Posts Tagged ‘Bhutan’
My piece published in the Friday Times last week.
Pakistani cable operators, following the cyclical escalation of imagined hatreds, discontinued the transmission of Indian satellite channels in 2002. The absence of Indian TV soaps, fodder for an entertainment hungry populace, was widely mourned. Once, not long ago, the axiomatic edge of Pakistan’s TV serials was widely acknowledged both in Pakistan and in India. No longer. This is the age of the market, of selling dreams and drama, of converting the stereotype into a saleable commodity and citing it on the cultural stock exchange.
The popularity of Hindi language soaps is not limited to Pakistan. I have seen squatters in Dhaka’s decrepit Bihari camp, Bangladesh’s largest no man’s land, glued to their colour TV sets. Here, Biharis lack citizenship; they are technically Pakistani, having opted for the Land of the Pure at the cessation of Bangladesh in 1971. But Pakistan doesn’t want them and so they continue to live in limbo. Yet, Star Plus is still beamed 24/7 into their tiny, cramped, leaking shacks. Indian soaps have made inroads even into Afghanistan, that newly liberated project of global corporate interests. They were wildly popular until the Afghan government banned them as inimical to Afghani values.
The soaring audience of Star Plus and Zee TV serials, with their in-your-face parivar mantras, is known all too well. The hype is also a constructed story of success and market acquisition. On the face of it, the commodification of entertainment is a global phenomenon. So what’s the problem, one might ask, given that most of us post-colonial wannabes in South Asia want to integrate into the global economy and its uniform cultural variants? Junk food, designer brands, pop music and the corporate media ethos are all “signs of progress.” Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Balaji, Bangaldesh, Bhutan, corporate, Ekta Kapoor, Globalization, India, media, misogyny, pakistan, patriarchy, Rama, Ramayana, Richistans, Sita, Television, televisual, TV soaps
SAJA Forum has this interesting post:
Bangladesh, India and Pakistan ranked 64th, 68th and 81st in the latest World Values Survey published by the United States National Science Foundation which surveyed people from 97 countries to discover who is happiest.
Denmark became the happiest country with a 4.24 mean score. The United States ranked 16th with a 3.55.
Bangladesh scored 1, India scored 0.85 and Pakistan scored -0.30, a negative score which indicated “predominantly unhappy or dissatisfied publics.”
Click here to see the full list(PDF version). Watch political scientist Ronald Inglehart talk about how economic growth, democratization and social tolerance lead to happiness.
Also, I should mention how Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Commission, which was the subject of a WSJ article this past March, is making an attempt to gauge its citizens’ happiness and boost their morale as the country heads towards a new direction.
Tags: Bangladesh, Bhutan, happiness, India, pakistan, Ronald Inglehart, South Asia
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