With the advent of movies, a system got in place  that  influenced our culture. Besides the schools and the theater, movies were added up to influence the Indian culture. In the early decades, the movies were influenced by our culture and hence it only reinforced the cultural values, especially in the era of Dadasaheb Falke. 

However, in the mid 60s, the movies were influenced by the leftist and the jihadis (silently at that time). In the name of innovation, an “expansion” attitude crept in which meant that they took the cultural depiction to the extremes which was not practiced in our daily lives or in our homes. Let me take a few examples.

Typical Hindi movie heroines started giving up wearing bindis when they played the role of  an unmarried woman and sarees were replaced by “Punjabi suits.' '. The latter was still an Indian attire and so was easily acceptable, but soon it was replaced by western dresses. As an extension of the same attitude, they  finally accepted wearing  short dresses and even bikinis. No one questioned the change of dressing styles. Every one of them was treated as an aberration to the norms, but with each  aberration, the norm itself was “slightly changed” and accepted as the new norm.

This phenomenon of extending the “Lakshman rekha '' every time a new aberration was introduced was then not limited to the dressing style but also food habits, eating styles, living styles etc. Eating with a knife/fork/spoon became acceptable as the new norm, even in the depiction of middle class society  and having bread-omelette as the most normal breakfast (which was brought in by the English). 

This phenomenon of “crossing the line slightly” and then drawing a new line based on that minor crossing became the driving force for innovation in Bollywood, and it still continues and was forcibly introduced to increase the sales and to look “different” from other movies. 

However, that is not the discussion here. People watched the movies for 3 hours at the maximum, and for most of the crowd it was a once in a month affair and so the influence faded after 6 or 12 or 24 hours, like an exponential decay. For some who were regular visitors, like the college teenagers, the influence was becoming more rigid, as planned in the Bollywood. 

In the mid 90s came the TV serial culture. It did not discriminate between the aged and young as it was pushed into homes. In the initial years, there were serials like Nukkad and Hum Log which depicted the ground realities of life and were very popular and entertaining. However, soon they changed to stories of  heroes who were business tycoons and had to deal with projects worth 100 crores and above, sitting in offices doing nothing but just firing their subordinates and shouting at the staff. Probably unaware of the number of zeros in a crore. But they certainly fought on smallest of things in the family and every family had a  scandal and everyone at home was so dressed up that a bride/bridegroom at marriage would feel embarrassed in their company. 

As this was an everyday affair,   it influenced people in many ways. People started thinking  of starting their own business. But only a small fraction of them succeeded because these serials never showed the journey to the top, they only showed the end product (having set up a big financial empire), completely ignoring the hard work required. 

To give yet another example of this attitude, most of the sets were  huge multi room bungalows. Rarely any of the set up was in a middle class home. Also the rooms were highly decorated with expensive show-pieces and all kept in a very spic and span setup, not showing who did the cleaning and arranging the things in their places. We all know the struggle, mothers have to ask their children to keep their things in place, and keep the house clean. Achieving what is shown in TV serials is a herculean task or one lives in a completely artificial environment. 

But the message which was given to the society (also absorbed by viewers on a daily basis) was that unless one played with crores of rupees, there is no achievement in life. 

However these aspects have been raised by many social scientists. But there is yet another aspect which has been ignored by the seers, and that is the ADVERTISEMENT culture. There are these advertisements which give a very narrow and biased  viewpoint, but in order to promote that very narrow viewpoint the other accompanying messages turn out to be  uncontrolled and strong. 

For example, there are very many advertisements which compare the intellectual abilities of a wife and a husband.In this era of “gender equality”, to be more politically correct than the others, it is usually shown that the male gender or the husband is more idiotic than the female gender. The competition itself is a very dangerous trend between husband and wife. In an advertisement of a car, in order to show their “greatness” a child, who is upset over something, gets a cheer when he is given the bribe of going out for a ride. As if in society the car ride is a means to pacify the child from his/her tantrums or reasons for being sad. I know of a case where an infant of age less than 3, would start throwing tantrums whenever she wants to go for a ride. And so the father had to take her for a ride even at 2 in the morning, because parents put her in a bad habit. 

In a similar car advertisement, the family is shown with a dog, to show their exceptional financial stature, but it leaves a message to the society that a dog is necessary as a pet to complete the family. This leads to more children being attracted to pets. The pets, especially the dogs are then made to behave like humans. which might be  probably  torturous to the dog. It is like a human being taken captive by an African tribe and forced to behave like them, which is inhumane beyond measure. In an advertisement, where they want to promote the online food providers, the children ask the mother what she has made and immediately she says ‘Karela (bitter gourd) sabji.’ Children make faces as if this is not a vegetable to be eaten and so immediately mother switches to something else. This is sending across the message that  ordering fast food is a better option  compared to home cooked vegetables including Karela which results in  setting up a cultural value that children need not eat all the vegetables etc etc. 

We are taught to live  in a world, where a woman can get married if she uses  all face creams  True mother’s love for an infant is possible only when she is very well off in a very expensive apartment using the most costly talcum powder. Some products depict that a child is an overall winner because he takes a particular food supplement, leading to a rush by the non-thinking mothers and fathers to feed their children with these supplements and encourage  unhealthy competition where the parents think that their child can be Sachin Tendulkar, Bhimsen Joshi, Amitab Bacchan, Birju Maharaj, and many others, ALL IN ONE GO. 

In times of lockdown and pandemic, rich families are  shown to spend time together to fight the pandemic. Only if one has a lot of equipment and riches can one do it? Not a single advertisement showed how a medium income group or low income group is getting over the issue. 

A message where everything is for the rich gives two perspectives to the youngsters. First one is to work hard to achieve it, but it is a difficult road which people do not take. The second one is the one which looks very attractive and easy, the shortest route to make money. This route is one which leads to corruption, and crime in general. To achieve all the riches through unethical means. Indian traditions used to promote simple living with least of the belongings. But in this era, achievement is judged by material benefits and not intellectual gains. 

Even for those people who don’t really  require a vehicle, want to have it, even if it means a high load of EMI payments, just to establish a higher social status. Because in advertisements, a car ride is considered as a great achievement in life. In shastras, it is written that with material purchases, one also gets for free the ugly property called arrogance. This arrogance makes one discriminate between the haves and the have-nots in society and is also termed as mental violence or intellectual violence. This violence is worse than the physical violence because both the victim and perpetrator do not realize the action. But it is registered in the subconscious which drives our power to make decisions. 

This culture of advertisements has certainly introduced the culture of materialism, where people are induced to buy what they do not need. It certainly helps the economy . Doesn’t it? People buy more than what they need and this increases the load on the environment. For every show-piece, decorative piece that we purchase, a tree is somewhere cut or some metal ore is mined or some plastic is manufactured which will not degenerate for years. People even buy flats/apartments/bungalows when they already have at least one. This increases the demand, the prices and difficulty for the ones who really need it. 

Advertisements now decide what I will eat, what I will wear, where I will live and how I will entertain myself and my family. Are we losing our power to decide what we need and what we don’t need? It is like living in North Korea where someone else decides the style of my haircut. Is it time to drive this intruder out our homes and minds?

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