Search This Blog

Thursday 14 July 2011

Harry Potter and India’s deathly shallows

Harry Potter’s phenomenal global success points to the importance of nurturing, developing and financing original content in the creative industries – something we have singularly failed to do in India. Actually this gap goes well beyond the creative industries. Outside of music and film, in science and technology too we get by simply by copying what others do.

We have become a nation of copy-pasters, having first ignored and then forgotten the skills needed to generate original thought and content. For all our world-beating numbers, can anyone think of a Bollywood film that was adapted by Hollywood or a drug that was copied through reverse technology by a western multinational?

On July 15, many of us will queue up to watch the last episode in the Harry Potter series, Deathly Hallows Part 2, marking the end of an era for an entire generation around the world. The books have been translated into 67 languages and sold 450 million copies so far, making its author JK Rowling a billionaire and reviving the British film industry.

Instead of trying to emulate that success – and putting in place the building blocks that make it a success – we take the easy way out. It’s an aberration that Bollywood has not copy-pasted Harry Potter yet. It’s not because it has suddenly sobered up but only because the Harry Potter franchise will relentlessly pursue plagiarizers anywhere in the world.

There are honourable exceptions – Amartya Sen, Vikram Seth, Ram Guha and the great Ravi Shankar among them. And there is original creativity that is ignored by the mainstream of the global industry – tribal art comes to mind. But the scenario of money-spinning original content, by and large, remains dismal and desolate.

Why so? An obvious villain is our learn-by-rota-or-perish school curriculum. Uninspiring teachers who should be encouraging schoolchildren to think about their subjects merely force them to memorise texts. Children are not expected to think outside the box. There are schools that are exceptions to this rule, but they tend to be expensive public schools meant exclusively for the children of the upper crust.

Both Ghosh and Seth – whose books, for all their greatness, are read by only a fraction of the numbers that devour Rowling’s – went to Doon School, and then St. Stephens College. Amartya Sen (like Satyajit Ray) studied at Shantiniketan, a school favoured by the Bengali cultural elite.

What about JK Rowling? She went to a government school in an English village. (In that respect she is a bit like MF Husain, whose rags- to-riches tale is uncommon in India). Ditto Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Ringo Starkey of that other phenomenal English global brand, the Beatles.

Second, technical education dominates. Abstract learning is shunned and classics and language education are practically unheard of. Whether a nation can become great on the back of a handful of world-class economists, some successful entrepreneurs, technicians and absolutely no foundation in languages or classics remains to be seen.

Third, there is a lazy habit of blaming the Brits (this is not a really a cause, but a fallout that then takes on a life of its own). The argument basically runs along the lines of ‘They ruled us for 300 years and, in the process, killed off all our initiative.’ The more extreme (and perversely logical) version of this sees no harm in copying from the West – apparently it’s payback time.

Fourth, as a people – the middle class in particular – we crave safety. Risk aversion is our second name. Originality needs stepping out of the beaten path and investing in a future with uncertain returns, but the middle class likes the status quo.

Some very clever people on the left argue that there is no such thing as originality, that at the end of the day we (and all our inventions) are products of thousands of years of physical and intellectual migration and that the problem lies with the monetization of creativity.

This is lazy thinking, and dangerous too – because it risks mothballing India forever among the second rung of nations. It may well be that Shakespeare stole his plots from other writers, but at the end of the day you’d be hard-pressed to beat the Shakespeare brand. That is because of his sheer creative genius, his Midas touch.

India has had its moments of glory: SN Bose’s seminal work in the field of particle physics has given the English language the only noun I can think of that has been derived from an Indian name: boson.

In order to forge ahead, we have to stop scraping the bottom of this shallow barrel.

No comments:

Post a Comment