What drives an entire nation to watch a movie like Happy New Year? Every friend of mine who saw it, called it the worst movie they’ve watched (only one person I know gave it a positive review, but he belongs to the film industry and must follow omerta – the unsaid law which forbids criticising Bollywood movies).
This means that I either move around in a pretentious circle, or the human civilisation has reached its nadir – the dystopian age that novelists have been predicting for years. The two greatest dystopian novels are – Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and 1984 by George Orwell (who was for a brief period Huxley’s student). Both these novels painted distinctly bleak but contrasting futures; 1984 had the entire human race enslaved by their government, while Brave New World featured a future where humans completely gave in to their consumerist desires.
The best comparison between the two (which I found on Wikipedia) was done by social critic Neil Postman: ‘What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.’
In 1984, Postman added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desires will ruin us.
Happy New Year’s success suggests that the world we live in is more Brave New World than 1984 (except in a small nation called North Korea). It’s not just movies; we (not just Indians) have become a civilisation that is obsessed with silly things. We go bonkers about Chetan Bhagat novels, wonder what Kim Kardashian does to maintain her figure, fight about which reality show contestant should be eliminated, share cat pictures and play repetitive games where we control birds or pieces of candy. The most popular videos on YouTube include a South Korean guy dancing to music whose lyrics most people can’t understand; a boy shouting the word ‘baby’ again and again; and a one-year-old biting a three-year-old child’s finger! It is indeed an age where the trivial goes viral.
Interestingly, Huxley had written to Orwell after reading the latter’s novel. Along with praise for the book, he wrote: ‘Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.’ The only thing he missed is that it wasn’t infant conditioning or narco-hypnosis or a malicious government that led us here, human civilisation simply found its way to this stage. Maybe Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) was right, ‘We're a planet of nearly six billion ninnies living in a civilization that was designed by a few thousand amazingly smart deviants.’ Our collective intelligence just couldn’t compete with technological advancement.
Or I could be totally wrong about the entire thing – being a misanthrope – I am unable to connect with things that are popular. After all, it has been pointed out to me, that in his time, William Shakespeare was considered vulgar and pedestrian. Today, he is revered as a master playwright, whose plays has been translated into every living language and is performed more often than any other playwright’s works. Even a recent Bollywood film, which received critical acclaim, was based on one of his plays. Who knows, maybe generations from now, school plays (or whatever they have) will be based on Happy New Year, Justin Bieber will be looked back on as the new Mozart and Chetan Bhagat will be hailed as the new Bard!
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