Culturama 2006: Desicritics Ponder Culture

The year 2006 was, simply put, the year of YouTube. It invaded popular lexicon, was named Time magazine's invention of the year for 2006 and Google snapped it up for a cool $1.65 billion in Google stock. YouTube is the water cooler fodder of the 00s. If you had watched something or read something the day before then you searched for it on YouTube the next morning and you circulated it to your friends and discussed it on blogs, in e-mails and on chat.

No one understood the power of YouTube better than the deposed Republican Senator from Virginia, George Allen.

In India, in a year of what the popular magazines are calling the year of "Citizen Activism," Sabrina Lal rode the wave of popular discontent at the malaise afflicting the judicial system and wrested a guilty conviction for the murder of her sister Jessica Lal, as did Mattoo for the rape and murder of his daughter Priyadarshini.

For a while in the first half of the year, Medha Patkar occupied the front pages and blog spaces. The reservations issue continues to make ripples. The intensity went up a notch following the release of the Sachar Committee report.

Desicritics raged against the Mumbai train blasts and its aftermath (or the lack of it), struggled to understand the farmer suicides in Vidarbha, the the reaction in the Muslim world to the cartoons in a Danish publication and make sense of Hair's hair-splitting at a Pakistan-England cricket match. By the time the dust had settled, Hair had presided over the first ever forfeiture of a cricket match, he was subsequently fired, Inzy was banned for four games and the England Cricket Board lost a whole lot of money. No clear winner emerged from the haze.

A few other events in the sports world crossed over and captured the popular imagination in the broader cultural arena. He whose name rolls mellifluously off the tongue and he of no hair, Zinedine Zidane, head-butted his way out of international football and everyone and his mother had a cow. Schumy and Agassi said bye-bye to the arenas they had ruled for ages. India's own golf icon Jeev Milkha Singh had a rip roaring year and ensured a place in Augusta at the Masters in 2007.

In the world of literature, two Indians bathed in the spotlight for diametrically opposite reasons. Kaavya Vishwanathan reached dizzying heights of fame only to come spiralling down amid accusations of plagiarism. Kiran Desai, on the other hand, accomplised what no other woman had done at such a young age - she won the Booker at 35.

While Desai held her nose to the grindstone and Indra Nooyi set the corporate world on fire, Bollywood stars, starlets and celebrity offspring were busy getting into trouble and on the wrong side of the law. Sanjay Dutt was convicted of possessing arms, Adam Bidapa was accused of roughing up the police, Salman Khan was convicted of killing endangered animals, Rakhi Sawant got smooched against her wishes and she promptly re-engineered the resulting notoriety into a role on a "reality show", Bigg Boss, model Carol Gracias suffered a wardrobe malfunction at the Lakme Fashion Week and she too promptly used that as a launching pad to land in that same "reality show". And Rahul Mahajan got into trouble not once, but twice. First for getting caught with recreational drugs in his system and second for allegedly beating up his wife of a few months.

"Gandhigiri" made its way into popular parlance thanks to the enormous success of Lage Raho Munnabhai, citizen activism got a boost from the goings on in Rang De Basanti, and a small-budget movie set in the deserts of Rajasthan and the verdant hills of Himachal Pradesh, Dor, stole its way into people's hearts and minds. The viewing public was fed a diet of remakes (Don, Umraao Jaan) and sequels (Dhoom 2, Munnabhai), some of which they lapped up, others they rejected resoundingly. There's a message in this somewhere.

The arts world lost some stalwarts in Bismillah Khan, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Naushad Ali, Rajkumar and Padmini. Rajkumar's death triggered a wave of mindless violence in Bangalore leaving people dead and causing damage to the city's infrastructure. Improbably, some quarters placed the blame squarely on the "outsiders," greatly doing disservice to the cosmopolitan nature of the city.

In addition to opining on these and other culture issues, Desicritics read a whole lot of books, traveled all over the world and listened to music.

Follow the links, read the posts and let us know what you think. Are there issues other than the ones above that grabbed your attention? As always, we welcome your comments.

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