Popular culture for easy mass consumption

10 bucks says that most people reading this know squat about books, music and cinema
- they bastions of popular culture in my opinion. I am tired of people telling me that "But I don't know anything about books, so-and-so is so well read".

That is all but hogwash. If I just take books as a platform. Think about it, all the people you know who read, count the same people as their influences - Douglas Adams, JRR Tolkien, Salinger, Gabriel Marquez, O Henry, Hemingway, etc. I mean there is a list of about say 100 authors whose works we are familiar with. Even the more 'hardcore' reader will not take a name which a person with a decent IQ will not be familiar with.

There is a distinct reason for this. This is a slightly complicated argument, so bear with me. The idea is that most of us who read books purchase it from formatted stores such as Landmark or Crossword. Indeed, since these have come up very few book-lovers have consistently decided to stay away from it. Ever since, it is the selection-manager/team of Crosswords that decides the ambits of popular collection and fringe literature for all of us.

We are presented 2 shelves for say non-fiction, and the same is populated by about 500 titles. The person browsing the store thinks he has the choice to "pick" his book, but somebody in the back-office has already decided which 500 titles from say the 20,000 odd at his disposal should be displayed for selection. The same is true for music and cinema as well. Sure, you can order a book/CD/film if it's not available, but only a true aficionado would subscribe to something like that.

As a result, an increasing homogeneity of popular culture is coming to be. Our idea of cinema comes to limited to popular Hollywood/Bollywood titles of the 90s. You are branded an intellectual if you have seen the cinema of staples such as Satyajit Ray, Ghatak, Kurosawa, Almodovar, Kieslowski, etc. It is cool in an intelligent way to name Francis Coppola or Stanley Kubrick as your favourite film-makers, the same way it cool to have read Rushdie or Naipaul or Shelley, or claim superiority of Jethro Tull over Pink Floyd or The Doors over The Beatles.

When you pick up the giant omnibus of the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame, most rockaholics cannot even recognize even a single band for every 10-15 pages. The reason for that is our understanding of rock music floats in the universe of - Elvis, Buddy Holly, Dylan, The Beatles, Hendrix, The Doors, Pink Floyd, Stones, Dire Straits, Queen, Nirvana, etc. You know the usual suspects. The "cooler" ones may name The Ramones, Sex Pistols/The Clash & the punks, Velvet Underground, etc.

The idea is that even here you can easily compile a list of about 80-100 acts which would cover the "popular understanding" of rock music for about 99% of people. There is no diversity of thought. There really cannot be. There is nothing that encourages it, there is nothing that warrants it.

I am tired of our notion of popular culture being modified by marketing departments of mass retail chains and media houses running culture (read: films, music, etc) channels. I am not against Crosswords & its cousins, it has done a good job bringing culture-enthusiasts into the visible mainstream.

But where are the book-lover societies, the film-clubs that eagerly pursue cinema as a voracious passion rather than a retail-format driven lust of a "killer" collection or for that matter music buffs seeking the art of marginal music movements that feed their own notion of self and identity and by extension the music they are then inspired to create. In effect, the input is a giant mass of easy-to-consume-mashed-fruit-pulp for a population of a billion - therefore, the output can hardly be a 7-course spread of an exquisite spread.

And we still wonder why we have to see a "size-zero" (what does that even mean?) Kareena Kapoor gyrate in skimpy clothes while the sex-starved horny producer is busy getting through his routine of masturbating 10 times per day as he sees some desperate starlet lock-lips with a confused hero in a disaster-wreck of a plot in the name of a Rs 150 buck cinematic experience at the nearest INOX.

You really have to ask yourself then... was the 50 bucks you spent on a giant coke, really worth it?