I remember the first time I read Lolita, my eyes couldn’t chase the words fast enough, it took me months to finish reading it, not because it was lengthy or tough to go through or I didn’t have the time, it was because I enjoyed it so much I was re-reading paragraphs just because I was fascinated with how the words were strung into a sentence, somedays I wouldn’t allow myself to read more than a paragraph a day because I felt it would be disrespectful to not give the words the time to prance around in my head.
Then I would be reminded of the fact that the book does revolve around a pedophile’s love for a 12 year old girl. Was I romanticising pedophilia ? Am I a pedophile sympathiser ? Is this the reason I enjoy Woody Allen’s character in Annie Hall ? Escandalo. I went on to read another book by the author of Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov. It was again, delightful, I truly wished that somebody could one day describe me to myself in a Nabokovian way, with words that had the freshness of the new but not treading on foreign. The book was Ada, a book about a (sexual) relationship between siblings Ada and Van.
I was between words about Ada’s pale skin when it hit me, maybe Nabokov writing isn’t about sex. Nabokov writes about sex without its social implications, without its thrill, without its shame, without its importance. It almost was like he wrote of it as if he were a tree who wrote about sexual encounters only with the visceral experience of pollination. Nabokov himself agrees to the claim that Lolita was not a book about sex, and I definitely see that. There is a case to be made of the Nabokovian sexual liberation.
I definitely do not think that sexual liberation means that pedophilia and incest should be common place or welcomed. The point I am trying to make is that Nabokov had found a way to liberate the dialogue of sex from the act itself. This got me thinking about our relationship with sex, sexuality, sex education/advocacy and the sexual revolution.
The duality of the Indian sexual revolution is quite peculiar. Your peers and friends would cheer you on to go ahead and finger bang in the back of a Maruti swift (as fingerer, fingeree, either or both) but at the same time you would internally die of embarrassment while watching Kubra Saits prosthetic dick in sacred games with your parents. We are constantly oscillating back and forth from modest and conservative children to thirsty and explorative partners. This has given birth to a dissonance (which I have termed as desi sexual dissonance) that is incurable because it hasn’t been detected yet. The reason for this ignorance is the eagerness within us to be part of a global discourse.
The conversations on sexuality, rape culture, gender, female inequalities and queerness are rampant in the digital world. We have seen an entire linguistic sub-genre of political correctness and trigger warnings etc, grow and been adopted. The reason codes and conducts are put in place is logical only because communication through the digital medium is complex because it is a space where body language, intent and personal history are discarded while having conversations in 240 characters or the comments section that pull a Harry Houdini with a reload. It makes sense in America where 95% of the population speak English and in United Kingdom where 97% of the population speak English. In India on the other hand only approximately 10% of the population speak English.
It is almost like these conversations are beauty pageant representatives with the generalities of their world peace answers, when we all know that the winner is going to be the one with the great rack. We are forced to participate in the online culture in a non threatening, diluted way that is non confrontational and is easy to consume.
The internet is always teaching us acceptable ways to behave, not through conversation but by having a reward system in place in the form of likes and shares. But culture can’t be moved by an online presence. Especially in a country where the internet penetration is 50%, and if you look a little closer you’d see that there is a gender imbalance in the digital space too. In rural India 72% of the users are male and 28% are female, and in urban areas 62% are male and 38% are female.
In comparison broadcast radio (AM) reaches 99% of the population and FM reaches 65%. India has a strong radio loyalty and all though this is commercial radio, this could possibly lead to the the success of community radio stations because of an already existing radio infrastructure.
Community radio could be fundamental in giving a voice to the LGBT community, women, tribals, underprivileged etc. To have honest conversations that are not quantified by likes and shares.
Media needs to be democratised and decentralised but clearly cannot be in the systems that already exist, the results are in front of us, be it in form of YouTube pushing content creators to make longer videos to fit in more advertisements or tik toks racial biases.
Understanding pleasures and plights of people 10,000 kilometres away rather than to people 500 metres away, is this the cultural globalisation we dreamed of ? We are hellbent on rectifying mass media with surface level representation (like a Mindy Kaling show) when we could have a paradigm shift in the patterns of media consumption.
It may seem odd that I started off with talking about a dead Russian man with an animated French accent and ended up here. But reading Nabokov did lead me down this train of thought, because Nabokov does have a way with words. It is un-daunting and fearless the way he writes and we do need more of that but we could never achieve that with the self inflicted limitations we live with today.
Maybe Video didn’t kill the radio star.
