Anguish and Affectation, Advertising and Appropriation: A Call to Action
Anguish
Children in photographs where they should not be at all, that is my point. Not in photographs, not in the real-life horror represented in those photographs. Children should be in childhood. And childhood should be a time of honor and worship for them. Such is their journey, from conception to birth, sage-like, all.
I do not care that childhood is a social construction or if some high theory deconstructs it, and makes lexical insanity out of motherhood, fatherhood, ancestor-reverence, tradition and family too.
Children should be safe. Loved. Happy. Not in your news feed, or mine.
And not as lifeless bodies, pain-inflicted bodies, crying bodies, certainly.
Yet, we have seen them there, too often. How many names can I name? For some reason, I think of the crying children’s photos first, the orphaned children of Kerala. And from years ago and going forward still the many, many real and maybe not-so-real images of children from war zones in West Asia. Are we desensitized? Are we programmed? I do not know. I do know that there are polarities; Syria-Palestine-Kashmir goes one pole, and Kerala-Assam-Bangladesh-Pakistan goes another. That polarization of course exploded wildly now, and we are still in its semiotic aftermath still. We are living in a double horror; after the horror first borne by a child and her family, we have the slow-burn cultural horror of a world of anguish divided.
Anguish divided.
Barbarism’s culpability halved, its evil doubled, our resistance to it diluted.
Why?
I do not know if I can venture to answer this without risking disappointing one of two poles in a polarized world. But I have to lay down my words where I will, lay them down and raise my palms together in a hope of understanding between us, between each other, all of us.
When my anguish reaches limits, I can only say Namaste; I yield to something greater than me alone to guide me now.
I have to say it, but anguish divided is not natural. It is not who we are. Anguish divided is unworthy of us. Anguish divided is weak, unnatural, political (and not in that ‘everything is political’ as progressive politics holds kind of way), and ultimately, merely affectation.
Affectation
Social media is for the most part about affectation. Some might say, culture itself is like that these days. Mass society, isolation, anonymity, and now, heightened narcissism, life by Likes and Retweets, all of this is how we live now.
Affectation by itself may be harmless. Most affectation is not, thankfully, about anguish, or even diluted and divided anguish. It’s just a way to be known, and know. Share a meme, Like a joke, join a fan group.
But we are talking about anguish here, ultimate anguish in a way, the greatest fear and horror a generation can live with, that of the cruel denial of childhood itself, of life in childhood itself.
And we are divided deeply on what is anguish and what is affectation too. Even the definition is suspect, the definer divided, a lie himself.
One side’s display of anguish looks like affectation to another. Or fake news. Or virtue signaling. Or whatever they may call it.
But we have to acknowledge that we do live now in a culture of accelerated position signaling. I will name the names now.
The Left, loosely speaking, for this word now includes upper management elites as well as poor student activists, marks its territory on the minds of the world with a specific code of affectation, determined by identity.
Identity is everything. If you’re X, Y and … maybe just X, Y (this “inclusive” list is shrinking), then you do no wrong. Simple. If you’re A, B, C, then that’s it. You deserve to die. Routinely genocidal wishes can be safely expressed against you and not only will there be no consequences, there might actually be rewards.
Examples.
“I would feel safer as a woman in India if a lot less boys were born actually.”
“I will not get into a cab with a Hanuman sticker because Hanuman is a symbol of Hindu supremacist patriarchal rapist culture.”
And there’s the toned down affectation, not hateful but ill-informed, common among some cosmopolitan Hindus:
“Hindus believe that a boar saved the earth and Christians believe a dead body came alive and both are equally worthy of rejection.
These are affectations, call it behavioral memes, and they are everywhere these days. I bet no sixties radical student leader, or even nineties one (my time in grad school), imagined what seemed to them/us as our marginalized, campus-restricted, minority worldview becoming the way the whole world, or at least its upper echelons, capitalist elites, would start acting one day. Maybe it was in the air the whole time, “Radical Chic” as Tom Wolfe wrote back then. But in India, despite the economy supposedly having gone in one direction (from Nehruvian socialism to Narasimha Rao’s liberalization) and politics in one direction (from Nehruvian secularism to the triumph of Hindutva), all that has happened is that what used to be campus chic affectation/angst has quietly become National Culture/Global Belonging. In my first semester during my PhD, the Cultural Studies shelf in a bookshop had one row. When I graduated five years later, there was a whole wall. Now the whole world seems to have gone in that direction.
If it really, honestly, genuinely did, the world would not be what it is now. I would not be writing what I write now, would I?
What was once our quest (“struggle” was the preferred word) to save the world from the evils of capitalism, imperialism, injustice, has morphed into the tools of the same forces it seems.
Our struggle is now only a display of affectations, available to all, promising rewards to some, and existential illegitimacy to others.
Righteousness comes in Grande and Mega-Grande styrofoam cups. With room for cream.
Advertising
The most popular course for undergraduates in my old university was on Advertising. Not “how-to,” but a social history, taught by the charismatic Sut Jhally. I had the privilege of teaching the same course later for two years, and nothing opened my eyes more than paying attention to advertising over other media forms and institutions. Students too, in America at least, instinctively appreciated a critique of advertising more than anything else. This was critique that seemed to get closer to the nature of power in today’s culture more than any other concern. We are born, immersed, controlled, determined, it seems, by a business that promises to sell us, and sell us hard, in all senses of the word, in all directions.
And this way before we got hooked even to Facebook algorithms and Netflix suggestion tiles!
In the 1920s, when advertising was born, the main angle of its narratives was anxiety (“do you have germs in your sink?” “what will your neighbors think if you use brand x?”). By the 1970s, it had shifted to lifestyle-identification. I am not sure if a new “dominant narrative” has been named, but people are noticing, and noticing rightly, that it is activism. It peaked in the Trump Superbowls. White women in trains dropping their scarves by mistake and nice co-passengers in Hijabs picking it up and handing it to them (Hyatt hotels ad). Inclusiveness. Acceptance. No to hate. You know. Good sentiments, and good business too.
Advertising has already shifted the global culture to one where what I have previously called affectation is the norm, and sometimes even intolerantly normative. Hapless critics call it “virtue signaling.” But if you’ve acknowledged “virtue” in there, you have realized already that your critique is at a profound narrative disadvantage. You get what you have in India; a passionate, intelligent, diverse (and disarrayed, sure) army of voices buying into the inadequate and inaccurate label of being “Rightwing” as a mark of pride against what they battle. They know what they battle is really mendacity, hypocricy, injustice, cruelty; and yet, their words fail to break through the walls. How can they? The walls are high and built with money; tall, tall fortress walls, walls of lies to hide and defend more lies inside.
Advertising has shifted whole cultures, sensorially, biologically, mentally. This it did for sellers of soaps and toothpastes. Then it did it for sellers of wars and conquests, an Iraq here, a Syria-itch there. Now imagine the mess when it is done to sell a fourth-generation prince to his reluctant and weary people!
Remember, this all started with anguish. And the genuine, sincere outpouring among people who did not even know this little girl or other little girls, of anguish.
Appropriation
It would be simplistic and callous to reduce anguish, and the cause of the anguish, the pain of the people at the heart of it, to a pawn in someone’s games. It is in fact not very easy to see the terrain of these games. We get glimpses of it here and there from whistleblowers and the like. But there is much we will not know. Advertising is like that, an invisible force, a genius game even, amoral, beyond our grasp. Political discourse, journalism, academic conversation, all of these are theoretically accountable and reflexive; to constituents, readers, peers, students. But advertising, especially this ominous war-and-conquest advertising, is its own sovereign empire it seems. Has one agency or creative person stepped up to take credit for the finely honed uniformity of the Bollywood placards? Of the “Hindusthan” there, and the half-underscored mark under “Hindu,” not too much, not too obvious, but not held back either.
What is being appropriated here though is not just a tragedy, or the genuine anguish of people.
When power gets really hungry, it’s so ugly, it shows itself. Think of 9/11. Think of the thirst to invade Iraq after.
Power got really hungry. It began to draw pictures of dicks and share them with a straight face!
It was growling for quite a while now, staging its assault, paid for and planned, and now playing out with hundreds of even well-meaning stooges high on affectation (and a smidge of anguish perhaps, for I can’t imagine human beings even propagandists being entirely conscience-deficient).
It went “MeToo” and squarely stated that Krishna was an agent of sexual harassment.
It went “Every boy is a potential Rapist!” and made bizarre videos of small Indian boys with captions saying “I am a rapist!” It was supposed to be a moving plea from boys to their parents to teach them to not be rapists.
I do not believe the boys featured in this promo reflected India’s diversity though. The director chose not to cast non-Hindu characters I suppose.
And a sizeable mass of what I call “Middle Hindus” went along with it. Maybe not as affectation or aspirational status symbol, but just because it seemed to be okay. It was a good message. Don’t harass girls.
You can’t see hate if as a people your parents and ancestors protected you from it.
So on and on the middle Hindu mind goes, tolerating ever more increasing levels of frog-boiling-water temperatures.
The “woke” Hindu mind of course knows this but falls often for its own weakness too; that of mistaking the opponent’s tactical concessions for grand victories. See, even Shashi Tharoor is calling himself a “Hindu” now! We have brought them to the table!
No. What is really happening is that a massive, massive final-stage movement of appropriation is going on. The new normal for being Hindu is being drawn up. And of course it can be drawn up because they own the drawing board, factory, distribution lines, and even the bloodied thumbtacks to fix their festering delusions onto the board. They will define the new Hindu; on television, in newspapers, in colleges, and in schools, most of all. Children and parents will go along, or have to go along. They are holding the line somewhat, the Middle Hindus, because some of them can see through at extreme hate moments (like dick-Trishuls), and also because they believe, like ever compromising (and compromised?) Hindus in the infallibility of success as marker of worthiness: Narendra Modi, the “Hindu strongman,” who won.
Action
The Middle Hindu may not be sure of things like existential dangers or cultural wars beyond what he reads in the paper, but he knows that Hindu pride is a thing, and maybe even a good thing now, to a large extent in the person and symbolism of Prime Minister Modi. As long as the “Hindu strongman” is a winner, no matter how much this winner may distance himself from Hindu concerns and issues (temple control, RTE, and so on), the Middle Hindu will stick at least tentatively to the promise of a Hindu identity outside what the Advertising industry is offering (“I eat beef and chant Gayatri Mantra so I am a Hindu” and “Why I am a Hindu” Hindus). If he fails in 2019, then all bets are off. Middle Hindus will lead the march (not Muslims, not Christians), over one or two generations, at the most, into the new “Hinduism is Evil” Hinduism being currently positioned in the culture as the norm, and then, into oblivion.
That might sound alarmist, but then the signs are here and I have to read them as I see them. I know, and I have heard, Hindus boast that we have got even self-identified seculars to now call themselves Hindus, and the whole world is in awe of India’s soft power because of Yoga Day and the like. For me, the line in the sand is not about “positive” Hinduism or its recognition as much as the delegitimization and demoralization of anti-Hinduism in the world today and more appallingly, in India today. I am not worried that Hindus will stop doing their ceremonies, or going to temples, or abandon their goddesses and gods, overnight. That they might well keep doing. But if the current trend towards genocidal normalization is not vastly delegitimized, none of it will mean a thing. Everything will sputter and vanish in two generations; temples into sterile museums, festivals into advertising occasions for sales and parties, human beings into puppets and slaves (Yes, I think the Hindu resistance is an anti-capitalist resistance too, but that is a different debate).
So what is the action I suggest now? I do not know how much more I can say to my readers or to me. What I have to say is to the people I hope will be able to convey some of it to the man around whom this present toxic explosion is unfolding: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who I believe is a vastly good man, and also the singular provocation for the revolting levels of open anti-Hindu hatred all Hindus are having to face today. I am not blaming him, not at all. It is the choice many of us have made, and will probably make again in 2019.
We know how this is all playing out; until 2014, the attacks were on his party, on him. Now, the attacks meant for him and his party are directed towards all Hindus, existentially, brazenly. Is it meant to scare off Hindus? Or to make them reconsider their support since he doesn’t seem to have addressed any of the usual list of Hindu concerns?
I am not sure. From the narrow perspective of electoral calculations, that might well backfire for the Prince (Queen Mother, rather) in the Fort, and that well be the reason why the BJP is not stepping up resistance to the aggravated anti-Hindu ravings of the vociferous few (either that or it is truly clueless about this front as many have said). Jugaad maybe. Let your rich opponent pay for your campaign too!
But it might also backfire in other directions. Instead of pro-Modi Hindu consolidation triggered by the increasing amounts of hate flung at Hinduism today under the guise of activism, what might happen is the increasing normalization of that hatred, and Middle Hindus getting convinced they were mistaken in believing Modiji over the media that demonized him all these years.
The truth is that whether Modiji continues to avoid Hindu issues or not, or is heading for what some concerned observers have called “Statesmanitis,” his image is caught up in the wider politics of Hindu survival too. Most of India heard of him in 2002 precisely because of the media that made him out to be a “Hindu strongman” (or worse). A large part of Hindus who have openly lived through and experienced what it means to be unprivileged saw in him that strongman they wanted, and voted for him. Now, here is the strange thing. A large part of Hindus who I call “Middle Hindus” also saw him and realized that he was not an evil and violent man as the media had made him out to be; that won their hearts too. I do not think this is a simple divide between “woke Hindus” and “Vikas” people as such. It is more complex, and has to do with the double disappointment that might pop up from both sides in 2019 if the dangerous media games around the representation of Hinduism, specifically, are not understood by the Prime Minister and his team.
As someone who sincerely welcomed Prime Minister Modi’s victory in 2014 and all the civilizational aspirations I thought it reflected, I have to say that the past few days have been the lowest ever for this government. It has allowed itself to be seen as a protector of criminals, and for little reason seemingly other than its sheer negligence of communication.
I think this is a deeper malaise in the BJP culture of underestimating the power and value of words, to put it simply, in the pursuit of bodies, and more bodies, for power. The basic unit of “narrative,” which everyone is talking about, is after all, not bodies but words. Bodies can do their part in rallies, campaigns, and voting booths. But there are places words go that bodies, however selfless, dedicated, and seva-oriented they are, cannot go (as for tainted bodies, criminals and filthy-mouths from other parties they are now collecting daintily, less said the better).
That place is in the minds of people. In their minds, now, there is only anguish. And it is going to go in all sorts of bad places very soon unless the right words appear in the right places and in the right time. The time, I think, is now.
Postscript: A Prayer for Akshaya Trithiya
My father used to tell me that the significance of Akshaya Trithiya (among many reasons) is that it was on this day that Lord Vishnu saved Prahlada when Hiranyakasupu had him thrown off a cliff. It is apt that a story about assurance and protection like this has at its heart a child. I pray to Lord Narayana that He will be there to comfort and rescue all the children of the world who, unknown to us, are hurtling to some horrible end in some form or the other. I pray for an end to anguish, for all.
