A cultural loss of authority
How often do you hear the question ‘who sung this song?’ compared to a more precious ‘who wrote this song?’? The answer is quite obvious…
How often do you hear the question ‘who sung this song?’ compared to a more precious ‘who wrote this song?’? The answer is quite obvious at least from a subcontinental perspective. The cardinal truth is that we, the desis of the world, don’t really bother ourselves with the originators of words. It seldom piques our interest to learn that Gulzarsaab wrote ‘Hum ko mann ki shakti dena’ or Javedsaab wrote ‘Sandese aate hai’ because we are sold by the magnetic pull of the crooners we hear or the actors on the screen we observe. Which leaves little to no corner to fill for the writers working quietly behind the scene.
In some ways, words are cheap because it’s everywhere. An abundance of a fleeting nature. Since we don’t value words, we end up not valuing those who craft them either. The poor janta that stands under scorching sun knows somewhere deep inside that the words flung at them by the politicians can’t hold the wind for long and yet, the mass plays along cheerfully well. This strange self-harming relationship could explain the decadent rise of hollow politics in our country’s independent history.
Speaking of rise, I can’t think of anything that could beat WhatsApp’s success in our country in recent memory. A generation that felt left behind by the pace of Internet is happy to hop onto a running train of information thanks to an app that paradoxically features a phone on its logo. Unless you live in an extremely sterile world inhabited by enlightened folks, you must have noticed the role WhatsApp plays in the spread of fake news. There are many reasons why this is so but to my mind, the biggest culprit is the factor I expressed in the very first paragraph of this blog post.
Since we don’t value the authorship of words, we don’t question the authority of truth. More than 10 years ago, jokes used to be passed around via SMS and nobody cared who wrote them in the first place. The minutiae of appreciation was evidently missing and the young people who were guilty of this practice eventually moved to social media only to claim credit for the tiniest pieces of originality.
As the years passed by and WhatsApp overtook SMS, nobody cared to know who wrote those long paragraphs in the first place as long as it confirmed an individual’s preconceived notion. Somebody somewhere has an agenda in place and that’s how a content gets created and circulated. It’s an effective process but what makes it more effective is the utter disregard for authorship at the consumer end. None of the readers apply mental brake while reading those WA forwards to ask, “Wait a minute, who the hell wrote this?” Or more importantly, “How can I trust the writer when I don’t even know who they are?”
If we dig deeper, perhaps we’ll have to wade through multiple layers of thick nuances from our ancient culture. Unlike in the West, where authorship is of key importance, literary works were largely kept anonymous in India. If you go through Bible, almost single verse comes with the person who wrote or said it. You can’t expect the same from the Vedas or the Puranas or the millions of shlokas/stotrams. People have been appreciating them for millennia without caring about giving the due credit. Maybe the ones who wrote it didn’t bother themselves whether they will be remembered or not. And today, we are in 2019 still reaping the benefits of age-old Vedic wisdom because our culture lays more emphasis on the message instead of the messenger.
The only problem, however, is we can’t carry on like this in an era where propaganda has become the very essence of identity and truth can’t filter out through the funnel of lies. In other words, the presence of words can’t complement the absence of authorship anymore.