here are a whole lot of things that look odd in the prevailing debate over what apparently is a non-issue: Should ‘cheerleaders’ be banned from prancing — or, is it dancing? — during the matches of the Indian Premier League? Blaming a certain minister from the Congress party in the Maharashtra Government or a certain politician from the opposition in the state, the BJP, would shift the focus away from the greater malaise that the authorities in this country suffer from. If not for raising such controversies, how many of us would know that some Mehtre and some Gadkari existed in this world numbed by an overdose of events whose importance in public perception varies in degrees as distinct as fingerprints of individuals? How many Indians outside West Bengal have heard of Subhash Chakraborty, Kshiti Goswami, Nandgopal Bhattacharya and Pratim Chatterjee?
Politicians and bureaucrats would do well to note how the people joke about them: When the national broadcaster, Doordarshan, first showed and then discontinued showing films with ‘adult’ content in the late nights in the late 1980s following frowns of some moral policemen in the government, people used to quip that the person who first demanded the ban must have had a great time watching the ‘objectionable’ contents perversely after which he must have mused that he was entitled to an exclusive right to voyeurism and, hence, denied the public the same ‘pleasure’! Some people are also seen envying jocularly the members of the Censor Board for Film Certification, who get to see ‘everything’ while others don’t.
The English media, especially, has never had kind words to say about the moral police. Its editorials are, to that extent, predictable. It falls, after all, under an unwritten code of conduct that supposes that a government is too holy to intervene in matters of ‘recreation’. Let’s grant the media its entitlement to this presumption. But whose recreation is it anyway? Aren’t the editorials calling the matter “frivolous” going by a popularly held myth that the semi-clad girls in the cricket stadia entertain the young alone? Enter any household in your neighbourhood without an appointment and you could well knock into a man facing mid-life crisis, feasting on every visible millimetre of an FTV model’s skin. Women who have to bear with mild to severe molestation every day inside buses will tell you that the older a man is, the greater are his chances of being a pervert, having lost all interest in his post-menopausal wife. Yet, as the young are not represented in the higher ranks of the media, the older people (the editorial commentators) can get away with belittling today’s generation, age-wise the biggest section of the Indian population. These men and women past their prime perpetually question the cerebral prowess of the young, whatever be the topic of discussion. One wonders if any old man who judges the young has ever viewed his judgement this way: Does it give me any pleasure to declare that while I am intellectually evolved — if not intellectually gifted — my son is intellectually challenged? In the case under study, the equivalent inference is worse: While I am not licentious, my son certainly is!
But much before the psychology of the moral police and their detractors bother you strikes the very nomenclature of the subject that is now in the eye of a storm. Nothing can be prompter than a spontaneous reaction. And the promptest obviously leads the rest. Therefore, how come the hired girls cheering two respective teams are called “cheer-leaders” if their choreographed display of joy succeeds — instead of preceding — the crowd’s delectation? Whose idea was it? More important, what inspired the idea? Is it the sight of bikini-clad women lying all around the stadia — a view that many Indian viewers have been associating with cricket in Australia since the 1980s, thanks to the television crews’ roving cameras? The society of voyeurs must be asked which of the two — flesh displayed voluntarily or that displayed for money — titillates them more.
One wishes emotions too could be bought by the BCCI. Beyond the lure of the so-called cheerleaders’ skin lies the fact that it feels nice to have pretty members in your club when you are cheering your favourite team. If anybody is blessed with sublime taste and discernment, he would agree that the sight of fully clothed (yet Westernised) Pakistani girls cheering their team in Sharjah was much more pleasurable. But which cricket fan watching television today is naïve enough to believe that those half a dozen pretty girls are actually friends in the same camp? Since inducing such a crowd-cheerleader fellow-feeling is impossible, let the cricket board admit honestly that the girls have been hired for nothing other than a mild version — or the first stage — of erotica, if at all even that can be achieved. There is a joke that goes: Women hate cricket because when a match is on, men don’t turn around to look at them! The BCCI does not seem to have taken this joke seriously, as the spectacle of semi-nude women, if the minuscule population of lesbians is overlooked, cannot be targeted at anybody other than male spectators.
If so, this act of employing girls with reluctantly draped busts exhibiting artificial joy not only disregards women as incapable of appreciating cricket — for which they cannot be the target viewership — but is also a glaring example of commodification of the fairer sex. Viewed in this light, it is both ironical and unfortunate that the overwhelming presence of women in the editorial boards of two pro-market Indian newspapers did not influence their editorial comments, which focussed solely on decrying the moral police. Celebrating “the woman of substance”, it seems, is akin to reducing a woman to a substance.
Where in this brouhaha would you place the Generation Next? Disgusted with the incorrigible proclivity of hyper-sensitive politicians and journalists to debate endlessly what a VIP said rather than what a VIP did, the young have long turned their faces away from the media. Young boys want real girls in their lives rather than fake girls on TV and in cinema. The debate would have never taken place had our country not been a gerontocracy, where one of our 40-plus uncles wants exclusive rights to voyeurism and another is obviously worked up for being denied the peep show.
0 comments:
Post a Comment