I've been amused and bemused in equal parts by some newspapers telling us lately how to improve the quality of our daily lives ufffd avoid electronic media and visit various restaurants and sponsored funfair type things or send in textured stories of everyday life
I've been amused and bemused in equal parts by some newspapers telling us lately how to improve the quality of our daily lives ufffd avoid electronic media and visit various restaurants and sponsored funfair type things or send in textured stories of everyday life.
If it needs a dressed up marketing plan to make us more actively present in the city's life or take on the lost art of simple storytelling, well, why not? I'm not going to be all purist about it.
But I wonder if it will unleash a flood of the one thing that fills me with terror: the urban Indian capacity for nostalgia. It is a woolly apple, a too sweet kheer, a rubberband with no band and it's the thing any media house knows is a crowd pleaser (hence better for marketing). We see it most commonly in IIT types unable to move beyond Pink Floyd, the breathless accounts of South Bombay as the epitome of romance, the insistence the no one is more beautiful than Madhubala.
Not that any of these things are per se not worth praising (they are), but the uncritical gooey eyed repeating of known facts that passes for storytelling among us is a bore.
One reason I find it boring is that this tendency, while extolling the wonders of the past, seems to have a peculiar disconnection with history. We are unable to look at the past with any sort of critical, ironic, or even human eye. It must always be a golden and epic one. This must also be why Indians bio-pics have scripts with the excitement of vrat kathas. Half our historical storytelling is just hagiography. The only recent exception I can think of was Harishchandrachi Factory, which, while no great cinema, was a highly enjoyable tale that looked at the "father of Indian cinema" with a twinkling eyes, telling the story of how great nuttiness can also lead to great vision.
The inability to see a story in history is compounded by the absence of a strong public library culture and the absolute inaccessibility of state archives. We study badly packaged, moralistic history in school and never go back to it. No one who is not a scholar might even know where the state archives are ufffd and you aren't allowed to go in and consult them just because you are a curious or interested citizen.
But why? The government is supposed to keep these everyday records of history on behalf of the people, not keep them from the people. Ditto for the archives at Films Division, AIR, Doordarshan. A rich record of the public life of the Indian nation, these archives are not only inaccessible for the most, they are probably depressingly ill catalogued.
Woudn't it be great if the government set up a national archive cataloguing mission that people could volunteer for? Senior citizens, college students, burnt out corporate folks on ufffd anyone with time could volunteer a few hours a week to catalogue the hours of no doubt fascinating of newsreels, interviews, performances so that more people are eventually able to access it.
We can't ask this of news channels since they are private corporate bodies and have rigid systems of ownership ufffd but we can ask it of our public broadcasters, because as a public we own these records collectively.
Stories stay alive for us only with the past and present, constantly throwing a new light on each other to result in new versions of events, with personal experience getting linked to public narratives. Stories are meant for swapping, not just shopping.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with
fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevi.com.
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