The contemporary great Indian spectacle, after the television, is the mall. In many ways, it is an extension of the television, if we look at the advertising done in malls, the roads leading to malls, are the hotspots for billboard advertising. Billboard advertising are huge and very ugly. I blame them for damaging the entire cityscape, replacing the trees. They are repetitive/ use limited vocabulary/ promote western materialism and discourage individuality at the same time being garish in color and so massive in size. They are the most depressing public installations viewed by the urban inhabitant. The sad thing that digital technology is poorly used in manufacturing these seemingly perfect images with perfect human beings. Anyway, I don’t seem to be saying anything, we don’t already know. So moving on to a question thought aloud …how do we rope in the same advertisers, the same ad agencies, the same clients, the very same temples of consumption, the malls, into envisioning a positive and less oppressive experience of the city. I foresee a saturation that will turn their strategy around. That’d be the dog day of the concerned designer. Strike me down for being way too hopeful!

In the circle of cause and effect, the cause always seems to return to the consciousness. What do /will/have these advertorial images done/are doing to us. Cities are brimming with chaotic images, they are seeping into the mind of the city, throwing the collective conscious into a riot of suicides/murders/and now bombs. How do we mellow this place down. Can advertisers/media contribute in changing the way the Indian city feels? Or is that solely the work of the vote-hungry politicians and a few mercenaries who work with NGO’s that might be getting some of Brangelina’s money after passing down many hands. 

What about fair trade?

Do people in cities believe in God? If yes, what do they think of religion?

In a city like Ahmedabad, are people of different religions, neighbours? why not?

As an artist and as someone who needs to earn her bread n butter and indulge in some materialism myself, do I have a job in this country, if I want to use media and technology just for the betterment of urban space? I can’t think of one place which would want me. They want numbers/ presence which translates into flashing images and messages wherever you may find the place. If i suggest installing a screen in a public toilet, infront of the pot, i might just be given a pat on the back for suggesting such brand presence!

Can I die rich and ethical? —The great urban Indian prayer to God

A travelling circus of media installations with the light that calls the masses. now that’d be a real playhouse.

An Indian media carnivale. with LEDs as the jugglers and the Singh sisters artworks as the portrait painting machines. 

Whoever wants the honour of producing my ideas, get in touch NOW or you may forever have lost a redemptive oppurtunity!

If you’re naive/ hopeful/ and admit that you care, beware, you may be out of fashion. 

Crib, be cynical/ sarcastic/ look down upon everything/ pretend some detachment/ pretend you have no feelings…                    be cool (cold)

Though This be Madness   a study in psychotic art

-Georg Schmidt | Hans Steck | Alfred Bader

devised by Alfred Bader (strange credit, I thought…)

The copy I have here with me is owned by an institutional library and seems to have been printed in 1961. 

“it is not the purpose of this book to prove anything, but to afford an insight into the wonders hidden in the depth of the human soul. The remarkable gifts displayed here by three psychotic patients open us a realm of weird poetry- a realm which the poet and the scientist, the art historian and the physician each strives in his own way to make accessible. Disease itself then fades into insignificance before man’s astonishing creative energy. To bear witness to the primaeval spirit of humanity is the sole aim of this pictorial album”

“ALL WRITING AND PAINTING, ALL SCULPTURE, BUILDING AND INVENTION IS IN FACT A FORM OF ESCAPE FROM HELL”     – Antonin Artaud

This book reminds of two other books, actually one other book and a student project document I came across. The first is a book called Outsider Art by Roger Cardinal. I’d like to type out the brief introduction that describes this book as well, as both these books are looking at the margins of art.

Both these books look at artists that seemingly bear no influence from their surroundings and society.

” ‘The characteristic property of an inventive art’, writes Dubuffet,’is that it bears no resemblance to art as it is generally recognized and in consequence…does not seem like art at all.’  In this book, Roger Cardinal examines perhaps the only art which can truly be described as inventive, the art engendered outside the influence of society: by those certified insane; by those who claim inspiration from

the spirit world; and by the innocent, upon whom the stamp of stereotyped culture has failed to make an impression. In doing so, the author challenges the accepted definitions of art, and the validity of the bases from which we judge it. In a society where artistic activity is all too often a by-product of professional publicity and the commercial juggernaut, he demands that we consider ‘outsider art’ as a real alternative. “ 

Minor Masters Of Madness …….(foreword to ‘though this be madness’, by Jean Cocteau)

‘In this age of monstrous vulgarity, of education without culture, when words have lost their meaning through being wrongly or loosely used, perhaps we should restore its true meaning to the word “realism”.

Realism consists in faithfully copying the features of a world which belongs to the artist. Thus it has no connection with what usually goes under the name of “reality”.

It follows that the artist must, to a certain extent, be a schizophrenic (I). Like a child or a madman, he can make no claim but to genius.

There was a time when a spiritless paraphrase of genius had cultural and scholastic authority, but talent in our time-the sort of talent that might stem from healing, from family pressures, or from mere habit-no longer has that degree of popular acceptance that would permit, for example, a mediocre painting t…

(i hate to write this but I lost what i had originally typed due to a connectivity glitch, and I cannot , for the life of me, locate this book again. It seems to have mysteriously disappeared!! and the librarians seem to be no help to try and locate it for me. It seems the disappearance of a book is really no big deal in this library.)

Anyway, I mentioned that there is one other book/document that I an reminded of here. That’d be a student project by Prachi Kamdar. There are only a few student projects that are worth looking upto at the institute where I study. This is one of those few. It is dedicated to studying the pocketed deviancy in society and the publication she has come up with is a celebration of that. “The commoness of the uncommons”, that I think is the title of this project if I remember correctly. I found that not only has Prachi Kamdar studied the subject thoroughly (and it is clear that she has enjoyed every bit of the same), but she has also translated that big chunk of learning into a very minimalistic publication which is interesting/ simple / subtle but heavily laden with meaning and intention. It shows that she has not only enjoyed making the visual graphic design during her educational experience but really managed to acquire an intuitive design sensibility, which is an increasing rarity at this institution. There is a sense of disappointment when one looks at the quality of the body of work produced in this space. All talk, hardly any walk.

Okay, heres me recording something I read, for posterity.                                                                                                                                 I’m keeping it public so interested persons can benefit from it, though all this information is directly from the book, Windows and Mirrors. I’ve given the links at the bottom of the post.

1998: Donald Norman says that computers as we know them are going to disappear. He predicted that they will be used still but will disappear out of view. They will be absorbed inside information appliances. He draws the example of the electric motor. When the electric motor was first available in the early twentieth century, a very visible electric motor was bought, with attachments to accomplish various tasks. later it was embedded inside appliances themselves, disappearing from view. 

He goes on to say that we won’t care much that these appliances have a digital processor inside them, we shall only care that these appliances accomplish a task for us.

An important aspect of my study is to look at the cultural implications of the digital revolution. For that I need to know how digital designers and technologists think and work. I am interested in talking to web designers/ educational technologists/ graphic designers working with and in digital forms/ interface designers and human-computer interaction (HCI) experts. 

Even though processors are being embedded in all sorts of devices, that doesn’t mean that computers are going to vanish from view into appliances and we shall stop caring about their existence. We have reaosn to believe that our attitude/relationship with a computer is way more personal than our relationship with an appliance/or the electric motor. 

Industrialization led to bleak city landscapes/inscapes if we remember from history or antonioni’s red desert and other depictions in cinema.  (find other examples of depiction of industrialized cityscapes in cinema…western/indian)

The digital revolution has triggered very different cultural/socio-physiological implications on the human race. My investigations want to weigh the positive and the negative and what can be done more towards the positive and lessen the negative. I believe digital participatory art is a great way to reduce oppressive urban ennui.

For some old school HCI experts (Don Norman), computers are looked at as information appliances. Then there are those of a different school of thought who are trying to convince people at large that digital technology is more culture laden and poses more possibilities for shaping the future cultures than a mere appliance. The latter is manifested in the most exciting and rapidly evolving digital manifestation…the World Wide Web.

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, a structuralist, had an idea for a system that would help scientists share their drafts on the internet. Berners-Lee’s basic idea was that the links of one hyper-text could point to information stored on other servers also connected to the internet. Berners-Lee’s hypertext system was limited largely to verbal representation. Each page could display only ASCII *  text along with links. This was adequate for what Berners-Lee had meant it for. The World Wide Web grew slowly in its first years, as it catered to its limited audience. 

The domain of the internet was once owned by the structuralists, a close-knit group of computer scietists, students and professors who had their own ethics/languages(C) and were highly evolved in mathematics but not art.

Ecommerce. In 1993, a fellow structuralist and a colleague of Berners-Lee, Mark Andreessen, produced Mosaic, the first graphical browser for the Web. He also introduced the in-line image tag at the same time, which allowed static images to be integrated into the text of the webpage. This interested people from outside the structuralist community because they wanted to see how the Web may be used for information and entertainment exchange to a vast audience outside the scientific community. These people started to imagine e-commerce. 

This is the time when designers started to invade the internet. many of them were trained print graphic designers, so they brought the skills and assumptions of print graphic design sensibility to the internet. They thought that a website could function as a form of visualcommunication medium like newspapers/magazines. They were skilled at weaving together words and images in the 2-D format. others who invaded the internet were hired by clients who wanted to colonize this new realm for advertising.

The designers soon mastered the structuralist language, html which they considered primitive because it did not allow enough control over the look of the page. The reason was that the structuralists had organized html to work in a way that it is able to describe the content/information in terms of paragraphs, lists, links. and not the the visual design/appearance of the webpage. The Structuralists believed that the appearance should be decided by each user; this belief was in tandem with their ethic of technological democracy.

This was the almost religious difference between the structuralists and the designers. the structuralists were separatists who believed that form and content could and should be separated. For them, a website is a pipe through which form and content flows to the user. They thought that visual design complicated the information flow. The designers were unitarians who believed that form and content couldnot be separated, that websites communicate their message through the careful interplay of words and images. For the designers, the webpage was an experience and they wanted complete control over it. So they kept pressing for more html tags to be available which could give them that control.

David Siegel, designer, gave the term structuralist in his book Creating Killer Websites in 1997.

“I believe design drives the users experience, who cares how great your content is if people aren’t attracted to it or don’t find it pleasurable to read?…”

Structuralist Jakob Nielson is a champion of what may be called the Structuralist Reformation. He thinks the web is for business, not pleasure: it should be a transparent channel for information transfer. He says that users visit a website for its content and everything else is just the backdrop. The design is there to allow people to access the content. He says that graphics are greatly overused on the web, they slow download time. For Nielson the most eficient design is one that becomes invisible and leaves the user alone with the information content, and that content is typically text rather than an image.

Designers like Siegel believe that webpages are visual and potentially auditory experiences. Static and now moving images are not mere ‘window dressing’ but essential to the communicative experience.

Nielson admits that majority websites are badly designed, they do not follow his prescriptions. There are more images/digitized audio video/ animation on the web everyday. Siegel agrees that websites are more than often poorly designed. The problem is not that they overuse visuals but that they use them poorly and fail to generate a compelling user experience.

The debate between the structuralists and the designers is so that we can define new media design or more importantly, articulate the significance of digital technology for our culture. For our current culture, the computer feels like a medium. It is important to understand this medium so we can understand the experience that this medium generates for us.

The above story of the debate between the structuralists and the designers is almost as written in the introduction to the book Windows and Mirrors  by Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala. 

Jay David Bolter, I suppose has authored the introduction, though there are no credits mentioned. Here on, he says that computers are a reflective and transparent technology, which goes for all digital technology. Jakob Nielson and Norman make the mistake of assuming that the single goal of all design is to make the interface transparent, when infact the goal is to establish an appropriate rythm between being transparent and reflective. This is a common error in mainstream interface design and HCI today. Despite evidence of the popularity of experiential websites,computer designers and HCI experts still suppose that the best interface is always “clear”, “simple”, and “natural”. As producers, we must render digitalmedia transparent to the user, but we must also render the media visible to, and reflective of the user. Making digital artifacts requires both perspectives.

After having read this,being more or less convinced or having agreed to David Bolter’s viewpoint/argument, I concluded for the time being, that as a filmmaker/designer, i shall show loyalty to this point of view  even in my film. Thus the film will more or less take to every digital artifact oscillating between being transparent and reflective.

In the introduction Bolter goes on to say that the structuralists are not altogether wrong. They after all built the internet and the world wide web. Nor are visual designers superior. The structuralists represent an important vision of the world as information to be organized and presented to the users in the most efficient way possible. Their vision is not wrong but incomplete. Infact some structuralists are themselves beginning to acknowledge the need for a broader vision. Norman is currently writing a book entitled “Emotion and Design” on the aesthetics of design.

An interesting question that arises here is the difference between art and design? let me leave that for a later write-up….

Art is nothing but the good of man, or so I do believe. And if Digital technology can bring about the serenity of a van gogh/ or the social satire of andy warhol/ the socio-political past modern art of the more contemporary singh sisters and fascinate the urban inhabitant who is only surrounded with the glare of advertizing images, it would truly make living in the city a more engaging pleasant experience when we look around. and this would be possible only because digital technology is such that it can be ubiquitous, hide and be visible, lay quiet and be loud when required, it can be cheerful and positively engaging. Thus, my effort will now veer towards how does digital technology engage the user? 

WHY DIGITAL ART?

Digital art has a tendency to be dismissed as eccentric reactions to digital technology or as ‘personal expressions’. They are actually radical experiments in digital design. They are experiments by digital artists who have thought deeply about the relationship between digital technology and the user and have backgrounds in art and technology both. Because their manifested art is coming from thought and the need to create/study society, it is a pure form of experimental design. Digital art is relevant for information architects, creative managers who are building websites, usability specialists testing productivity software, computer scientists imagining new applications in mixed reality and ubiquitous computing and those seeking to create new forms of digital entertainment. digital art is not some self-limiting experience that will vanish from one’s consciousness.

To design a digital artifact

is to choreograph

the experience that the

user will have.

IF WE ONLY LOOK THROUGH THE INTERFACE,

WE CANNOT APPRECIATE THE WAYS IN WHICH

THE INTERFACE SHAPES OUR EXPERIENCE.

*ASCII text: Acronym for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Pronounced ask-ee, ASCII is a code for representing English characters as numbers, with each letter assigned a number from 0 to 127. For example, the ASCII code for uppercase M is 77. Most computers use ASCII codes to represent text, which makes it possible to transfer data from one computer to another. definition courtesy of webopedia.internet.com

content courtesy: Windows and mirrors(interaction design, digital art, and the myth of transparency)  by Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala, MIT Press. 

Note: This content is not entirely reproduced as from the book, but the essence of it is entirely from there. This is for solely an educational purpose.

Advertising is the art of manifesting an appearance. Manufacturing a deity; an image for the masses to drink up. The more absorbtive, the better. Graffiti has been an effort to subvert advertising in most cultures. It is not a mere expression of drawing techniques and skills, or colors. It does not only carry a ‘coolness’ factor with it because it has the element of risk and adventure attached to the artform. Theres a deeper cultural ground that manifests itself into graffiti cultures. Many photographers/ artists/designers have attempted to document the graffiti culture in india. But most seem to be looking at the graffiti generated as part of commercial advertising. Thats not really grafitti. Even commissioned works may not qualify as an emerging graffiti culture. The premise of this art is to articulate what the advertisements/ visual bombardments leave out/disguise or mislead on.

From personal experience, the only authentic graffiti that I may have encountered is scratched out words and figures(usually always pretty demeaning to women) in buses and  train toilets. Or the ones at public places, especially historical monuments in cities or ones visited by the civic-sense lacking Indian public which has almost no caste or class distinction. Most of them seem to display a society of sexually depraved men who have been repressed from any sort of sexual talk with women. Secret writings on the walls are their desperate means of communication about their most natural but unfortunately suppressed desires. Also a certain attitude towards sex and women seems to come about which is representative of nothing but highly damaged perception of the opposite sex. This culturally spontaneous graffiti that has emerged hidden in the toilets/trains/ buses of India which spontaneously seems to make an effort to subvert the sexual taboos in the social/familial structures. Opposed to this natural tendency of the Indian graffiti culture, the graffiti that seems to have been born in the tubes of london or the trains of New York has been a more direct critique of capitalism/advertising and inequality of the sexes. This culture has emerged as a pure subversive socio-cultural art with all the adventure/risk but clear social messages and intentions. The commissioned works have come much later when certain styles (like schools of graffiti) have found appreciation and connoissseurs. Some of the works are detailed masterpieces and have become celebrity graffiti artists, some still guarding their identities and sticking to the essence of the medium and its illegality and focus on the art and the anonymity of its presence, making it actually an intended voice of the people. What is fascinating is that the American/European graffiti cultures have emerged mostly from the lower classes of these locations, born out of the need to neutralize the frustrations/exploitations/struggles and their everyday socio-political disappointments which filter into their everyday experiences. Which says a lot about the patriotic, civic and socio-cultural discourse going on in the minds of the young. Their need, so strong, to scribble their message on the pavement and convert it into a whole new artform.

Certain groups have recently come up in Bombay and other places in the country who have studied and found the Western styles fascinating and are merely emulating the styles and doing some commissioned work. These groups, however, seem to lack any sort of vision or seem to be unaffected by any real motives. this could be due to the fact that they do not really directly experience social adversities or feel that capitalism or any other agency(government/religion/family….etc.) has disillusioned them in any way and therefore their non-urgency to express anything. Even though i think, the disillusionments/disappointments are there but theres a lack of expressing or giving them any form of articulation or a mere critique of the Indian urban society by its young(15-40 year olds)  There is an air of being on guard, of complying with all constructs of social exchange, pretending, being very careful, lest one is alienated or sought to be a social deviant, misfit at the same time being an elite memeber of an elite community. The youth revolution of the sixties has transformed into college level politics. As Guy Debord would have remarked, mere apprenticeship for becoming a zombie. Kids of white collar citizens do not engage in politics. They do not understand it. The majority of the youth are too ignorant or mere dim-witted towards leadership, society, country, governments and rule. They’d like to pay their taxes, commit some minor corporate crimes, avoid the traffic policeman and any other sort of policeman or law-making authority by becoming invisible and paint beautiful colourful western forms on the city walls, hoping to believe that they can relate to another country better than their own past and present.

There is a tendency in the urban Indian who thinks he can be hip by being part of a seemingly subversive group or just of an artform which represents the new/ the outsider art (especially European or American). Something he can do and talk about that makes him part of an artistic minority i.e. adds an elitist quality to his existence which can help him further manipulate his social status or in intimidating the other more common, more mediocre, not so elite artist on the other side of the table. These groups are not subverting ‘evil’ practices of indian capitalists in any way, rather they want to get their own little pieces of the capitalist cakes using only the surface level technique of this socially critical and important  medium. Also these people use the walls of people who are very eager to please them. What is this fascination of the indian lower middle class (is it naivity?) with flashy dressed hip youngsters resembling the Hindi-dubbed Hollywood film actors or the brand flashing bollywood actors. i want to investigate the reasons for this eagerness to welcome the richer, the haves by the have nots. Is it the aspiration to make friends with them? because they (notice how ‘they’ are ‘they’, THE OTHER which says something about the biases of the author here) are not only from the lower middle class but also all that the lower middle class stands for, especially conservatism, more frustrations, more struggle, and usually cinema/television (and now going to the mall) is the only means of adding quality/standard or entertainment from their mechanical survival dominated suburban (subaltern urban? )  lives. and all these respites are also full of the glitziness of a higher lifestyle. so when someone from that higher lifestyle comes with a proposal that seems strangely new, as if it’ll help them enter a realm of the unknown high art, the swish, the glamorous people, its their chance to get an insiders view of their strange polished world.

The earlier canvas was made of wood of a jackfruit (kathal) tree. Currently, it seems to be plywood with a layer of cloth pasted on top. A uniform coating of limestone paste and a binding material. 

Four Shaivite Saints | Appar-Sundarar-Mannika Vachakar-Sambandar| Early Tanjore C.19| These Tamil Nalvar Saivite saints (7th to 9th century) each represented a different form of reaching out to Lord Siva and communicating their love and surrender| in gilded (gold impasto) and gemset technique

Krishna & Rukmini Kalyana | early C19th|

Hanuman as bhakt, c.1725 , Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, watercolor on cloth. Not as colourfully busy like the popular calendar representation of the same god.

Calendar art/ miniature statues of dieties etc……has led to the standardization and homogenization of sacred iconographic content panning over all/most Indian Religions. This has led to a manipulation on how these deities are visually represented.

picture source: Auctions of Indian Art by Neville Tuli.

This painting is a 1780 depiction of the legendary romance of ‘Sohni-Mahiwal’. This is what is now called the Indian painting style.

This one lost out as a choice for mass production when the Indian region became modern. So you and me don’t recognize it as a depiction of the popular tragic story. Made popular with the availability of mass printing technology. The reasons of who chose which depiction and why, are lost to history. As are the reasons for many other choices which were made long ago that can be seen as our present-day visual language.

This collage of many images of  the popular Indian art print in the Western style is synonymous of a copy-paste action. The digital manifestation of the print production.

“Endless repeatability of information due to mechanically reproduced print denotes modernity in India. Colonial India was a visually dominated society organized around the printed image. Printing made a whole new visual public domain available regardless of wealth and class. In this, India became an iconic society feeding on graphic devices and drinking the symbolisms like they were meant to. this was modernity in india w.r.t. socio-cultural visual engagements. “

-Partha Mitter

So the visual came to be judged as to how well it could be mass produced and meet the demands of the consumers/spectators/market.

*hermeneutic: interpretation of text

image cutout from an advertisement, lyrics from a marilyn manson song, re-mixed by simran dhaliwal

This woman, who seems to be sensually aroused by a cold metal television set under her young and pretty bottom. Her hand that touches it ever so lightly, like a slight brush that may have been the cause of her pleasure. She shows to you, Mr.Viewer, this box, of her emotions and dreams.

“It is easy to deride reality Tv, as many do, for being base, superficial and morally bankrupt. While that may or may not be true, what is true is that the way it mixes the public and the private, the artificial and the real, introduces complex indicators of where culture is and where it’s headed. It has become so pervasive so quickly that it’s hard to keep up with, even if you try. 

In reality tv, the line between artifice and reality is blurred, and the distinction between the audience and performers is broken down.

A crucial distinction between ancient and contemporary thinking is that the allure of Dionysian theatre was founded on the return to a state of nature- of a more intense world of pleasure. In contrast, today, participants seek the same intense experience through fame on reality TV, but this experience is anchored in illusion, without being free of their identities. Instead, they desire an escape from anonymity by having the public fall in love with them. This seems to be tied to the ascendancy of subjectivity in our opinion dominated culture, where every possible thing is measured and counted to ascertain its popularity.”

-Tim Gilman-Sevcik

(Commarts, 2008, is reality TV altering our sense of reality?)*

The Ekta Kapoor dominated Indian television scene may be deriving its base argument from creating individuals which are part of huge conservative joint families, which are essentially black or white. She exploits indian religious sentiments of the pure/ the ideal idea of the sanctity of life/ relationships especially marriage/ female misogyny (hatred of women by women). Her storyline banks on the majority of Indian families in which the wives are essentially house wives, who look after the home and children and try and finish their work just in time to catch Ekta Kapoor’s soaps. Of course, the basic means to grab these wives’ attention is by glorifying their everyday lives. Especially coding and brainwashing them into coming to terms with their frustrations, if any, of being mere homebodies. Ekta Kapoor’s serials depict housewives as radical epitomes of sacrifice and a religion of fear and karma. They code in dreams and aspirations which seem probable to the naive trusting housewives. The adventure in this existence comes in the form of family blacksheeps/mother-in-law-daughter-in-law relationships/ greed for ancestral property/ money/ and stealing the eligible bachelor/fiance or husband by the female vamp. All the while that these themes play out, the “good, morally-sound woman”, who is inside the ‘circle of purity’, the one who cries a lot/ prays a lot/ doesn’t speak much/ never raises her voice no matter what the circumstance/ sacrifices anything and everything valuable to her/ behaves subservient to her in-laws and husband, saves the day! She never claims the limelight (even though the director’s camera so happens to do just that…keep her always under the viewer’s eye) She is always discovered as the saint. This portrayal of the ideal Indian woman is rooted in the most terrible way in traditions like Sati and the conservative structures about the role of the two sexes in the Indian historical context. The danger is that these soaps are single handedly scripted with the sole intention of creating shocking melodrama for the over eager television viewer. This has evolved as the only economically viable hobby or entertaining everyday engagement for the Indian homemaker of the service classes and semi-rural classes. This will undoubtedly have a profound impact on the worldview of the future generation of the Ekta Kapoor-watching families.

Cashing in on superstitions, reflecting the personal beliefs of the producer, ekta kapoor, are this television’s outright crime. The domination of this television points to the fading idea of a democracy in the minds of the public. Ekta Kapoor is the George Orwell’s present-day “big brother”. Dictator-like and irresponsible. She makes herself come across as extremely religious/ conservative and superstitious. Her soaps are always named with the letter ‘k’, which is apparently lucky for her as told to her by an astrologer.  These shows seem to have no script and seem to be concocted as they go along, knowing cleverly what sort of moral twists and addition of black sheeps can keep the TRPs mounting.   

but who is this ekta kapoor? what exactly is her agenda? what are her own political leanings? We can only know this through the media, a language she seems to know better than you may give her credit for.

This is NOT harmless media. The most dangerous form of communication; mind-numbing, sweet.                                               Everyday dose of sweet acceptance into complacency of cultural and social values.

(*In this article he also mentions phil collins’ work in the exhibition “the cinema effect” at the hrishhorn museum.)