The trouble with “ethnic” television

I’ve written about MTV-Desi in previous posts, but here’s a story that points very clearly to a shift in the way American media execs are now thinking about “ethnic” programming (link). According to this story, we will soon see a bouquet of STAR-owned channels (Star Plus, Star One, Vijay, and so on) on Comcast’s International line-up. Comcast owned International Networks has just signed a deal with the Star Group (owned by Newscorp). Good news, for the most part. But I also think that such relationships between U.S.-media companies and transnational entities like Star point to an important shift in how “ethnic” programming and the very notion of an “ethnic” audience community is being imagined.

Take a look at this statement from David Wisnia, senior VP of distribution and sales of Star North America and Europe:

International Networks is the leading aggregator of ethnic language programming in the U.S. and we are thrilled to have them represent five of our Indian channels to MSOs across the country. We look forward to increasing our distribution to cable homes across the U.S. so that more South Asian viewers can enjoy top-rated entertainment from back home.

It is abundantly clear that this exec, and arguably those at Comcast, conceive of South Asian viewers as remaining connected to their “home,” as viewers who can speak Hindi, Tamil or some other Indian language. Why are South Asian-Americans being defined primarily in South Asian terms? I would argue that there are three elements at work here.

First, we need to acknowledge the limits that marketing discourse imposes on distribution and programming decisions. The failures of MTV-Desi and AZN, one would imagine, have added to industry lore that such niche channels simply do not work. Besides, there is a very well-etablished tradition of marketing and advertising executives (including many who are of South Asian descent) who work hard to define ethnic difference.

Second, and perhaps the biggest challenge for the industry, is the problem of content. Why would a company seek to invest in original program production when it is clear that audiences are already watching programs from various television channels via YouTube and even by borrowing tapes of saas-bahu serials from a local desi grocery store. It is, without a doubt, financially more prudent to enter into a deal that brings in top quality content.

Third, and more broadly, this new definition of “ethnic” television that ties migrant populations to their “home” (the where are you really from question) completely ignores second and third-generation desis. South Asian Americans are now caught between two powerful nationalist imaginaries: an American television/marketing industry that is struggling to think beyond old notions of “community,” and an “Indian” television industry that includes desis but doesn’t need to worry about those desis who do not understand Hindi or Tamil or, for that matter, might not be “desi” in these very limiting ways.

Workers and Unions in Bollywood Inc.

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal (link) pays attention to an aspect of film production we don’t think about very often - who gets to be an extra in contemporary Bollywood films. Pointing out that directors these days look for “extras who fit the scene,” the reporter Amol Sharma documents the emergence of entrepreneurs who work closely with directors to help cast extras. And what’s more, these entrepreneurs, who carry CDs with images of potential extras and broker deals with directors and producers, are proving to be a threat to a well-established institution in the film industry - the Junior Artists Union.

Indian directors say they need to be picky about extras as they try to go global and appeal to the United Kingdom and the U.S. markets, where higher production values are expected. “You can’t keep using the same faces every time,” says Sudhir Mishra, director of the recently released “Khoya Khoya Chand” (Lost Moon), a love story set in the 1950s. Mr. Mishra bypassed the union to hire actors he felt could more authentically portray prostitutes, bouncers and pimps in a brothel scene.

Directors also try to boost the international appeal of their films by using foreign extras, often European or American vacationers rounded up at Mumbai tourist spots — a tactic that is particularly galling to unionized extras. Film producers “give excuses, like ‘We’re shooting in a pub, so we want to have some foreigners there,’” says Firoz Khan, a 25-year-old member of the Junior Artistes Association, the union for male extras. “It’s just excuses.”

The Junior Artists’ Union is fighting back valiantly, trying to figure out how they can renegotiate their place in an industry that is currently besotted by the language of “corporatization.” Read the whole article here, and here’s a video that accompanies the article:

It’s important to note that this isn’t an isolated domain of the industry that is under siege. In an article in Anthropological Quarterly, Clare Wilkinson-Weber maps the changing world of costume design and the growing marginalization of “dressmen:”

Dressmen have always employed informal methods and techniques in their work, and they now find their skills, knowledge, as well as their privilege of maleness in a male-dominated industry being eroded as Hindi filmmaking is transforming itself aesthetically and organizationally in response to global forces.

Drawing on in-depth interviews with a number of such “dressmen,” Wilkinson-Weber explains how the “de-skilling” of dressmens’ jobs has to be understood in relation to changing industry logics and specifically, the entry of a number of young, urban women who “claim superior knowledge of filmmaking techniques and of the fashion world that informs film costume” [The Dressman's Line: Transforming the Work of Costumers in Popular Hindi Film, Anthropological Quarterly, 79(4), 2006].

I know very little about the history of workers’ unions in Mumbai, but this story points to the importance of industry-focuses studies that can provide nuanced understandings of production culture in “Bollywood Inc.”

Taaza Khabar

Aswin’s post about Khabar Lahariya reminded me that filmmaker Bishakha Dutta had made a documentary film called Taaza Khabar on the women who produce the newspaper. I have not seen the film but the Nirantar wesbite has some clips of the film here.

To add to the discussion: this initiative appears to have resolved to some extent the problematic NGO impulse to seek out the ‘voiceless’ and give them ‘voice.’ Nirantar’s role seems limited to training the women, not dictating the ‘issues’ they need to be concerned about. The women, at least from the website, seem to have autonomy in choosing what they want to investigate and report on. This is significant.

Grassroots journalism: Khabar Lahariya

There have been a number of commentaries of late criticizing the logics of mainstream journalism in contemporary India. In one widely circulated piece, Naresh Fernandes, editor of Time Out Mumbai, reminds us about P. Sainath’s “rural journalism” and how the space for such writing does not exist anymore (here). It is, as Fernandes points out, quite clear that English-language urban dailies like the Times of India operate with a very specific and narrow notion of who the reader-consumer is. Given this state of affairs, non-market and local initiatives become increasingly important.

Via India Together, I learned about one such initiative - Khabar Lahariya, a newspaper run by women for audiences in the Bundelkhand region of India. Kalpana Ram provides an overview of how this initiative came to be and argues that more than circulation figures, Khabar Lahariya is important simply because it exists.

Khabar Lahariya began as an experiment in 2002, aided by Nirantar, a resource centre for gender and education. It is based in Chitrakoot district, one of the 200 poorest districts in India, where there is practically no industry and the majority of people survive on rain-fed agriculture. Literacy rates are lower than the national average; female literacy is only 35 per cent. The sex ratio is also below the national average, only 872 women to a 1,000 men. Incidents of sexual violence are high and the justice delivery system barely functions as criminal gangs operate with impunity under the nose of a complacent and often complicit administration.

Against this background, a group of Dalit and adivasi women felt the need to start and run their own newspaper because the existing media in the area did not report on the issues that concerned them. They wanted to break the stereotype that lower caste women like them would not dare enter the public domain. Despite their lack of education, they wanted to prove that they too could be journalists.

You can read the rest of Ram’s piece here. The Nirantar website carries more details, and to get a sense of how these women cover current affairs (taaza khabar), national and international news, women’s issues, panchayati raj, and much more, you can read an entire issue of the newspaper here (Hindi).

Circles of Sexuality

The latest issue of HIMAL SOUTHASIAN draws attention to the many transitions and conflicts surrounding sexuality.

Discussions on the wide range of human sexuality have begun in Southasia, albeit only in certain circles – universities, NGOs and within specifically interested communities. For the rest, alternative sexuality exists the way it always did, mostly clandestinely, at other times through rigidly defined ‘communities’. However, as television and film producers, authors and journalists continue to try to push certain envelopes, and appeal to additional (and younger) audiences, these discussions are inevitably cropping up with greater frequency within the mainstream.

But just how realistic is all of this talk? More importantly, just how pertinent is it to the lived experiences of Southasians, particularly long-oppressed sexual minorities?

Articles tackle the state of homosexuality in Nepal, class and conservatism in Pakistan, “virtual closets” in Bangladesh, NGO-isation of sexuality, and much more.

On being desi in post 9/11 America

After a session on Goodness Gracious Me, I usually get students to watch Hanif Kureishi’s My Son the Fanatic in an attempt to talk about cultural citizenship and the ways in which religion has become an increasingly important fault line. And until now, I’ve never found a film like My Son the Fanatic that might help us talk through these issues in the context of South Asian-Americans. Mississippi Masala only gets us so far. Last night, I learned about “Punching at the Sun,” a film that takes on the question of what race, nationalism, and citizenship mean for South Asian muslim youth in post-9/11 Queens, NY. Here’s the trailer, and you can watch the entire film on Jaman:

Links to reviews and interviews with the filmmaker Tanuj Chopra here.

To Indira, with much love….

I was about seven years old, we had acquired a telephone at home and there was always a big fight over who would answer the call. Imagine my good luck when I happened to be the closest to the telephone on October 31^st, 1984 and very proudly picked up the phone. It was my grandmother in Bangalore yelling something about the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi being assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards. She also yelled something about turning on the television, also newly purchased – talk about newly realized middle class aspirations. My aunt in the US had called and told her about the assassination, which she had heard through the BBC. Sadly, All India Radio and Doordarshan, most likely waiting for the higher-ups in the hierarchy to release orders from the shocked government, were mum until later that evening.

As the news of the assassination spread, every evening for the next few weeks, our living room would be packed with neighbours and their friends and family, with theirs and my family’s eyes glued to our black and white television set (the one with the wooden doors that could be opened and closed). Salma Sultan, with her single rose bud in her tight hair bun, shed a single tear when she read the news of the assassination that evening, dispelling annoying myths that she was actually an early robotic experiment conducted by scientifically-minded folks at Doordarshan.

Indira’s death perhaps did more to resuscitate the Congress Party than anything else. It also, more importantly, changed how one thought of television and women in television. That critical historical moment did two things: one, it helped resurrect Indira’s image as a martyr – a female subject who could be recuperated either as a Mother figure or as a political subject who could be aggressive, non-submissive, and agential (an enduring figure that continues to be resurrected, think Lalithaji!). Secondly, television was recognized as an extremely influential medium to mobilize political support. Images of Indira Gandhi, her funeral and her grieving family became a mainstay in the political advertisements that were instrumental in Indira’s successor – her son Rajiv Gandhi - coming to power. Not surprisingly, Rajiv recognized that power, pushing for expansion and investment in the television sector. What happened after that event is also significant, because we see how deeply entrenched state regulation was in the dissemination of information or ‘news.’

Being in the South of India in Hyderabad, we were completely disconnected from the planned and systematic persecution of Sikhs in Delhi. What we continued to be exposed to on television were images of a supposedly grieving nation, and it was through national television that a ‘national family’ was imaged, a cohesive unit that somehow was beyond and came before class, caste, and gender differences.

The events of 1984 remain, in the history of the country, somewhat of an academic stepchild. One acknowledges its pesky presence but never bestows upon it historical veracity or legitimacy. This sort of makes it really difficult for me, Swati Bandi – a mere student of documentary studies, from the South of India and astonishingly illiterate in the ground realities of 1984 – when I am called upon to introduce a fiction film that meshes popular memory and history to address that pesky issue of the Sikh massacres post Indira-assasination! Yes, I am talking about Shonali Bose’s 2004 film Amu, being screened at an International Women’s Film Festival in Buffalo, NY.

As so much has already been written about the film, I think, for this blog, I will extrapolate and talk about what really interests me – the marriage of documentary and fiction film aesthetics to talk about an event that is fraught with tensions inherent in the recounting of historical ‘fact’ as it intersects with popular memory. Truth be told, the film underwhelmed me. It was self-absorbed and except for certain powerful moments in the flashback scenes in the refugee camps in Delhi, I was vaguely dissatisfied throughout. Yes, vaguely, like there is nothing outwardly terrible about it. For instance, I could not point out one scene and say “see, this is why you disappoint me, you film.”

The story is unraveled as the protagonist Kaju, a recent UCLA (film?) grad, ‘goes back’ to Delhi to discover her roots. The story is documented through her trusty video camera. This narrative device, seen often in documentary films made by filmmakers in the diaspora who ‘go back,’ is employed quite unproblematically by Bose. Amu, along with her native boyfriend, are allowed easy access to ‘documentary subjects,’ who recount the ‘truth’ - helping her uncover not only her own story as an orphan whose parents were killed in the massacres of Sikhs in 1984 but also legitimize, through the documentary camera, that version of historical memory.

As I said before, I really would have to do much more research before I could talk about the horrible events of 1984 with any authority. Yet, since Bose does present Amu as the only film that addresses the anti-Sikh riots and argues, rightfully, for more attention to those events, it would have helped to move beyond certain narrational devices like forced moments between foreign-returned desis and natives, surficially addressing generation gaps, uneven accents and an exploitative ethnographic gaze.

This marriage between documentary film aesthetics and fiction film has huge implications for television. It is in this sector that one can move toward larger distribution of documentary films. NDTV already dedicates some hours towards screening documentary films. More exposure to the public can only help break the chains that bind the doc film genre in its ‘boring,’ ‘educational’ moulds. It is also in television that our notions of documentary ‘truth’ and our investment in the notion that the camera never lies can slowly be eroded (thankfully!). As the lines between fact and fiction blur (think TV news, for instance), documentary film can finally emerge as truly, wonderful entertainment.

Ok, I am dreaming but Indira Gandhi was on her way to film a documentary interview with Peter Ustinov when she was gunned down. Go figure.

 

TV and taste: the “saas-bahu” question

In a recent article in the avowedly “upper-class” Mint, columnist Vir Sanghvi wonders why television in India speaks to PLT (People Like Them) and asks the readers of Mint, People Like Him, why “so many of us (readers of Lounge, for instance) thrill to masala Hindi movies while remaining resolutely unmoved by the appeal of the mega-serials that have much of middle India so completely enthralled?” He writes:

As much as you may have enjoyed Om Shanti Om or even Saawariya, do you watch Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi? When you flip from one Hindi entertainment channel to another, can you really tell the difference? Isn’t there a certain stultifying sameness to the manner in which over-made-up, overdressed women waddle around lurid and garish sets, pausing every five minutes or so for an extreme close-up, accompanied by loud and, frankly, disturbing explosions of music? Do you really find the jokes on the many stand-up comedy shows (spawned by the success of The Great Laughter Challenge) genuinely funny? Can you understand why Navjot Singh Sidhu laughs so hysterically at every weak gag uttered by each aspiring comedian?

It’s a strange thing, but even as Hindi cinema has become the great leveller, television has become a world unto itself, carving out a solid constituency in the lower- to middle-middle class (look, I’m sorry if this sounds snobbish, but there’s no other way to say it), while almost completely ignoring the upper-middle class and the elite.

Given that these shows remain highly popular and continue to draw the highest ratings points, it is rather easy to imagine what Ekta Kapoor, the architect of many a saas-bahu television serial, might say to Sanghvi and People Like Him. But it is not as easy to brush aside Sanghvi’s assumptions about taste, class, and the expectations of a medium like TV - in fact, it wouldn’t be a stretch to suggest that academic culture is yet to take saas-bahu serials seriously. I have heard nothing but dismissal of shows like Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi (Because mother-in-law was once a daughter-in-law) as regressive and that they do little more than reinforce gender stereotypes. But is this all we have to say?

Does the study of TV begin and end with this all-too-easy ideology critique? Would it not be worth exploring how Ekta Kapoor, a young woman, managed to become one of the most important figures in the TV industry? What about looking closely at how writers on this show think through characters like Tulsi Virani (Smriti Irani)? Do we have nothing interesting to say about Smriti Irani’s move from a TV soap into the realm of politics? And tempting as it may be, are we really prepared to call women and men (yes, men watch these shows too) across India who enjoy these serials cultural dupes? Without falling into the trap of 80s-anglo-american-style “resistant reading” ideas, would it not be important to explore the politics and pleasures of these TV serials in relation to everyday life?

In many respects, this piece by Vir Sanghvi reminded me of the discussion about taste cultures in the context of television scholarship/writing in the U.S., and the fact that there is hardly any “ideological and cultural diversity within television studies per se” (more here). Talking specifically about discussions at a conference (Flow), Henry Jenkins picks up on Greg Smith’s question - why JAG, a popular show never gets the kind of attention that a cult hit like Buffy does - and writes:

I would argue that our inability as a field to write intelligently about shows like JAG has something to do with our sense of cultural isolation from those people who live in Red States. One challenge may be to broaden our object of study. An even bigger challenge may be to expand who studies television and what kinds of perspectives are welcome at our conference. Very few folks at the Flow conference rose to defend JAG as a worthy object of study. My bet though is that there are people out there reading this blog who regularly watch JAG. Indeed, it was one of my late father’s favorite programs and I found watching the program with him helped me to understand how his generation saw the world.

Along the same lines, while I cannot bring myself to watch a saas-bahu serial, I did spend many hours watching a Tamil-language saas-bahu show with my mother. This was right after my father had died, and I was with my mum in Bangalore for a couple of months. At one level, the ritual of watching TV, quite simply, provided great solace. And for my mom, these shows with their strong (and yes, in some ways regressive) women characters were almost a balm for grief. During those weeks, I was, in Sanghvi’s terms, PLT. The “saas-bahu” question needs to be framed differently and not just in a banal isn’t-it-regressive vein.

Yizo Yizo (The Way It Is) and Wetin Dey (What’s Up?): Revisiting “Development TV”

Thanks to my colleague leo africanus, I could include Yizo Yizo, a groundbreaking and gritty TV show from South Africa, in my course on Global Media. Yizo Yizo is a terrific text with which to invite students to think about the question of “development communication” and the central role that this strand of communications research (carried out, for the most part, in mass communication departments in the U.S.) has played in shaping media policy in much of Africa and Asia. But what sets Yizo Yizo and Wetin Dey apart from other “pro-development” Miguel Sabido-inspired dramas developed in places like India during the 80s is the socio-cultural and political context - post apartheid South Africa.

Where radio and television in India were imagined and controlled by the state as a means for integrating the “nation,” in South Africa, radio and television were central to the project of racial and ethnic separation. Yizo Yizo, however, is in many ways emblematic of “post-apartheid” TV in South Africa - by which I mean not just the re-structuring of the South African Broadcasting Corporation and the growing influence of transnational formats and genres on TV in South Africa (Big Brother Africa, for e.g.), but also the ways in which TV has emerged as a key site for the re-articulation of cultural citizenship. And Yizo Yizo is a brilliant text to work with for the simple reason that it is so uncompromising - it lays bare the many issues troubling township life in South Africa (violence, drug abuse, sexual harassment, and so on) in unprecedented ways. And needless to say, the show generated tremendous controversy and attracted considerable public discussion. TV done right.

While I’ve planned to screen an episode or two of Yizo Yizo in class, it looks like I now have to make time for another show - Wetin Dey, from Nigeria. A story in the BBC says that this show, produced by group of international TV, film and advertising producers, is designed to raise HIV and AIDS awareness across Nigeria (here). Nigeria, as we know, gets talked about in both popular and academic settings in relation to Nollywood and the enduring popularity of Bollywood. I’m hoping this show (clips available on BBC) will help add another dimension to our understanding of media production in Nigeria and force us to think anew about TV and the question of “development” in an age of global flows - Wetin Dey is, after all, funded in large measure by the U.K.’s Department for International Development (DFID) and produced in collaboration with a number of NGOs.

[Pic from BBC]

What Brown Can(not) Do For You

A week from now, I will be on my way to Boston to participate in a workshop at M.I.T where a group of academics will talk about Unboxing TV. Following the model established by Flow, this workshop is organized as a series of roundtable discussions with each participant outlining a provocation instead of reading a paper for 20-25 minutes. Take a look at the program and the provocations here.

I decided to take this opportunity to think through the MTV-Desi experiment, and use discussions surrounding MTV-Desi to think about the relationship between the South Asian diaspora and TV. Over the next week, I will be working through answers to the questions I raise and will have more to say. For now, here’s what I wrote:

In July 2005, MTV Networks announced the launch of MTV-Desi, a niche channel for South Asian American youth. Launched with great fanfare and made available on Direct TV, MTV-Desi featured Bollywood sequences and Indi-pop (sourced from MTV India), diasporic artists in North America and the U.K., and shows about desi life in the U.S. Recognizing the transcultural nature of South Asian American youth culture, executives and producers at MTV-Desi worked hard to define MTV-Desi as a unique site of cultural production that neither mainstream American television nor Indian satellite TV channels could match.

Eighteen months later, MTV Networks pulled the plug on MTV-Desi, stating that the distribution model failed to draw in South Asian Americans. As one prominent South Asian journalist commented, “we published next to nothing on the channel, because I couldn’t find anyone who watched the satellite channel: no college students, no twenty-somethings with spare change. And it wasn’t just me. All the tastemakers I interviewed - DJs, other music types - said they didn’t know any MTV Desi subscribers either.”

While pricing and poor marketing were cited as the major reasons for failure, it is worth noting that MTV-Desi’s business and content-production strategies were shaped not only by the institutional politics of the U.S. television industry but also by the operations of satellite television channels such as ZEE, STAR, and Sony Entertainment that cater to South Asian audiences worldwide. MTV-Desi executives were also attuned to reports emphasizing that South Asians are now among the fastest growing minorities in the U.S. and, more importantly, as a niche demographic with tremendous purchasing power. Thus, at one level, it appears as if executives at MTV-Desi did nothing wrong in terms of identifying an audience community. So what, besides the premium distribution model, went wrong?

I wish to argue that the MTV-Desi experiment constitutes an important moment in the history of diasporic media production, and that a critical post-mortem will allow us to grapple with challenges faced by media producers and cultural critics in imagining and mobilizing a diasporic audience community. Outlining the changing dynamics of migration between South Asia and the U.S., and competing definitions of desi identity and being brown in the U.S., I will tackle these questions during our roundtable discussion:

- In what ways does the institutional framework of the television industry in the U.S. limit the possibility of imagining a “post-national” audience community?

- If Bombay, as a film and television capital, is dominating and defining the production and flow of South Asian content, what possibilities remain for diasporic television production?

- Does “diaspora,” as a socio-cultural and political critique of the nation-as-community, need TV?

Multiplex Effect(s)

One of the most interesting transitions in the world of commercial Bombay cinema over the past few years has been the experimentation with low-budget and offbeat films. While lavish nationalist-diasporic films that the likes of Karan Johar, Yash Chopra, and Subhash Ghai churn out are the ones that seem to define “Bollywood,” especially for viewers and critics outside India, films like Omkara, Dor, and Johnny Gaddar have drawn audiences, critical acclaim and, importantly, made money at the box office. To be sure, films like these would have been unimaginable in the commercial sector a decade ago.

Writing in the Mint (link), Gouri Shah takes stock of this development and argues that these low-budget films have succeeded primarily because of the shift from single-screen to multiplex theatres as the mode of exhibition in urban India (and to a lesser extent, in smaller cities and towns). Shah also writes that recent successes have prompted large production houses to set up separate divisions to focus exclusively on low-budget films with new talent across the board.

Subhash Ghai’s Mukta Arts Ltd has set up two divisions—Mukta Searchlight Films, which handles small budget films, and Malpix Films, which will launch its first Marathi film, Kaande Pohe, soon. UTV Motion Pictures Plc. has Spot Boy Motion Pictures and UTV Classics, while Percept Picture Co. recently set up Cause Cinema, which will look at projects with socially relevant themes as well as corporate films. Yash Raj Films Pvt. Ltd is also planning to set up a separate division that will focus on small budget projects or independent films, according to people in the industry familiar with the developments.

I agree, for the most part, that this is very much a “multiplex effect.” As Aparna Sharma explained in her Seminar piece, in addition to flexible scheduling that allows multiplexes to accomodate films of varying lengths, low budget films are lucrative for a multiplex because the number of viewers they bring in translates into “a greater, more competitive marginal value” (more here).

At the same time, it is difficult to overlook the fact that an “indie” filmmaker has little hope of getting his/her film into a multiplex unless s/he is working with a large banner like UTV, Mukta Arts, or Yashraj Films. My Brother Nikhil (Onir, 2005), the film that, in many ways, started this trend, would not have worked without Karan Johar and Aditya Chopra’s patronage. To get a sense of how critical this patronage is, all you have to do is take a quick look at the films that NFDC, the government of India enterprise that defines “good cinema,” has produced over the past few years - not only are they predominantly in regional languages like Marathi, Kannada, and Tamil, none of them made it into a multiplex.

“Daily Me” and Democracy

According to Cass Sunstein, my media consumption habits, such as my personalization of a google page into a collection of news and information sources (including, *gasp* blogs) would slot me into what he terms a “daily me.” Thanks to “filtering” options, which allow me to read, see, and hear what I want and not what I *should* in order to be a well-informed citizen, I am now one among millions who do not care about many issues and ideas that matter. Sunstein writes in the first chapter of his new book, Republic.com 2.0:

People who consider themselves left-of-center make very different selections from those made by people who consider themselves right-of-center. Most whites avoid news and entertainment options designed for African Americans. Many African Americans focus largely on options specifically designed for them. So too with Hispanics. With the reduced importance of the general-interest magazine and newspaper and the flowering of individual programming design, different groups make fundamentally different choices.

The market for news, entertainment, and information has finally been perfected. Consumers are able to see exactly what they want. When the power to filter is unlimited, people can decide, in advance and with perfect accuracy, what they will and will not encounter. They can design something very much like a communications universe of their own choosing. And if they have trouble designing it, it can be designed for them, again with perfect accuracy.

Not only does Sunstein assume that I live in an “echo chamber” and engage only with ideas and people I pick and choose, he argues that I could not have been a “daily me” in the “old media” world, that I would have been “exposed to materials that [I] would not have chosen in advance.” And now that I’ve begun blogging, there is no hope. Like other bloggers, I only read/see/hear that which I can blog about. I am utterly uninformed and need to be sent away to an information camp where well-intentioned men will teach me how to participate effectively in a democracy.

Review in The Guardian here. Henry Jenkins’ take on Republic.com here.

Madlib discovers superstar Rajnikanth!

Rapper-DJ-producer Madlib’s latest album, Beat Konducta: In India, samples music and images from Tamil cinema and Bollywood. The one thing that *really* irks me about reviews of such work is the all-too-easy inclusioin of Tamil, Telugu and other “regional” cinemas within “Bollywood.” Check out an excerpt from this review in Metro Times Detroit:

He has an unmistakable affection for the source material, a love that’s rooted less in kitsch value or multiculturalism than it is in the fact that the movies coming out of Bombay in the ’60s and ’70s sure did have some funky-ass bottom ends. Madlib exploits that funkiness to his own purposes and comes out with a peculiar and personal sort of homage to South Asian sounds that — in ways both similar and opposite to Shankar and Kale’s — rejects traditional perspectives on “Indianness” and aims simply to create great music.

Now take a look at this promo video made by Madlib’s record company -

To slot superstar Rajnikanth into “movies coming out of Bombay in the 60s and 70s” is quite terrible. And in addition to folks who review and critique music, I wish artists would also step up and clarify a few things and not assume that Bollywood speaks for India.

[Sean, thanks for the tip]

SMS 52525: reality TV and local politics

In the latest issue of Himal Southasian, Sumana Roy probes what satellite TV does to local-national relations:

From the Bagdogra airport to Siliguri, there were posters of the Nepali Indian Idol contestant everywhere – glued to tree trunks and lampposts, on hoardings next to Shahrukh Khan, on car rears and house fronts in Gurungbasti, a locality with a pronounced Nepali population. For the next several days, everywhere I went Prashant’s face followed me, and with him, a trail of numbers – 52525, an incantation that seemed to have hypnotised my town and its neighbours. I began to hear stories of local patriots, of young men staying awake all night long, not at defence outposts or research laboratories, but at temporary telephone booths, erected by benevolent telephone companies and shrewd politicians, hungry for proxy votes.

Article here.

Rahman, Ramayana, and India Shining in Ann Arbor

Shobana, the renowned classical dancer and actress, was in Ann Arbor yesterday for a performance organized by AID. I’m not sure what the predominantly south-Indian audience expected, but Maya Ravan - a twist in the tale (details here), was anything but a traditional dance-drama. “Fusion” is a convenient short-hand at best - the performance included dances set to flamenco music, Rahman’s Vande Mataram and Chinnamma Chilakamma (from Meenaxi).

Shobana’s interpretation of the Ramayana from Ravana’s perspective (details here) was interesting overall, and while the show may have been too “filmi” for the purists in the audience, I enjoyed it and was *really* kicked to see Ravana dancing on stage to the song chinnamma chilakamma…thithli daboch li maine (literal translation: i’ve captured a butterfly) celebrating his abduction of Sita!

While I enjoyed the show for the most part, there were two moments that were disturbing. To be sure, Maya Ravan did re-cast Ravana in more sympathetic terms and reminded the audience that there are always many ramayanas. The re-interpretation also took on one of the most important parts of the Ramayana - Rama’s refusal to take Sita back because she had lived in another man’s house, Sita’s trial by fire, and her eventual banishment from Rama’s kingdom. I was hoping Rama would be taken to task, but it wasn’t to be. Rama is let off the hook and remains a noble figure. Lakshmana, his younger brother, is portrayed as the one responsible for casting aspersions on Sita’s chastity (Ramayana from Sita’s perspective here).

And the other moment involved an opening dance set to Rahman’s Vande Mataram. The piece could easily have been commissioned by the Indian government as part of the India Shining campaign! And what’s worse, not only did the dancers reduce contemporary India to cricket, beauty pageants, and call centers, they mixed in the sound of machine-gun fire and evoked a sense of nationalism that was way too limiting and conservative.