Nothing Beyond Virtual Reality Alok Rai The Times of India Saturday, January 7, 2006
The move to name — or rename? — Bangalore as Bengaluru seems of a piece with the reactionary attempts to redress, through a form of hypernominal activism, the taint of time, the "wounds" of history — similar to the way in which local street names are changed along with changing political regimes. This tendency must be resisted. There are more important things to be done — better that roads be maintained and cleaned than that they be renamed. Not less important, there is irreplaceable cultural value in that patina, that depth of resonance which can only be acquired through time's slow che-mistry. And yet, respect for the achieved and given world must be balanced against the also-human desire to register one's passage, to leave a mark, to modify that which is given and resist that which is imposed. Time, then, to ask Shakespeare's question — what's in a name? Because, clearly, something is. It used to be called Priya Square, but in these heady, headlong days, that name itself might well be retro now. Particularly in Priya Square. This is the open space in front of the Priya multiplex in Delhi's Vasant Vihar. With large stores emblazoned with the iconic brands of international consumption — Nike and Baskin Robbins and Levis and the inevitable McDonald's — this enclave in south Delhi is an enchanted space for a certain kind of young person — because as soon as one steps in here, as one bubbly young thing was heard remarking loudly, India khuttam! Across this magic threshold, India stops, and one is instantly transported to, well, Byzantium, with... The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees... and soft, relentless, muzak in the neon-lit arcades of the shopping mall. It's not true, of course. India is still present, in the famished shapes soliciting alms, the dark children with stick-like limbs, weaving unseen and unregarded through the throngs of the well-heeled, devouring their ice-creams and their accessories with hungry, angry eyes. It would be unfair to suggest that all forms of the globalisation fantasy — or aspiration — take such gross forms. The CII ideologues are vastly more sophisticated, but even in their accounts of that globalised future which is simultaneously desirable and imminent, the transition from an all-too-present present to the gleaming, glamorous future is always visualised as smooth and streamlined, lubricated by a miraculous coincidence of desire and possibility, so that everyone gets what they want, and there are no losers and no costs. That this infantile fantasy should have acquired so many adult believers is one of the great mysteries of our time. It's not difficult to understand the desire to escape from this world of weariness and woe. After all, the more dire the misery becomes, the less likely it is to be relieved in the span of the one and only lifetime that is given to us. And, so the sages have told us, what cannot be cured must be endured. So we endure, with ready stoicism, the misery of others. But that escape — sought even if not achieved — exacts a price. The "global" sheen has effects that go well beyond the surface. The call-centre hacks who acquire slick tele-identities along with their shaky accents are common knowledge. One can easily imagine the damage caused by the social dislocation that results from working a graveyard schedule to suit the convenience of customers in American time-zones — so that the only other people one can know are the similarly afflicted, other denizens of the night-world in which they are Bob and Carrie and Chuck and Robbie, au fait with cultural trivia derived, I'm told, from a pedagogic exposure to Friends. The real damage, however, results from the hollowing out of oneself. It is generally understood that identities exist in relationship with other identities, in matrices of ascription and recognition. Identities acquire density through being implicated in everyday social networks, in the quotidian interactions of the pre-global world. But the virtual identities of this world — of which a kind of "English" is the lingua franca — are altogether different. They are lightweight and elective, and commit one no more than does the choice of a silk shirt — perhaps even less. The resultant cultural desolation is camouflaged in an ideology of rootlessness, a celebration of a shiny glo-balised world that, in more senses than one, exists beyond gravity. Pico Iyer identified the new "post-imperial" culture thus: "...English is the lingua franca, just about everywhere is a suburb of the same international youth culture, and all countries are a part of a unified CNN and MTV circuit, with a common frame of reference in McDonald's, Madonna and Magic Johnson". In this ideal world, the lightness of being is not merely bearable, it is actually desirable. Of course, not everyone can be a part of this world — and there might even be some who do not wish to be part of it — but to the ideologues of globalisation, such people are mere living relics, and their cultural hankerings obstacles in the seamless transition to the future. From such a position, even a relatively harmless symbolic gesture such as the renaming of Bangalore in line with local pronunciation is seen as dangerously retrograde, the thin end of the Luddite, future-denying wedge. The writer is professor of English, Delhi University.
The move to name — or rename? — Bangalore as Bengaluru seems of a piece with the reactionary attempts to redress, through a form of hypernominal activism, the taint of time, the "wounds" of history — similar to the way in which local street names are changed along with changing political regimes. This tendency must be resisted. There are more important things to be done — better that roads be maintained and cleaned than that they be renamed. Not less important, there is irreplaceable cultural value in that patina, that depth of resonance which can only be acquired through time's slow che-mistry. And yet, respect for the achieved and given world must be balanced against the also-human desire to register one's passage, to leave a mark, to modify that which is given and resist that which is imposed. Time, then, to ask Shakespeare's question — what's in a name? Because, clearly, something is. It used to be called Priya Square, but in these heady, headlong days, that name itself might well be retro now. Particularly in Priya Square. This is the open space in front of the Priya multiplex in Delhi's Vasant Vihar. With large stores emblazoned with the iconic brands of international consumption — Nike and Baskin Robbins and Levis and the inevitable McDonald's — this enclave in south Delhi is an enchanted space for a certain kind of young person — because as soon as one steps in here, as one bubbly young thing was heard remarking loudly, India khuttam! Across this magic threshold, India stops, and one is instantly transported to, well, Byzantium, with... The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees... and soft, relentless, muzak in the neon-lit arcades of the shopping mall. It's not true, of course. India is still present, in the famished shapes soliciting alms, the dark children with stick-like limbs, weaving unseen and unregarded through the throngs of the well-heeled, devouring their ice-creams and their accessories with hungry, angry eyes. It would be unfair to suggest that all forms of the globalisation fantasy — or aspiration — take such gross forms. The CII ideologues are vastly more sophisticated, but even in their accounts of that globalised future which is simultaneously desirable and imminent, the transition from an all-too-present present to the gleaming, glamorous future is always visualised as smooth and streamlined, lubricated by a miraculous coincidence of desire and possibility, so that everyone gets what they want, and there are no losers and no costs. That this infantile fantasy should have acquired so many adult believers is one of the great mysteries of our time. It's not difficult to understand the desire to escape from this world of weariness and woe. After all, the more dire the misery becomes, the less likely it is to be relieved in the span of the one and only lifetime that is given to us. And, so the sages have told us, what cannot be cured must be endured. So we endure, with ready stoicism, the misery of others. But that escape — sought even if not achieved — exacts a price. The "global" sheen has effects that go well beyond the surface. The call-centre hacks who acquire slick tele-identities along with their shaky accents are common knowledge. One can easily imagine the damage caused by the social dislocation that results from working a graveyard schedule to suit the convenience of customers in American time-zones — so that the only other people one can know are the similarly afflicted, other denizens of the night-world in which they are Bob and Carrie and Chuck and Robbie, au fait with cultural trivia derived, I'm told, from a pedagogic exposure to Friends. The real damage, however, results from the hollowing out of oneself. It is generally understood that identities exist in relationship with other identities, in matrices of ascription and recognition. Identities acquire density through being implicated in everyday social networks, in the quotidian interactions of the pre-global world. But the virtual identities of this world — of which a kind of "English" is the lingua franca — are altogether different. They are lightweight and elective, and commit one no more than does the choice of a silk shirt — perhaps even less. The resultant cultural desolation is camouflaged in an ideology of rootlessness, a celebration of a shiny glo-balised world that, in more senses than one, exists beyond gravity. Pico Iyer identified the new "post-imperial" culture thus: "...English is the lingua franca, just about everywhere is a suburb of the same international youth culture, and all countries are a part of a unified CNN and MTV circuit, with a common frame of reference in McDonald's, Madonna and Magic Johnson". In this ideal world, the lightness of being is not merely bearable, it is actually desirable. Of course, not everyone can be a part of this world — and there might even be some who do not wish to be part of it — but to the ideologues of globalisation, such people are mere living relics, and their cultural hankerings obstacles in the seamless transition to the future. From such a position, even a relatively harmless symbolic gesture such as the renaming of Bangalore in line with local pronunciation is seen as dangerously retrograde, the thin end of the Luddite, future-denying wedge. The writer is professor of English, Delhi University.
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