#2: Craving Enrichment
Escapist TV, Gatekeepers, and the Value of Giving Time and Vulnerability to Art
My first visual memory has a TV set in it. At 3, I watched the Hindi serial Shanti. By 9, I lapped up Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki and Kasauti Zindagi Kay. I graduated to the cooler, smarter Remix and Sarabhai Vs Sarabhai in my teens. When I finally discovered Full House and Friends, I was properly hypnotized.
TV was not just a box in our living room, it was an array of rooms I could happily get sucked in. It was employed in numbing the tiny conflicts that make up family life, engineering excitement after the tedium of school, even learning English. The constant trance of the cuts, close-ups, and sound effects and the razzmatazz of MTV Roadies and Indian Idol defined familiarity and home in my young psyche.
As I left home and the TV set with it, the internet had started booming. By the time Mr. Ambani decided to distribute 1 GB laddus to everyone everyday, I was creating my home everywhere. I assumed the responsibility to find fresh visual content. I scoffed at women who were still immersed in Hindi serials. During my stint at a media research firm, it dawned on me that I’m more like them than I had imagined. I too mitigate my loneliness by placing animated people on my screen.
To this day, I am desperate in my daily attempts to match a delicious snack with an exciting episode. After hours of consumption, I’m still craving. I finish in a day what must have taken months to get created. I get angry that the next season won’t be released until next year. I look for new content and polish that off too. Yup, still discontent.
What have I gotten myself into? How many times have I abandoned my body and my reality to devour someone else's fiction? Isn't it crazy that the more I consume their content, the richer they get, while I get robbed off my time and energy?
I am not alone in being alone. We are in a culture of inhaling content and exhaling time. Reduced to our eyeballs, we are Pavlovian dogs ready to relax at the da-dhang of Netflix. In this war of attention, autoplay and algorithms ambush us. We are the pawns and we are the battlefield.
I am tired of this lonesome home. I don’t want the bait of connection to lure me into this digital rat-trap. I no longer want to rag-pick for that one feminist moment or that one well written character in a sea of stereotypes.
Why don’t I access the work of a fierce female artist instead? Why is it so difficult to turn to books, art, music? Why is ‘content’ way more tempting than the timeless work of artists?
Art appreciation has been monopolized by the upper caste intellectual elite, who were silly/insecure enough to convince the rest of society that art needs to be ‘interpreted’ and only they know how to do it. No wonder we grow up to be afraid of art and abstraction, as if extreme wide shots or mixed metaphors were designed specifically to torture us.
The upper caste business elite exploit this very gap. They slyly coax us to consume what we think we deserve or are capable of digesting.
Artists on the other hand, trust our capacity - to feel, to sense something even if it doesn't make 'sense', to be educated and delighted simultaneously - unlike intellectuals and content producers, who have led us to a dual culture of criticism in the streets and guilty pleasure in the sheets.
Like Udayan Vajpeyi suggests in the interview embedded above, if we give some time and vulnerability to art, we might feel connected with humanity in a profound way. I know how awkward it is to stand in front of a painting and not know what to think. How spooky it is to read a serious book with dinner on a lonely weekend. But if I can give myself again and again to the exploration of what I'm really craving, if I can gather the courage to sit nervously for five minutes in front of an Iranian film that will slowly but steadily nourish my senses, I can ensure a tectonic shift in my inner life. Instead of a mere viewer, I can be a seeker - of that which magnifies my spirit, the timeless over the viral, enrichment over escape.
I worship those who exercise awareness and agency in their media habits. I also feel deep compassion for those like me who urgently want to harness their cognitive surplus. We know that creating and recreating in beautiful ways is the only method to grow as a human without making others shrink. We also know it's tough. After all, we are trying to destroy our clumsy home, while trying to afford a new, spacious one.