Wednesday, March 16, 2011

The real and the unreal

My son Anindya wrote this comment on my last post 'Japan Earthquake' :
'Same reaction with gargi :), we were telling her lets see the news , there is a big earthquake, but she was least interested. For her these scenes are common in movies and so she was not much interested. Nowadays such a small kid is exposed to so many unreal things that they miss the reality.'
(Gargi is my granddaughter, not yet 5 years old )
I was in fact pondering over this as I wrote the piece and had continued, but I  decided to keep the extended portion for another post. This is what I had penned :
'I remember about forty or forty five years back, a film called King Kong ( the original one ) was released in Calcutta and when King Kong appeared on the scene, I am told, some people fainted. I am sure even a child today would not do so now as he is growing immune to such shocks with the continued exposure to giant and monster films that are so common today.
The films will be there because we want them. People love to watch violence, they also love to watch the macabre and the weird. They thronged the Colosseum in ancient Rome to watch the gladiators fight to the finish. They love to watch bullfights in Spain and cockfights in rural India. If two bulls start fighting on a Kolkata street, a crowd will immediately form to watch the fight and some would start cheering one or the other. Public execution was quite common in America at one time. Though the authorities thought they were setting an example for would-be criminals to be afraid of, people actually gathered to watch the show for entertainment only.
There is something about violence, even in nature's fury, which makes the adrenaline flow when we watch. From a distance, personally unaffected. In the civilised world we no longer have the gladiator fights ( except in some moderated form in boxing or freestyle wrestling ), we have shifted to other forms of competitive sports  which provide similar tensions and thrills to watch. The evolution of cricket from its 5 day test matches to a faster ODIs and then to its present T 20 form is an example, it fulfils  our craze for the 'fast and the furious', but all these still do not fully satisfy the primitive human desire which drew us to the gladiator's arena. The modern films pander to this desire.They know that is where the business is.
We  watch them, so do the young children. It is for us to make sure they retain their sanity and remain sensitive to the real world and its joys and sorrows.'
It is however easier said than done.
There is one consolation though. Even before the TV invaded our homes with an extension of the visual world with various doses of unreality, children all over the world were being fed with stories of fantasy, of giants and dwarfs, of the lands beyond the seven seas, and of the imprisoned princess and the prince charming who fights the demons of all shapes and sizes to rescue her from a  distant castle or a cave. And later, with comic book stories of super heroes or of Tintin in his various adventure trails. It allowed their imagination a free run, but they learnt to tune in with reality as they grew up. So will the children of today given the right direction.  

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