Entertainment has gradually, but purposefully, wormed its way into all human activities and has become the natural representation of all experience
Robert Nesta Marley was convinced that there are two kinds of people who can’t be entertained -- those who are afraid and those who are hungry; “You entertain people who are satisfied… you can’t entertain a man who has no food” he had famously said. But Bob obviously hadn’t been to India, and if he had cared to visit, the natives would have told him “Them belly full, we hungry”, and yet, would have discovered for himself, that the hunger for sustenance do not necessarily supersede the hunger for entertainment, and that the idea of a better life, for most of the population, is escaping from it. He would have also determined, that this is definitely not the land, even by the narrowest of margins, of the well-fed, the immensely content and the ferociously courageous, and yet, would have seen for himself, entertainment’s drug-like intoxication under which the people went about their humdrum lives.
Punching Maslow where it hurts, by cheekily inverting his Hierarchy of Needs Pyramid, it would appear that we have made ‘the need to be amused’ the most basic; food, shelter and security be damned; pass the remote, serve the euphoria, inflated self-esteem and elevated mood three times a day and all times in between, and let’s sit back and watch the parade go by. Psychologists call this passive entertainment and equates it to junk food, while many others, armed with reams of startling data and inarguable scholarship, proclaimed the impact of such activity, rather ominously, as the erosion of social capital.
But the width of our discourse on entertainment has always been, for the most part, restricted to the quality -- or the lack of it -- of its content, and the threat it poses to our mental well being, especially that of our children, given the gross trivialisation, mindless stereotyping and shameful distortions that’s passed off as entertainment, the monopoly for which have been held, fervently, by our exceedingly commercial film industry.
Unnerving as this is, there’s something even more sinister and disconcerting that’s developing around us which, because of its surreptitious and insidious nature, has deceived even the most vigilant of us who haven’t seen it coming, and because of its irreparable and irreversible character, it has greatly alarmed those of us who have. Entertainment, once confined to mainly films, has gradually, but purposefully, wormed its way into all human activities, and has become the natural representation of all experience. Entertainment -- at its lowest common denominator form -- has become the delivery system for all cultural, economic and social communication, engagement and interaction, converting the world into a glitzy, delusory, 24/7 amusement park.
This so called ‘Bollywoodisation’ began with the regional film industry, as epitomised by the asinine portmanteaus that they are known by, then went on to pervade all other activity quite rapidly, dampening their cognitive quotient and infusing them with characteristic ostentatiousness and misplaced melodrama, converting everything into an unappetising mawkish mash -- easily digestible, but as flavoursome as dog chow.
Unfortunately, this is what we crave. Like recalcitrant children who refuse their nosh unless served with a dash of ketchup, we spurn everything unaccompanied by dramatic lighting and cloying melody, encouraging, nay, urging, every endeavour -- from news broadcast to politics; sports to social service -- to plug into the ubiquitous Entertainment Grid, and like Adam Lambert, sing: “Turn it up, heat it up, I need to be entertained”.
Naturally, businesses follow people’s desires, and advertising quickly realised that targeting the spine was more welcome than targeting the brain, suddenly finding immense merit in David Ogilvy’s ancient advice: “When you’ve nothing to say, sing it”; news barons realised that the topics of debates had no relevance to viewership as long as the participants loudly and simultaneously abused each other -- better still if they walked out -- and the whole show became the ‘Spectacle’ Barthes predicted.
Cricket, despite our dubious claims of being a religion, was on its death bed when someone got it to mate with Bollywood; and the progeny, though having no resemblance to cricket, bounced back with the effervescence of an eighty year old man who just married a Miss Universe, saving world cricket from life threatening impotency and financial ruin. The sugary coating of entertainment deflected attention from the ineptitude and clumsiness of the game itself, and it no longer mattered if cricket was replaced by football; which it did, and ISL was born.
As we turn into a nation of attention deficient, sensation seeking, passive voyeurs, we need to remind ourselves of a seminal study by social psychologists Tim Brock and Stephen Livingston, who found an inverse relationship between the need to be entertained and the need for cognition, which means the more you succumb to entertainment, the lesser your ability in critical thinking and problem solving. Thankfully, it also means the more you think, the less you need to be entertained. So, a good place to start would be to think of excessive and overreaching entertainment, and how its distorts information, how it’s getting us addicted, and how it’s changing us forever.
