Epiphany

Bollywood - The Denial Tribe

Passionate lip lock. The watershed in Hindi cinema. So far taboo - suddenly given the thumbs-up by the censor board. It was ok to kiss on the larger than life silver screen. What followed was a slew of films capitalizing on it to get the box office collections ringing louder than usual. Films like Khwaish were described not as per genre of a moving love story but on its Kiss Count - the film with 17 kisses. How bizarre is that? But what is more bizarre is Bollywood itself. Bollywood that revels in the new found independence is a shy bride itself. Or at least pretends to be one. Yes, Bollywood - the world which film stars populate.

Bollywood as a word is hated by most stars. But I want to use it as it best describes their world - that coterie of mega stars and starlets, the wad of cash rich producers, the thin layer of underpaid script writers and overpaid music composers, lyricists and of course the iconic film directors. Bollywood, the real world which houses these people must not be confused with Hindi cinema. For, Bollywood is not Hindi cinema.

Bollywood is the world where the stars live. Hindi cinema is the world where these stars live the lives of ordinary people. Hindi cinema is a microcosm of our culture, our values, our thinking. It changes as we do. It reflects what we think. It is art imitating life. That is what Hindi cinema is. But it is not Bollywood. Hindi cinema is about the masses. Bollywood is tribal. Hindi cinema is ever evolving. Bollywood as a tribe is static, never changing. Hindi cinema is liberal (more so, now that kisses are allowed). Bollywood is parochial and feudal.  Hindi cinema is progressive. Bollywood is still living in the Victorian Age. How ironic then that the contemporary is made by the tradtional!

Why do I call Bollywoodians traditional? Because that is what they are in their personal real lives. They behave very similar to a tribe with a few tribal lords that draw the line of morality even when they attempt to cross it in their ouvres. The tribal laws are set and rigid. One man's wife cannot kiss another man on screen. That is the unwritten rule. Once a woman is married in real life, she ceases to be an actor on screen! But the man continues to be one. No wonder all kisses are showered on nubile actresses and all the married ones are left untouched - even though "the scene demands it". The male ego of this tribe is too inflated to accept a real life wife kiss another actor even if it is an essential part of the acting. The entire tribe complies. No wonder a much married Kajol in real life was asked to deliver a kissless copulation in Fanaa. The scene and script certainly demanded it. Only the real life marital status came in the way. Look at all other countless liplocks that have happened. The actress who gets kissed and kisses back is always unmarried in real life. The marital status of the man, however, is not important.

And it is not as if the lady herself decides. It is her marital status. A much kissed Juhi Chawla in Lutere is made to seal her lips after she gets married. Same will happen with Aishwarya, Preity, Priyanka, Kareena once they get married. Karisma's tryst with lips stopped after Raja Hindustani. You may say, much is being made of just a kiss. But this is a sign of something deeper. Of the double standards of the tribe. Of the tenuousness of real life relationships. Of the lack of faith in them. Of the specious ways of covering one's insecurities. And of the sophisticated veneer that hides the hollow inside.

Why else is there a denial of the casting couch practice? There is denial of the links with the underworld too. There is denial of relationships gone sour. There is denial of real credit and appreciation.  There is denial of a healthy competitive spirit. Why is Bollywood so wont to expressing itself openly? When the profession ironically demands that very openeness and candour? In trying to be others, they have forgotten to be themselves. What is the use of all the excess when one has to live a life of constant denial?

Old wine. Old bottle. New label - Corporate

Success is tricky. It is enthralling at first. Then it haunts you. There is always this need to better it. And there in lies the trap. If you attempt to repeat success with the same formula, you better be sure of all the equations and the calculations that got you there. Or the other option is to take the risk of creating an altogether new potion and hope that it is as potent as the earlier one. The risk involved in both is equally big. But the chances of failure in doing the former are more. As same formula means an audience already familiar with your modus operandi. And in doing so you have created your own Frankenstein. You have to now deal with a universe of vastly different expectations your earlier success fuelled in the minds of this savvy and familiar audience. And this is where Madhur Bhandarkar went wrong in Corporate.

The word politics always unwittingly gets used with another word - dirty. There is nothing new in this. Dirty because there is always an innocent scapegoat while the perpetrators join hands and revel in the end. Hindi cinema has used politics as the text and subtext of many movies for as long as we can remember. And today's corporate world seems to have embraced both the words - dirty and politics as second skin - in the way it works. This is perhaps what inspired Madhur Bhandarkar to use as a plot for his film Corporate. But he lost the original thought somewhere in attempting to gloss up an age old theme of dirty real politics with a corporate world sheen. His calculations went wrong. His equations didn't add up successfully. As the real subject matter of a corporate office was only used as a context and not the microcosm where all the dirty politics happened. The politics that happened was political in its true sense and not corporate.

He didn't do what he did in Page 3 - successfully debunk what lay behind the glamour of the socialites from an objective outsider's perspective. What made Page 3 successful was the various sub plots of different socialites and their reasons for being in the party circuit. These very differing reasons provided the humorous and real life insights that made Page 3 successful. The real agendas of each party-goer were played back beautifully in his/her personal life when each returned home. Page 3 provided that crack in the socialite-veneer that assuaged the voyeur in the masses. And it raised the expectations for the next magnum opus - Corporate. One expected to see the real politics in a corporate world. Not what happens at the state and government level which in any case has been so often flogged. One expected to touch and feel the lives of the corporate executives, their pains and pleasures and the real reasons why they succeeded or failed. As isn’t that what corporate politics is all about?

Instead what we saw was the personal and professional life of only one protagonist - Nishi. She was not a victim for the whole two hours and fifty minutes. The whole time was spent on glamorizing the corporate world and the way it worked. An organization was still portrayed as a clean and fair organization within. Which is not true at all, most of the times. Yes there were the unethical espionage escapades with rival companies. But even a slice of internal rivalries was not touched upon. The microcosm of a corporate unit is portrayed clean till it gets tarnished with the political world outside. And that is where the fundamental flaw is. We don't need to be told how dirty real politics is. It was time the masses were made voyeurs to the real goings-on of the corporate world and its real motivations and vulnerabilities. Not state level political wine in the same old scapegoat bottle with a new label – Corporate! Spare us the routine, please.

Oh no! Not the same blah! on the spirit of Mumbai!

July 13: 2 days after the serial blasts in Mumbai

What would you do if you see a bus full of school children meet with an accident right there, in front of your own eyes? What would you do if you see an elderly person trying to cross a busy lane with no success? What would you do if a young woman hobbles and twists her ankle while wading through knee deep water and you were wading alongside? What would you do if an earthquake claimed a city far away from yours and you saw distraught people on TV grieving their loss of home and loved ones? If you are a human being, you would reach out to help. As it happened with me in all these cases. I was a victim in some and a human being in some. But what I did was what many of us would have done. And what I suffered was what many of us would have suffered some time or the other in our lives. I helped some in need. I got help when I was in need. Does that make me a hero? Does that make me resilient? Does that make my family say "we salute your spirit?" And does that mean because I am a Mumbaiker, I represent the true spirit of Mumbai? Did you know these incidents that are cited above, none of them happened in Mumbai?

So why this brouhaha about the spirit of Mumbai - relentless, never-say-die, helpful, resilient and many other epithets? Aren't people outside Mumbai much the same? We all help if we can and move on. The sufferer also thanks you and moves on. So why this insane urge to differentiate Mumbai from other cities and tag it so? Is this again one of those specious media creations? Is it the result of the inexplicable fetish media has with sound bytes? Did you know that yesterday Delhi was flooded too. There were traffic snarls there as well. But everyone went about doing their jobs and the media was content to call the snarls jams and move on without so much as a token appreciation for the Delhiites. No this is not a Mumbai-Delhi comparison debate.

The truth is that the true spirit of either Mumbai or any other city and its people hasn't been tested yet. The real test would be not when adversity strikes. Because the nature of adversity is such that it makes you imagine yourself as the sufferer. And the thought is dreadful enough to make one reach out. The true spirit of any city and its people would be evident when we see each one of us have an everyday mission other than our daily jobs. An everyday mission to do something for the city. It may be small. But imagine if each one of the 18 million Mumbaikers did something small but constructive to help the city in whichever manner, what a difference we would make in just a day! Then we don't have to face a tragedy to make media valorize us. And who knows had we been doing this as a part of our everyday mission, the tragedy that hit us two days back itself may have been averted. Just imagine.

Chasing the Elusive Realism

Indian telly programming guys are like kids in a candy shop. Excited. Running Amok. Not knowing where to go, what to pick first from among a plethora of adaptable reality formats and telenovellas and Mills & Boon romances that most K serials are inspired from. It seems they want to grab all and eat all the candies - colorful and grotesque without giving an iota of thought as to whether their stomachs can digest it. The result: a veritable regurgitation of formulaic stuff with no understanding of what makes the audience tick and what lifts a serial from an ordinary soap to a memorable series. It is all a game of hit and trial. And sadly there are no lessons being learnt from even the past successes.

What are the past successes? Ask anyone and they go into a euphoric trip down memory lane when they recount serials like Rajni, Udaan, Nukkad, Hum Log, Buniyaad, Yeh jo hai zindagi and of course Mahabharat and Ramayan. It may well be argued here that those were the times when India was an entertainment starved country with no channel proliferation. And the first time anything happens even if it is mediocre, is always the most euphoric. If that were true, then why is that people don't recall those first mega series which dotted the satellite entertainment scape in the early nineties like Tara, Banegi Apni Baat and lots of others whose names we have already forgotton. Why is it that an entertainment starved country that considered even ads as good programming, now remembers only Lalita ji and Dhoondte reh jaogey fondly from among scores of others. There was obviously something that went right with these serials and ads even if it may have seemed at the time that it was something someone stumbled on serendipitously rather than thought through strategically.

But there is a definite trend and a winning formula that underpins all the past successes. As a researcher who happens to meet all kinds of men and women across socio economic backgrounds on categories as diverse as pharma and fashion, TV programs get discussed often enough. And if I close my eyes and play back all these small but telling informal chats I begin to realize that Indian audience is not as capricious as it is made out to be. There seems to be a tenuous thread that is holding together all the serials they consider close to their hearts.

We all know TV, more than cinema, is art attempting to imitate life. And it is this depiction of reality - its various renditions, that form the rudimentary framework of success. But the key question is what kind of reality and who does it appeal to. If you consider serials like Mahabharat and Ramayan, there is a mythological connect that represents our culture and beliefs. Our cultural connect is also palpable in serials like Buniyaad and Tamas. Not surprisingly it appealed to the vulnerable refugee mindset as the ugly scars of partition, though healed, were still discomforting. These serials managed to sensitively portray our cultural realism. And again if you consider serials like Rajni, there was always a social issue being raised and tackled in each episode. Similarly with Udaan - a woman's resolve of fighting a corrupt system while being in the system - a reality most civil servants faced at the time. A kind of social realism which we experienced daily and hence liked the dramatization. And we felt we were not alone in this country who suffered these vagaries. And what of serials like Nukkad and Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi? Well, you guessed it. They all had a kind of everyday life realism handled in a comic manner. This everyday realism is what Ekta's earlier saas bahu serials seemed to touch upon. Unlike the comic realism of others, she chose to make them emotionally high strung. But an everyday realism it was. After all, if all the saas and bahus of India saw that their everyday domestic problems and altercations - often dismissed by their husbands as too trivial - being dramatized on national television, they obviously felt they were not the only ones who went through these "small deaths" everyday. And there is someone who thinks they are problems big enough to dramatize serials on.

Now think of all the recent serials which have been successes. Astitva, Saans, Kora Kagaz and the more recent Saat Phere and Thodi Khushi Thode Gham are sensitive portrayals of social realism which the audience are finding relevant. So whether it was adultery, age compatibility, dark skin stigma or unconsummated marriage and woman asserting herself in a patriarchal setup - all find an echo with real everyday lives and social issues of people around us. Nowadays everybody seems to be on the bandwagon of everyday realism - comic or emotional - Office Office, Baa Bahu aur Baby, Jab Luv Hua seem to be somewhere between the comic or emotional everyday realism. Ekta's latest serials seem to flog the same old dead horse of emotional realism in different contextual and family set ups. It is interesting, however, that there is not one serial which seems to relevantly connect with our cultural realism. You may say Buniyaad is on a re-run and yet not successful. Not surprising. As the audience to whom it was relevant culturally have aged. There is a huge opportunity to appeal to today's generation by portraying their socio-cultural realism of Mandal 1 and 2, MMS scandals, internet marriages, sexual exploitation of women and the omnipresent media prone to sensationalizing everything. Maybe if more programs were made with stories that are seen through the lens of various realisms, TV viewing may become more enjoyable and diverse.

My Experiments with Lies

When I was a part of the advertising circuit, I championed exploratory qualitative consumer and market research. To me that was perhaps the only tiny window I had of meeting with real consumers in flesh and blood in an otherwise packed schedule of an ad executive. The joy was in trying to deduce what lay beneath and trying to cull out fresh nuggets of truth we called insights. After a decade of meeting consumers from behind one way mirrors and getting to know them better through the omnipresent lens of the cc tv camera, I concluded that research agencies were just not making the most of the deified presence of consumers - the ultimate end users of our products and services and the unsuspecting recipients of our fruits of labour - the final piece of communication. There were ways of engaging with them to draw out the most candid and unguarded response. Having experienced enough of such arm-chair familiarization sessions with consumers, across different markets and socio economic backgrounds, I decided to engage with them directly by opening a diagnostics and consumer research firm which claims to have the key to their minds and hopefully their hearts.

Armed with refreshingly different techniques to engage with them, I thought I really had the key that could open many locks. In the bid to uncover fresher nuggets, I disinterred a cesspool of lies that were consumers. When business started pouring in steadily I realized that I was increasingly wasting my creative techniques on a bunch of people who had just experienced them a month back. This bunch of people were what we call "trained respondents" and they are such a malaise to the industry. Always available to participate in a discussion even at the nth hour, they will never let you down when it comes to group attendance. But when it comes to group participation, it is almost as if they hold the recruitment agencies and the research agencies at ransom. Involvement in any discussion is directly proportionate to the menu of snacks and dinner served to them. Not to mention sticking to the time limit of 30-45 minutes only plus of course the gift they take home. Sometimes the gifts are dictated by the respondents themselves and given the back slapping terms they are on with the recruiters, they are almost always appeased. And at the back of what these people say, the fate of a brand or communication launch is decided and marketers continue to make million dollars worth decisions on what I so far thought was the voice of god in marketing. What a pack of lies they are.

They change their names in case you are good at remembering their names. I have had boys change their look because I could remember faces quite well. And the acid test came when respondents started actively enquiring the name of the research agency they would be meeting. My problem of getting repeat respondents was being solved by the respondents themselves. They declined to participate in any session that my company organized. And my research company was 'banned' by most respondents. As my company was the only company who had the ill repute of turning out respondents from a discussion if the face or name matched with the photo-profile of all respondents it had met in the last 1 year. While I looked at it as a huge relief, clients saw it as inept recruitment. So I turned to all such recruitment agencies who were willing to knock on fresh doors to get real untrained consumers for my research projects. And by doing that I guess I unwittingly invited a further ban from recruitment agencies as not one was willing to do that.

Was it time to close my business? Looked like it. Till I realized that my search for truth can never be successful however deep I dig into the bag of lies. The bag had to be made of truly unsuspecting consumers. And they need to be lured by things other than a meal ticket or a token gift. In fact they should not be lured at all. If these are times of the consumer becoming the prosumer, why not apply that in research as well? And that is what I did. A snowballing exercise within a group of consumers who were willing to take time out to participate in a discussion on brands - the type who are willing to experiment differently in new areas.

Prosumers are a different species of animal from the common consumer. The prosumer is a proactive consumer who is internally referenced and takes pride about thinking for himself or herself. The prosumer is experimental and is usually the first or the second person to try new products. And this limited prosumer set within my social reference has today spawned myriads of groups willing to participate in a discussion as long as it is engaging and will not use them again and again. It is more like buzz or word of mouth referencing. The challenge hence is to really make the sessions brain tickling and enaging that people do not hesitate in recommending others and encouraging them to participate.

That is how the search for true insights will never lose its sheen. The excitement has to be a two way street. And if the research agency doesn't capture the imagination of these self willed consumers, you can be sure, nor will the product/concept/communication under study ever will.