It is fashionable today to deride or defend millennials
Illustration/ Ravi Jadhav
It is fashionable today to deride or defend millennials. But it seems to me that the phenomenon we often describe as millennial behaviour, has not as much to do with a generation, as with the age we find ourselves in: the Age of the (Glorified) Amateur.
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At the start of this century, a television reporter interviewed me about my new film. It was a surface interview, which I suffered through. At the end, he cockily said, "I haven't even seen your film. But I'm sure it didn't show." Given that I had made the film, it had certainly shown itself to me. I was shocked by his callousness which he thought was a stylish casualness then. Well, a few years later, seeming to be good, rather than actually being good, at your work is the new normal.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with being an amateur - someone with an innate talent who, upon learning and practicing will evolve into a professional or even master of their work. We celebrate amateur work for its freshness and energy and its potential to create something transformative over time, which the experienced and established have ceased to do and to challenge the orthodoxy of formal education as the only way to learn.
But, in the Age of Amateurs, bred on a diet of empty self-love and entrepreneurial brashness, filtered through the fleeting facsimiles of fame the Internet offers, the amateur has come to think of themselves not as amateur - hence, becoming - but as a genius - fully finished. We see them everywhere, but especially in the arts. You may have met the Blessed Bandra type, yaniki the person who feels perpetually blessed for their ability to turn out a doodle or a ditty, underlining that it's all Universe-given, needing little human effort. Or you might have run into the Versova Value System - talk fast, always have to check your alleged schedule, name-drop. Often the name they drop most is their own, listing their every activity as a landmark event.
Most such people are unified by their limited knowledge of the world. Their sphere of reference is limited to their immediate circle. For them, if they haven't heard of it - yaniki, the person is not their friend or trending on Twitter - then it can't possibly be important. Those who sit before them may find this offensive, but they don't mean to be rude, because they have no concept of good manners, only of coolness and its foreign-returned cousin, success in a mainstream sense.
Perhaps it shouldn't matter but it is cause for regret in two ways. On the one hand it reveals how tenuous is the space of artistry in the world. When the idea that one must work hard to hone talent at one's work gets left behind, and the amateur considers themselves complete, we set low standards for ourselves, for the word and style starts to substitute for skill. But perhaps the larger loss is paradoxically the loss of youth in a culture that privileges youth. The liberty of being unimportant - the liberty to make mistakes, to learn from others, to be free of the burdens of success and masks is part of youth's advantages. To lose that is to ensure that it's not just lonely at the top, but at the bottom and in-between as well.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevipictures.com
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