The Democratization Of Life

“Printing made us all readers. Xeroxing made us all publishers. Television made us all viewers. Digitization made us all broadcasters.”

– Lawrence Grossman

The recent trend of globalization, which cannot be more than 20 years old at its best, has awakened to all of us the possibility of living a life all over the world while we sit in front of our PC. The technological advancements, coupled with the subsequent progresses in financing, investment and politics, have translated all of our aspirations to memorable careers where speed has been dictating all the terms – and those who lost out were not stupid but only unacceptably slow. In fact, I can comfortably move on to say that there are now only two kinds of people in this world: the “fast” and the “slow”. If you have an internet connection that’s faster than you neighbor’s, it doesn’t even matter if he’s much richer: you can be assured of a spot in the finals. If you can make a telephone call from Mumbai to Rio de Janeiro and make an investment in something that’s being tipped as the “next big thing”, you’ve just gone one step ahead of the race. If a helicopter is rigged with personnel from the Indian reserve security forces in order to escort an electronic voting machine to a far off island with less then 5 occupants, then you can take pride in the fact that democracy is still alive and revered in the nation. However, up until this point, I have only spoken of what a more open world with larger markets and fading boundaries can do to empower specific activities, i.e. business and politics. What can it do to empower te individual? Rather, if globalization has indeed bettered the state of the world, what is it done to better the state of an individual?

Lest we forget, there are always two sides to every coin. I can have all kinds of names and notations for these sides, and in this case, I can call them “what have you given from it” and “what have you taken from it”. Speaking of the global village, we have given it the power to dominate over everything in this world. We have given a small company in Brazil the authority to drive into a section of the Amazon rainforest, cut down a thousand trees, sell the timber and free the landscape. We have given the local authorities the power to sell that land to people interested in erecting business houses there, and we have given the company contractors the authority to sell the timber. We have given the authority to local occupants to begin building a sky scraper on that plot of land, and the traders to export the timber to South Africa, where it is serviced into being usable in the construction industry. We have enabled the ongoing construction of the business house to demand more quantities of support-grade timber, which is now brought in from South Africa, and we have enabled the respective governments to slap duties and taxes on the import and export – the money from which will eventually trickle into the household of a destitute man who will feed his family of seven. At the same time, the business house is complete and its offices are occupied by various companies who put people in their cabins just to gather more and more information for them to make more money – the kind of information that made you take a decision in the first place to let these things happen. You can wonder how we could have given it so much, and the lies in one very important outcome of this New World we inhabit: networking. You, me and everyone like you and me are now part of one very large, inexhaustible network. We’re connected together over the internet, through the telephones, televisions and radios. We’re connected through the books we read, because those who read the same books can be thought of as having the same interests and as forming similar opinions – pertaining to goals if not to ideas. In the end, we have given ourselves to belong to this network. We have opened our markets to a wider range of prospects, and we have exposed the local manufacturer to international competition. But what have we received in return?

We have received the access to information. By throwing all the fish in this world into one big lake, we’ve made sure that if ever we wanna have fish again, we just have to go fishing in that one lake. In other words, we have democratized information. If the stock market takes an alarming dip in London, one phone call to New York can disturb investors in the US enough to pull out all their funds from the British market and into other more promising economies that have shown stabler rises, say, Thailand. It is all in the open now, and if you want to get to the big fish first, it won’t help if you’re there first in the morning. Your bait has to be tastier. If you want someone to spend money on you, then you’ve to make sure you’ve got something to offer which no one else does. Ultimately, what we’ve taken from it all is what we did give it: power. The only difference is that the system which we call globalization has taken in power in one form and transformed it into power of another form. For instance, if I elect a government in my country that promises to open up its markets to a greater extent and liberalise the economy, then I will have given the global players one extra country to align with. In exchange, I will break down the walls around me that were once restraining me from reaching out to a larger customer base. If I were to design a T-shirt and think about marketing it on a larger scale, I will now be in a better position to do so. It’s like droplets of ink in water: before, the bucket was only half full. Now, it’s up to the brim. A single drop of ink can now penetrate through to a greater depth; you’ve to just be careful as to not let it get too diluted – you’re facing a larger group of people now. For the message to be driven through, you’ve to keep hammering it in.

Just as we’re now capable of transforming ourselves into uber-individuals in terms of creativity (owing to a greater number of inspirations) and productivity (thanks to the increased access to information), the family as a fundamental unit of society has also been impacted by advancements in technology. Earlier, our fathers and grandfathers had to choose between sacrificing one luxury in order to attain another; today, it’s no longer a matter of what luxury you have – but how you use them to get better results. Earlier, there existed a sizable disparity in terms of wealth and accomplishments between those who had chanced upon just one more opportunity than the rest. Today, that disparity is negligible. When a working father realizes that his job is not being threatened by earthquakes and tornadoes tearing down his office but seemingly inexplicable dips in the stock market that are capable of shutting his company down, he will look to offset risk as much as possible by making intelligent investment decisions and not building his cabin underground. He will also realize that his children have to be brough up with different goals in mind than just settling down because he will now know that there is a long way to go before that. Today’s is a world of competitors, and there are three roads one of which you can take.

1. You stick to what you know and discard anything new and innovative as junk that won’t last the day. If this is going to be your outlook on the world, you will also find that by the end of the day, you will become part of your own idea – you’re old, and you haven’t lasted it.
2. You keep moving around without an anchor. With nothing to hold you down to a specific set of goals, you cannot have a strategy that encompasses all things. The competition in each field is fierce, and you should be able to accommodate for changes in all of them before you make a decision. In other words, you’re either a paranoid prodigy or a dead man.
3. You strike a balance between being moved around and anchored to one set of goals. And yes, it is traditionally easier said than done.

When Intel’s Gordon Moore stated his notorious law in 1965, I think he had an idea of what that law would come to mean 45 years down the line. Moore’s law, coupled with the advent of globalization in this frighteningly unipolar world, is what is making a difference today and now. Again, it’s only a measure of how fast you are. If you’re very fast, you’re one man who’s capable of changing the lives of a million men, women and their families at the click of a button. If you’re not fast enough (there’s no “slow” indicator on this switchboard), you’re one of the millions whose life is going to be determined by the guy with the faster internet connection.

(I wrote this piece while reading Thomas L. Friedman’s ‘The Lexus & The Olive Tree’, a book he wrote in 2000 about the coming of globalization. I just wanted to express my interpretation of the details of the book through this post.)

Back with Blogger

7 months back, I made a very ostentatious entry into the world of WordPress, believing it to be more blog-oriented. It turned out it wasn’t just blog-oriented, but too blog-oriented, in that WP was spurning the growth of the blog as a breed of communication tools rather than focusing on their actual purpose: that of letting the layman with the internet connection speak out. Most of the templates available weren’t widget-aware and did not support javascript, the themes were pretty rigid, and they had a limited viewers pool. I know some of my arguments have nothing to do with ‘speaking up’, but being widget aware enables me to feature some of my articles, say, on Digg. Turns out, not possible! And their newly featured ‘Blog Stats’ section has its customers spending too much time on ogling at them instead of at the screen, wherein the quality of their posts is now secondary. I, for one, would like to have the flexible environ blanketing me, with just an editor and a template to write in and on, and the web out there to explore and annexe in my conquests.

Apart from that, I do have the usual complaint of not being able to export from WP to Blogger and vice-versa. So, instead of shutting my WP blog down, I’ve put up a detour message there to send people here. In the last 7 months, 180 of my posts have come up on WP – some of them quite controversial indeed! – and if it had been possible to switch all of them over here, it would have been easier to continue interacting with the same people I was then. Apparently, managerially, asking ‘our customers’ to do stuff stuff for us doesn’t work well! Anyway, that’s about it for now. The Castigation of Vanity is back with Blogger.

Blog on!

Silver Screen Sorrows

The film industry is one of the world’s most dominant audio-visual media, and spearheads the information and awareness hegemony against ignorance of common social issues as well as important political ones. It is no wonder that some of the fastest growing nations on earth derive a considerable fraction of their GDP from them. Ever since the advent of the television, and its encroachment into the spaces of print and audio media, the movies have been able to spawn greater audiences as well as critics. Messages that they come to convey are easy to understand and comprehend, and their availability in various languages defies the probability of information localisation amongst major groups of the population. More over, owing to their inherent style of dramatics and character play, it is entertainment on the house if only you can pay up for the theatre tickets. They seem to breed even a fashion conscious worldly wise generation as the years progress!

India, as one of those fastest growing nations, has a dominant film industry thriving in mainly two regions of the nation: the central region, the home of Bollywood, and the southern region, home to the Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu industries. Together, they form the largest filmdom in the world in terms of number of movies produced and ticket sales. The Central Board of Film Certification has stated that “every three months an audience as large as India’s billion-strong population visits cinema halls”. There were a record number of movies, 877, produced in the year 2003 alone. Considering the magnanimity of the bosses behind this movies, it is only common that we face such statistics. However, amongst these regional industries, Bollywood, the Hindi film industry, is the largest branch, with an approximated annual collection of USD 1 – 1.5 billion through tickets. Funding for these movies comes from a few large studios as well as private contributors. Earlier, Indian banks and financial institutions were forbidden from lending money to these production houses; this ban has now been lifted. Owing to the inadequate regulation of monetary influx, some of the movies are also partly, or sometimes wholly, funded by the Mumbai underworld (for ex. Chori Chori Chupke Chupke).

The industry seemed to have been firmly established in the Indian soil by 1931, when Ardeshir Irani’s Alam Ara, India’s first sound film, was released. Earlier, in 1913, Raja Harishchandra by Dadasaheb Phalke was the first Indian film. Over the next 20-30 years, most of the regional film industries shifted over to sound filming, and by the 1940s, around 200 films were being produced annually. Colour crept into Bollywood in the early 1950s, but were a commonality only in the late 1960s. Around this period, the genre of the films tended noticeably towards romantic musicals and melodramas. As the 1990s dawned, the films swung back to family centric romances, making stars out of a new generation of actors such as Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Kajol and Madhuri Dixit. Comedies were also widespread, spearheaded by actors like Govinda, Akshay Kumar, Karishma Kapoor and Raveena Tandon. Incidentally, this decade also marked the successful creation of art and independent movies, which were hailed by fans and critics alike.

At the start of the 21st century, Bollywood saw a new and immense surge in the popularity of its films with the utilisation of better equipment, improved cinematography and innovative story lines. With the construction of multiplexes around the globe, and also a growingly predominant Indian community overseas, Indian cinema expanded its reaches to greater audiences spanning a plethora of cultures and backgrounds. As the returns grew, so did the investments, luring in foreign businessmen to spend their money on this lucrative trade. And around this time of sconomic boom was planted the sapling that is today known as the concept of globalisation.

Box office bosses looked to maximise their profits, and the most convinient solution happened to be the targeting of mass audiences. This move resulted in Bollywood resisting investment in movies that targeted narrower audiences, thereby no longer representing the face of Indian entertainment and Indian education per se. The doors were shut to small-time investors and prospective producers and actors. The band wagon had to continue to roll, and it seemed that if you couldn’t beat them, you eventually joined them. Further, the increasing investments saw the clout of those at the top also rise. Now, with the localisation of power, the delocalisation of interests was neglected: movies were made if only they were appealing to these bosses. Smaller industries were confined to their parent regions and were unable to move out of their cocoons as the markets grew more and more dominant. This era spearheaded a hegemony of sorts with Hindi cinema stealing the limelight away from movies that had greater potential if only they had people watching them. The new techniques available for movie making, coupled with the paraphernalia that went with it, drew on a large number of talented movie-makers, only to put them down in favour of those who seemed capable of drawing in the bills. It is as if you pinch a sleeping baby to wake up, and then rock the cradle to send the baby back to sleep again.

Bollywood is a portmanteau of Bombay, now Mumbai and the capital of the Hindi state of Maharashtra, and Hollywood, its American cousin. Owing to the development of each state in a different manner, and also due to their classification on a lingual basis back in 1950, the northern regions of India now reflect a greater cosmopolitanism than the south, which is more conservative and abiding with its root cultures. Owing to insufficient segmentation at the box office and the drive for a greater output-to-input monetary value, Bollywood, in its move to target broader audiences by the year, has increasingly integrated the values of the Western cultures. India being dominated by a large middle-class community, a loss of identity streaming from entertainment with which you find hard to establish a connection becomes gradually unavoidable. The need to stay in line with your cultures and traditions is not mandatory, I agree, but to retain them in at least a few aspects of the movies you are producing is necessary. Women bearing all on the big screen is sensationalistic enough, but is this who we are?

Furthermore, owing to the large (monetary) volume of this market, the impeding recession in global economies spelled the sudden shrinking of it. The reliability that Bollywood had generated in its founding years now seemed overbearing, consequently giving birth to investment concerns. Due to the variational dependencies of India’s economic growth with this industry, the lack of safeguarding measures against such mishaps was reflected in an increased inflation rate (up to 14% as opposed to the critical 12%) within the country. This tempted the Mumbai underworld to get involved, who began to provide funding for some of the productions – the result? Black money disappearing into the maze of the market, worsening the economic recession.

Now, the allowable infrastructure, freedom and flexible for the regional industries is dependent on the local government to a great extent. The volume of money floating in the market, being sufficiently regulated, is pinched at the top before it can cascade to the bottom, leading to a monetary localisation. The markets up north may not have realised this, but since it does h
appen, there is an indirect regulation of money in the southern circles also. Finally, Bollywood has continued to be the most lucrative of industries in India, but only a representative de facto. The post of representative de jure has been regained by those businesses that equiprioritatively dealt with money as well as the needs of the people who made use of them.

India: A Cultural Coalition

The famous philosopher and post-modernist Michael Foucault said “language is oppression”. This may be partially true, since it allows only those who do know the language to communicate, shunning all those who don’t to a section of the society that gradually and inevitably disintegrates. Communication is a very central aspect of who we are, and our ability to communicate ‘in harmony’ reflects our togetherness, or rather, integrity, as a people and our capability of being able to establish a nation that stands strong. Although a national language would be hard to establish as such, an official language should do. A national language has far more severe consequences as opposed to official ones. This is because the official languages serve only to formalise business communication; the national language would attempt to unify the people of the nation. For a predominantly English-speaking nation, this is easy. For a nation like India, this is not. We have official languages in double digits, fine, but since all of her 30 or so states have been formed on a lingual basis, the inclusion of a provision for a national language in the constitution would invoke chaos within the nation. India is a coalition of different cultures: having a national language would be having a bias. It is not easy in India to conflict the values of the peoples of one culture while you try to side with another. It is a delicate balance, and the best solution would be to just stick to officialising business communication. The south Indians, especially the Tamilians and the Malayalis, don’t take as easily to Hindi as do the Telugu and the Kannadigas. On the other hand, the Hindi-speaking peoples are exposed to a different kind of lingual characterisation than the southern languages, and adaptation is again difficult. There are, of course, many more problems beside these, but I think you get the point.

However, my point in this post is that how only your mother tongue seems to be able to deliver the style of communication you need. No other language you could learn will come to serve you as finely as your mother tongue. If everyone observed this, a possibility of a nation language in the offing would seem even more bleak. Your mother tongue is your native language, it is something you have been listening to being spoken since birth, and it is something you have been speaking yourself. Many of the necessary habits of life taught to children are during their younger ages, when they learn without questioning and also follow it blindly. Even thought they may come to realise the purpose of it all later on, that time period when their mind is ripe is a rarity. And when you the child learns a language in this period, it is difficult to forget it wholly, and later on, it is also difficult to let go of it. It is as if the language has been mixed into your blood. This nativity in language is present among all the peoples of India, and those asking for the establishment of a national language should take into consideration these factors also. Apart from the commercial aspect of it all, India’s existence as a cultural coalition is a very important factor in the determination of such matters. No other nation is like India, and we can’t come to a conclusion derived from a comparative study. If we can’t have a national language, then we don’t need a national language. That’s all.