Coolness that once was

Middle age is a time of reflection. One has seen the world changing, understood some decisions one’s parents made and been exasperated by the conventions the next generation is rejecting. 

I realised about my own middle age seeing the latest season of Koffee with Karan. The show started in 2004 when I was at the cusp of adulthood. It had an upper-class urban vibe. The guests were beautiful, and the setting was informal. It did not appear stiff and rehearsed like Rendezvous with Simmi Grewal, nor was it pandering to the rest of the country like the saas-bahu serials. In some ways, it represented post-liberalisation urban India. It defined cool. And those of us entering college aspired to that coolness. 

The recent episode starred an ageing superstar and a shrivelled host. The heroes of my youth were now reflective elders. They were guarded not in a politically correct way, but with a guardedness that comes with wisdom. They lamented that they were the last of stars; the new kids on the block are too guarded, and how things were great back in their time. What they refused to acknowledge was that their audience and wider country had moved on. They do not set the culture or the zeitgeist anymore.

One of the first indications is where the show is coming from. The show started on Star World. A channel made to cater to this upwardly mobile, educated Indian who was physically in India but mentally in the West. The show now streams on Jio Hotstar, a streaming app whose main subscription event is IPL, the two-month cricket bonanza. It is now mostly watched on mobile phones, with a 1.5 GB-per-day limit powered by Jio and compete with “Big Boss”, the mind-numbing voyeuristic reality show on the same channel. 

The urban India it was catering to became a minority. A small TG for the bosses of television studios. Bigger money lay in catering to the large and newly emerging middle class. The new middle class likes to be loud, embrace its culture and hates being told what to do. It is here, it is rich and it doesnot need your permission to enjoy what it likes.

While writing this, I realise I sound like an uncle bemoaning the good old days (hence the middle age). But there is nothing wrong with that. As India grows, it will get more confident, more sure about its own ethos, culture and language. It would want to watch the content with which it relates rather than feel inferior looking at people speaking a foreign language. The biggest comedian in India is Hindi-speaking, as is the biggest YouTuber and the show with the most TRP. 

This is the normal order of things. The old replaces the new. A new power emerges and displaces the old. The alternative is statis which is not acceptable. So it is ok to see the things you once considered cool be considered a relic and better considered in a museum. The only thing you can do is accept and perhaps embrace the change. There is always the alternative to bemoan about how things were better in olden times. 

PS: The old upper-middle class has not disappeared. It has closeted itself in gated communities in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. It is still the main spender and the target market for Qcom, Maid service startups and D2C. It is now catered to via performance marketing rather than  TV ad sales.