Krishna Shastri Devulapalli | Hey, let’s make some better things worse
“Give us something, and we’ll make it worse.” These (roughly) were the words from a few years ago of a talented singer whose voice is the only thing I like about him. Despite my reservations, his simple pronouncement was so succinctly accurate and undeniably profound that I thought it ought to be on a plaque somewhere. He was referring to a popular show on which he was serving as judge. (But he could just easily have said “Give us anything, and we’ll make it worse.”) It was the Indian edition of a long-running international show, ‘repurposed’ for that unique beast we fondly refer to as ‘Indian taste’. One of his grouses, what with our land being our ancient land, was that the judges were made to perform, too, from time to time. Because, you see, our audience would like it. It would be cute. And that was everything. Meaning, the folks who had been hired for their expertise in a particular field, for the express purpose of deciding if a participant had what it took, meant to be impartial figures, would also perform alongside the amateur participants now and then, thereby rendering the term ‘judge’ meaningless, but so what?
Unfortunately, the chaps who took this ‘creative’ decision are right. Our audiences would like this. In fact, what they would have liked even more was if the judges were made to mud wrestle dressed in tutus in a pit in the middle of the set. While singing. In fact, what would work even better would be to do away entirely with the participants, for they are unknowns, and we in our wise land look down on anyone fame-challenged, hire more celebrity ‘judges’ and make them sing while cooking, tightrope walking and bare-knuckle boxing. Now that, dammit, would be a show! But would it be the show they bought? Which brings us to the question: why buy the rights of an internationally popular show, if that’s not what you want?
Why not come up with an original format – ideally suited for ‘Indian taste’ as per market analysis, algorithms, data thingamajigs and the Vastu Shastra – for a music-centric show that has judges being shot out of cannons, clashing mid-air to sing a duet?
If you think about it, it’s the same with everything else. We revel in buying, taking, borrowing, co-opting – when we can’t outright steal, which is our first preference – ideas from all over, good ones, mind you, from fields as varied as architecture, filmmaking and cookery, and making them worse.
Give us a good book. We’ll do an Indian version that’s worse. Hand us a tune, a movie, a dish, a building, a pristine beach, an idyllic hill town, a syllabus, a revered monument, why, even a massacre memorial – no problem, we’ll make it worse. (Was there any need at all in this world for Gobi Manchurian?) And we will hail our new version as being the superior one and defend it till we are blue in the face. And anyone not agreeing with that point-of-view is anti-national.
We are like that snot-nosed kid who cannot resist instantly dismantling the shiny new toy car he has been gifted, part by part, looking at the rubble, denying his own destructive idiocy, and going ‘There, that’s much better.’
What makes us this way? Why do we have this pathological need to tweak, alter, remodel, ‘improve’, revise, convert, modernise? Why do we fix things which ain’t broke?
There’s two parts to this, I’d think. To take apart something that’s already done is easy. You need to be no more qualified than the kid with a screwdriver and hammer left alone with his new toy.
But, if for a moment, we just stuck to art, or popular art, which is more or less what the singer was talking about when he made that astute observation, what is this ‘Indian taste’ that he speaks of that artists have to keep in mind when they create for our market?
What changed from the time when the Brihadeeshwara, the veena, the Panchatantra and Pahari art were deemed fine as they were, okay for ‘Indian taste’?
I’ll sign off with something that a friend, a quintessential Indian, did many years ago, to prove my point. Wanting some quotes on creativity by well-known names, which he wanted to use at some office seminar, when my friend sought my advice on account of Google not being all-pervasive, I gave him a handy book of quotes.
A few days later, my friend showed up again. He looked disappointed.
“Your quotes didn’t go so well,” he said.
“They’re technically not mine,” I countered. “But why?”
He showed me a piece of paper.
“Good taste is the enemy of creativity so one must make the complicated simple by developing a creative process that shrivels by not making a thing but making something after it is found while every animal leaves traces of what it was, man alone leaves traces of a whirlpool of imagination, a self-imposed straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.”
“Who said this?” I said.
“Well,” he said. “I combined what Picasso, Jung, Einstein and a couple of others said.”
