“Culture?“
he squinted in the daylight, as he looked up bewildered to her.
“Yes,
CULTURE. What does that mean to you?” she pressed hard on ‘you’.
“Well,
umm.. Culture is like.. you know.. a bit like Apur panchali, Rabindranath
Tagore, Sukumar Ray, and, like theatres, nukkads, nice movies, and anything
that has got a nice reference.” he said carelessly, as he took drags from his
cigarette.
“Well,
let me tell you this. I have no idea
what ‘Culture’ actually means, but I certainly know what ‘Culture’ does not
mean. It does not mean creating rock music out of a Rabindrasangeet . It does
not mean distorting a Satyajit Ray movie into something that has a lot of
drop-the-clothes scenes, with no message to deliver. It does not mean visiting
Shantiniketan to just click pictures for your Facebook profile. And it certainly
does not mean puffing cigarettes in a culturally-rich area simple because, you
feel, it makes you “cool.” She winked as she took the cigarette from his lips
and killed it on the floor.
Well, I don’t know any of them. This whole
conversation was eavesdropped by me. I preferred to throw the cigarette as
well, when I heard her.
As the dusk grew darker, I sat on the stairs of
Nandan and for a pretty long time I pondered on whatever I heard now.
Where
is culture? Or well, what is culture?
With the advent and yield of globalisation, it’s
more about head banging to music than listening to music. It’s more about
mature pornography in the foil of art and culture, than creating a movie that
has a strong message to give out. It’s more about shedding clothes than wearing
them, and well, it all has gone down to money, than the feel-good air it
brings.
A weird place I reside in. They smoke because Bob
Marley used to. They shed clothes because film stars do that. They talk high
about cultural and literary exponents because that makes them feel creative
about themselves. They go around places of high cultural value, not to embrace
culture, but to show off their photographic and pseudo-cultural flair. They
mould Rabindranath’s compositions into rock music, because, ‘that’s cool.’ They
shed clothes in movies, because that’s the present culture of merchandising the
flesh.
The
dusk had given way to night. I needed to get out of my world of deep thoughts
and rush into the real world. One hour of hopeless dissection of ‘culture’, and
I already needed a smoke for myself.
