What cricket, Bollywood and TV tell us about 2015

Reflections on the year-ending creates strange rituals. Somehow one gets caught in the mentality of a report card and eventually ends up in stereotypes and clichés. Year-enders often turn out to be anecdotal but beyond messaging nostalgia, they convey little.

They usually focus on the official and rarely go beyond it. Today, it is also fashionable to use one or two World Bank or human development indicators but even these lead nowhere. The more scientific or objective we make it, the less it seems to convey the real state of the world.

Cricket

Yet, the world is full of signs and messages about democracy. Beyond the formal system, there is the informal economy of culture which is always full of meaning. All we need to do is improvise a framework. If one needs to get a sense of the Indian democracy, all one needs to do is to look at cricket, cinema and a gossip of media. Each has its sense of folklore and myth, each has a deep sense of value frame. The three together create a symbolic frame for assessing our politics.

I want to begin with cricket. Cricket is not just a sport, it is a career, a world view, metaphor and a lens for looking at the world. For two generations it has been a way of life.

When younger Indians salute South African batsman AB de Villiers, they are saluting what cricket represents, talent combined with character. De Villiers combined the contradictory to surprise spectators. When India saluted him for one of the slowest innings ever played, they understood the patience, tenacity and control of a man who otherwise played exciting cricket. Suddenly, one felt proud of the Indian spectator for his sense of judgment. De Villiers could easily become the "Indian of the Year".

However, when it comes to Indians, there is little to celebrate. More and more, it is not the game that attracts, but the battles outside the pitch. First, it was N Srinivasan-Lalit Modi and now it is Arun Jaitley. And we wonder why these people who not know nothing from Bamford to Victor Trumper, have throttled the game, turning it to an extension of matka and electoral politics. The game we celebrate as cricket, with legends - Keith Miller, Nawab of Pataudi, Prasanna, or Hashim Amla loses out to the power play of politicians who may not even understand the nuances of a complaint - that today's game is just not cricket.

Yet the beauty of cricket is the silver lining. This time it came from Kirti Azad standing his ground showing that he understood both parliamentary decorum and cricketing norm. When Azad levelled charges against Jaitley, the audience was surprised. Kirti Azad by himself may not have carried the day. But sitting next to him, watching quietly was a legend - Bishan Singh Bedi. Bedi's presence was enough to turn the tide.

The career and the personality, the outspoken honesty of the man was recommendation enough. Jaitley might be the Union finance minister, and Bedi, a retired cricketer and an ordinary citizen, but even then the battle for credibility was unequal. Such is the charisma and integrity of a Bedi that Azad is prompted to see right and do right. Just that one act of Bedi inspired a defiance that kept cricket and the values of cricket alive. One sees a sense of hope.

Bollywood, too, produced its surprises. Once again it is not the films that impressed one, but the debates outside it. There were good movies but nothing that impressed. The mythical sense of Bollywood as breeding contradictions and inventing new myths did not come true. In fact, the myth of Bollywood unravelled in the opposition between male and female stars, between the likes of a trinity of Khans and the new generation of women stars like Kangana Ranaut, Kalki Koechlin or Deepika Padukone.

Cinema

The feminine is being redefined in India while the male model, with a few exceptions like Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Irrfan Khan, remains stagnant and frozen. Yet, it is the Khan bastion that stood out against the philistinism and bullying of the RSS and Shiv Sena. Shah Rukh and Aamir still emphasise the power of Bollywood to remain plural and therefore, creative. Sadly not all the Khans gave epic performances. The Salman Khan court dispute despite its epic length was anti-climactic. The courts released him and for once the Salman script short-changed our sense of justice. It marked a bitter after taste this year. Especially when we wanted our myths and heroes to sustain our value frames.

Television

TV has become a separate world to view the culture of democracy autonomous from cinema. Between news broadcast, electoral dramas, TV has become an autonomous symptom of cultures of democracy. This year has operated between noise and silence. The silence of TV comes from its indifference to certain kinds of news. TV has been silent over the repeated incidences of agricultural suicides. TV has also missed capturing the moment where Baba Ramdev became the new medical multinational with his superb organisation and homespun Ayurvedic philosophy. When the next generation says noodles, Nestle might have lost to Ramdev. If this was a business battle abroad, it would have captured front page news.

Bihar was the centre of TV news. But politics in Bihar was never conceptualised or analysed systematically. One wishes the sociology of Lalu, Nitish and Modi had been presented reasonably.

Unfortunately, even legendary channels like NDTV made a perfect ass of themselves. TV somehow remained aspirational and Modi just as Modi-esque. Without a sense of ground level narratives, whether it was the Chennai floods or the Kashmir crisis, by continuously trying to accommodate Modi as the only story, democracy was losing its criticality, its bite as gossip and its sense of the anecdotal as ethical. TV, in that sense, was disappointing as a moral force.

I am using TV, cricket and cinema as indicators for my annual sense of India because they are better than technical indicators. The three domains capture the sense of doubt, loss and despair that nibbles at the Indian democracy. It seems that our institutions have been damaged by majoritarian democracy. And these three show how democracy is being damaged by a contending version of it, and that might be the biggest source of worry for the future.

(Courtesy Mail Today.)