Saakhi | The Unspoken Saga of Lives Lived Online
We all know and talk endlessly about how much the world has changed. But we also know that India has known darker political times and our chequered past remains a musical score from which a good leader can still tease out newer, occasionally wildly different, but rich melodies. For the last few years though, the guardians of our historical archives have proved sadly incapable of producing anything but the most banal and meanest Ragas.
We continue to trust our democratic format, hoping perhaps somewhere a few younger and more open minds might already be quietly experimenting with a finer mixing of notes that would force the nation to spring to their feet when they play the new compositions with fearless abandon.
It is obvious from the recent behaviour of most Bollywood Biggies that they have found their ideal. The media regularly tweaks their stories to suit the leadership’s skilful shape-shifting: the recent transformation from a once glamorous man into a bemused grandpa in white or ochre robes trying hard to ‘connect’ with a Gen Z and Gen Alpha.
How this innovative but sentimental , ‘come into the garden Maud’ gesture from the top, will connect a bunch of boomers and Gen X politicos to young voters remains to be seen. One result though is the entire mainstream media and various social media platforms obligingly taking to a falsely jolly, fake-friendly tone with the help of a few wannabe ‘influencers’. With that our colourful, lively, ethnic multiplicity, and their little cultural republics India was built with, is in danger of getting flattened under the lethal juggernaut of One Nation, One format principle.
The irreverent young, it is felt, choose brevity and visual information over thunderous and long speeches. So a hunt has begun for reel making ‘influencers’ in every field who know what attracts the young eyeballs.
The problem is that having been disconnected from young voters, political media cells mostly rate a good influencer’s worth on the number of friends, followers and likes he or she gets. This takes them into uncharted zones and results in embarrassing stories flooding mainstream media and panel discussions on what is the real nationwide percentage of non vegetarian Hindus. And within their ranks, what is the nation-wide gender and caste wise break up of fish/meat consumption by males and females? Should the nine-day Poojo in Pandals of West Bengal be henceforth turned into a totally vegetarian and booze free event?
When social media sites speedily transform human beings and age old traditions, everything slowly shrinks: human sensibility, the basic nature of human friendships, language and dialects that feed into them. People have already lost their own assessment of their bodies to health drinks, spa owners, gym trainers guiding their tastes and opinions on what is cool. So good bye those lovable messy human frailties. Individuals across generations must learn to make friends online whom they may only meet online, not in person, or perish in lonely depressing rooms.
There has been a recent volley of information with owners of big AI companies blowing the whistle about how the AI created by them has grown Bhasmasur-like and could turn upon its creator human race as early as 2030. That may or may not happen so soon but there are signs that are being ignored. The first is the loss of older kinship patterns that bound entire families and social gatherings together. Then it was the turn of political rallies in 2024 where people no longer paid much attention to grand oratory or three dimensional images of leaders. To the urbanites as also their rural brethren family matters only as a subject for making reels about family traditions. Wedding reels posted on Instagram make it clear how each event from Haldi, Mehandi to Vidai of the bride are pre-rehearsed. Bored home makers and grannies are low hanging fruits waiting to be dressed in retro silks and gold, cooking and serving traditional meals and/or dancing during festive Poojas.
Recently, a fellow non-resident Pahadi who is a whiz kid from India’s advertising world, sent me a small ad for an international company that aims to cross language boundaries with simultaneous translation facility available now even for fast fading dialects like Kumaoni. The slick ad showed a handsome city-bred young backpacker visiting his aged granny in her picturesque little village in Kumaon hills. He confesses to a super star how he crossed the language barrier for a heart to heart with his Dadi? ‘Easy’, says the super star with a dimpled smile. Even if one does not speak the Kumaoni dialect, the only language this grandma is familiar with, an app has just the answer. Cut to the duo sitting across a table in what is a rural tea stall. Having consulted the app, the grandson says in an accented Kumaoni, “Grand ma you still look so ‘cute’, my grandpa was lucky!” and the old woman across the table beams.
Does the ad maker or app promoter speak Kumaoni? I do not know. So I will never know if they would share my dismay over the enormity of the loss of a mother tongue and genuine and continued intimacy between generations revealed here. My linguist friend Peggy Mohan once said that dialects are the first to succumb to environmental toxicity, like canaries carried by miners in coal mines. Do we wish to press ahead still?
Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.
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