign hand!
No, the common Indian on the other side of the screen is not appreciating an hour of Bharatnatyam or Kathak. Nay, it is not an hour of Shastriya sangeet or the Sarod. It is an hour or two of the grotesque and the cringe-worthy where talent is measured by scores on a scoreboard and certificates of excellence from the self-certified experts are sufficient to make the masses watching swoon and ask for more. Playback singing, songs with sub-standard and mindless lyrics, dance routines which are more suitable in the “gentleman’s club” than national television are all spoonfed to the gullible and half-literate mind ranging from the toddler to the teens to the elderly. Its audience, ranging from the homemaker, to the housekeeper all under the hypnosis of a common sub-culture, belting out dreams of stardom and promising country-wide fame even for the very mediocre. Just like a medical pandemic, this is a pandemic of ideas. A set of unrealistic and mediocre if not gross set of infectious ideas which has spread far and wide in this nation from the North to the South and spanning East to West – just like a real pandemic.
Of course, it is never sufficient or satisfactory to merely point out something as inferior. One has to also compare it with what is superior and what is desirable from the point of view of the author. Here, I should present mine, a set of ideas which could have been, instead of what is. There can always be dispute over what is superior and what is inferior as all discussions in these matters are subjective and never objective. However, what is not subjective is what is good for the education and intellectual progress of the masses. If our national goal, according to the constitution is to develop a scientific attitude – with one foot rooted in our glorious past and another firmly in the future – it is plain for all to see that the current cultural setup is the most inefficient and counterproductive in reaching that goal.