By Zohra Javed for TwoCircles.net,
Sometime back in a fashion show Bollywood star Katrina Kaif dressed up like Barbie and walked the ramp. That hit the front pages all over the country. And as if this was not enough, comparisons between Katrina and Aishwarya also started doing rounds and the reader was “informed” how the younger looking Katrina was more Barbie-like.
Can’t say how this affected the graph of Barbie sale figures in India. But surely it was setting a trend or was it actually consolidating one that is already in the process of grounding itself un-noticed but decisively firm as an acceptable way of life.
Now one hears that the comic strip character Archie has (after sixty eight years of existence!) popped “the question” to Veronica instead of Betty and that has caught the attention of some mainstream national dailies, and they have taken this as the basis of some analysis of the human behaviour. The results of the research on human behaviour it seems points out that men (represented by Archie!) now like the so called bad girls.
And what do women prefer…? Archie-like “men”?!
Honestly the entire analysis is, to say the least, very comical. What else can it be? Are comic characters now established standards of attitudes in human behaviour? What kind of a world are we living in? A considerable number of our population is young and in an impressionable age. They must have solid role models to follow so that in their future life they become worthy and responsible adults. But the idea perhaps is to dull and numb the senses of the youth so that they don’t ask questions nor do they care what hell they are living in. They are surely being trained to become brutally selfish, blandly robotic and callously intoxicated, living away from the realities of life and in the process becoming emotionally weak and far too dependent on hollow materialism.
The Barbies and Archies of the world are essentially urban characters (that is of course if our youth want to model themselves on these comic strip characters!), which do not constitute the majority. Has anyone given a thought to what life is like for the tribal youth living in forests or that portion of the Indian population that is based in rural India and deprived of even as basic a necessity as water? Those who eat lot of chillies not to impress a girlfriend, but to cause a burning in the stomach so as to forget the pangs of hunger for sometime?? Those who are caught between State and local terror outfits???
One political party gave the slogan “India Shining” another declared that its “Haath” was “Aam aadmi ke saath”! But that’s about it. Our double standards have become increasingly stark and stridently visible. We shout on top of our voices how India is the next super power of the world (Karan Johar even has Preeti Zinta calling a white woman “kameeni”in his film “Kal ho na ho”!) but in the same breath everything foreign is divine and Mr.Johar as also the Chopras shoot most of their film sequences in their adopted motherlands.
Urban India now has a global culture where we eat, drink, sleep, socialise, shop, love, live, talk, laugh…in short do everything as per global attitudes dictated by the Barbies and Archies…so we do not have time to “think”, because Barbies and Archies don’t “think”. Their faculties of understanding are poorly developed as in glamourous morons.
Should this intrusion in our private lives go on? Or should we pause and take stock before it’s too late? The question is what we want our children to become?
I think it is an important question…more important than which religion is perfect or whether sex education should be imparted in schools…so the sooner we debate it the better it will be in the interest of our children.
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Proud mother of two, Zohra Javed lives in Mumbai.