It is strange that the city that never sleeps, actually never sleeps. In the early hours of dawn there is a flurry of activity that does not necessarily get associated with morning blues. Its a city that remains active, functional and most alive, even as the rays of the early morning sun struggle to peak across the cement jungle that now has become a prominent sky line of Mumbai.

The paper stall is ready with the morning prints and we pick up all that can be readable in a 2 - 3 hour journey over the crowded drive to BB Land. And what catches the eye first is the article that I had been asked to write for the Anniversary celebrations of the Times of India. Bachi Karkaria, that delightful little lady columnist, had been after my blood to do a decent worded piece on the Power of Entertainment and despite giving her a very vivid account of my grueling schedule she had insisted that I do it. So in the middle of completing all the last minute work on Paa, on the 28th November anniversary celebration for my Father, for the week end reviews of the Bigg Boss, I found time to compose some thoughts. And here they are -

The Future of the Power of Entertainment

‘How must Entertainment change to be a key social force and shaper of the next decades?’

I am an old man, amongst other things.

In a time that seems to offer an increasingly precarious future for humanity on this planet, the prospect that we might manage to entertain ourselves at all in the course of our present chronic ecological demise gives one pause.

I have old thoughts from times before. They summon an image of that fated orchestra, aboard the sinking Titanic. Certain of death, they played on, even as the deck began its craven seaward descent. They brought forth music up into the heavens, when most fellow passengers sank down to watery grave. Then their last paean chords were lost into that great dark churn of ocean. It is a waking nightmare of horror and sadness that can overcome the weary with despair.

And yet, wracked with premonition and fear for my grandchildren, I hear a sound rise above still: I know that music; I know the orchestra and its sacred chant. No, they did not play a funeral dirge, they could not. They struck up a piece of bright hope into that arctic night, they sparked the spirit of life tunefully, they gave brave duty in unison against fear and death.

I know of few such examples of the true power of entertainment that can inspire beyond this, the act of those musicians aboard the Titanic, who chose service above trying to save their own lives.

How must Entertainment change to be a key social force and shaper of the next decades?

To begin to discuss this question, I would like to return to first principles, to the word ‘entertainment’ itself. The full ambit of its value and potential to generate cultural wealth becomes clearer in its extended definition. To entertain is a rich and complex act: it is to amuse, divert, distract. It means to consider, to contemplate, to hold in mind, to receive, to harbour others in generosity of spirit. The Latin root of the word breeds such manifold connotation: ‘inter’ – among; ‘tenere’ – to hold.

“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it”. The words of Hannah Arendt reflect the imaginative potential of entertainment, but her insight goes further: those who entertain have no business with didactic ideology: true entertainers don’t give answers; the audience deserves the dignity of their own choices.

Entertainment is also an industry: it must generate material wealth. This wealth must sustain its increasingly complex and expensive structural fabric, as well as profit its financial investors and those who devote their labour to its production.

The generation of material wealth is a good in society, when carefully balanced with the moral debt to a society that such business owes: it is that very society - its structure, values and individuals - that creates the conditions wherein business flourishes. This is the principle of mutuality that sustains justice in a culture, through reciprocal activity. Put simply, individual privilege must be balanced by the virtue of service to the collective.

However, the collective Entertainment Industry (or the commercially popular performing arts) has far deeper moral obligations to a society than most. The reason for this resides in its profound cultural power. It creates, manifests and disseminates our collective conception of what we value, what we mean to ourselves, how we wish to be, how we relate to others. It holds enormous power of our collective narratives of identity.

How must it change to be a key social force and shaper of the next decades?

With the question at hand, before one can take issue with the future, one must address the present.

I have defined ‘entertainment’, and its material manifestation in an industry, for a purpose. I would like to ask this audience to entertain an argument drawn from the premises that I have set out above, and hope that they may gain something more from its effort than merely enjoying my encounter with a proverbial banana skin on deck.

Accordingly, I would like to contend that the Entertainment Industry is in danger of failing its role right now. Its failure takes a peculiar form, stemming from both premises. ‘Entertainment’ is an international entity, therefore I do not limit this failure to our own nation, but characterise it as a general global phenomenon, evident everywhere to greater or lesser degree.

The rich complexity of meaning given in the definition of ‘entertainment’ is being reduced to its most primitive elements: to amuse, divert, distract. Entertainment becomes a pauperised insipid avatar. It is being stripped of its generative power: the creation and contestation of value and meaning within shared culture. Entertainment now too often apes fantasy without any provocation of critical reflection, reifying our lives into product description, consuming the consumerisation of our internal selves. In fact, I believe that I have come to describe the regime of modern advertising, where we are sold ourselves back to ourselves but in perpetually unattainable form. Touché.

There is equally, at the same moment, a shift in Entertainment wherein it has become deeply parasitic on other media. It has leeched itself onto their forms, sapping their life-blood. One could characterise it as becoming a colonising ‘style’, as much as following a particular content. We now have edutainment, infotainment, our political life made circus; we must now contend with a dizzying chaos of staccato sound-bite, staged opinion fictions, glib theatricality, performative jostlings of self-promotion, the trite cult of a celebrity parade, throughout our manifold media.

Both of these phenomena of Entertainment, of internal pauperisation and external colonisation, deeply weaken our language to communicate effectively, meaningfully and genuinely with each other. It is destructive for our collective lives together.

It is a grave imaginative failure.

Or is it? What of the future? What do people really want?

The future is not what will be, but what we choose it to be, whether we choose to change it, or not. Despite (or perhaps because of) the oversight of seniority, I have no more facility to predict the future than any other human being, nor is prediction particularly interesting, unless one holds a penchant for immortality. What is interesting is what we will choose for ourselves now.

Entertainment will continue to be a key social force and shaper of Power in the next decades in Mumbai, in India and in the world at large, whether it persists in its present manifestation or not. Many of my betters have given copious and insightful coverage of its future transformations: how it will inevitably change and proliferate, due to an increasing amount of disposable leisure time and income amongst the youthful middle classes in India in particular, and also in consequence of technological innovation more generally. Both considerations will lead to the further globalisation of the Indian Entertainment Industry and the progressive penetration of foreign operators into our own domestic market. Narrative content and format will reflect demographic and technological shifts: what with nearly seventy per cent of the Indian population under the age of thirty-five[1] and the internet revolution, the excitement and challenge of new possibilities is intoxicating. However, I would contend that we will lose the plot if we unduly focus on such structural phenomena: they provide instrument, not value. After all, considering pornography comprises twelve per cent of all internet websites, this medium simply reflects existing contemporary cultural norms of entertainment, rather than changing them[2].

So what do we want entertainment to be for us? How much entertaining do we really want and where? Do we want it whilst trying to inform and educate ourselves, or instead? Or, to put it more simply, where and when do we not wish to be entertained? We can have it mostly carrying on amusing, diverting, distracting and selling us all over the media at large and selling our most private moments too, or we could insist on other things. In its more complex avatar, it possesses greater challenge, but perhaps we would prefer it otherwise, as a deeply repetitive drone of Mass Entertainment Lite, because we are equally terrified of being seriously entertained, or not at all.

I hope that we would want more than that. We could want more of the best of what entertainment can be, with its transformative, redemptive - and strenuous - potential.

We could want that orchestra on the Titanic to keep on playing for us. In the face of our precarious future, we could want those who entertain to give imaginative strength to us fellow passengers, come what may.

That imaginative strength takes the form of stories, narratives that explore our dream of the human good, navigating our perennial strife of simply being alive, and worse, in each other’s company. That strength provides alternative multiple narratives to the ones in which we can become seemingly trapped by the weight of sheer circumstance, separate and alone in our individual lives. Or it can provide other narratives to provoke genuine reflection on our conflicts with each other when we are stunned into mutual intransigent fear and hatred. It requires arduous imaginative effort to constantly challenge the value of the collective narratives that we conventionally privilege by habit. It is an act of imagination to ask life questions, not to proffer advertising on how best to consume lifestyle products and the lives of other people.

If Entertainment were to return to fulfilling all of the meanings of its name, and other media stylistically de-colonised, then we may find ourselves more interesting. If Entertainment re-expanded its content and contracted its form, it may be taken more seriously by its audience, and its audience may take themselves more seriously in turn. For ultimately, entertainment is a deadly serious business. It has nearly killed me on a few occasions already.

I don’t argue that as human beings in the world, we do not merit rest from suffering in the pleasure of narrative transport. We can only bear so much reality. On the other hand, it is wide open to debate at what point the pleasure of fantasy can become de-politicising opiate. Nor am I saying that we should never laugh again. After all, humour is one of the finest of our creative capacities: the ability to laugh at ourselves and others. Without it, we all become distinctly intolerable and prone to fits of sanctimoniousness. But one can choose to laugh at many different things: you can laugh as you watch me yellow-heeled, slip down the deck and off the edge into darkness, or you can laugh against fear and find the laugh of freedom.

As an old man, I see the longer view, when all around me, India’s young are very much in the present. What I can contribute to a discussion of the future of Entertainment, through my involvement in its industry here in Mumbai, is not really the point. Four decades in Entertainment is a humbling experience when humanity has been thoroughly entertaining itself for a few hundred thousand years. Comparatively speaking, I am a fumbling ingénu. I urge my professional fraternity/sorority as equally as its audience to remember ourselves accordingly, to remember our human legacy. We’re not just about now.

Senescent, some may think that my senses are taking their leave with the ravages of time. Yet I do still believe that I hear that orchestra playing somewhere, although the din of the profane leaves the sound faint. Nevertheless, optimism for the future should be cautious: its blindness unchecked has played a significant contributing role in our current financial and ecological abandon. On the other hand, excessive indulgence in morbid eschatological reverie (2012, anyone?) is equally dubious, for the primordial churning of the oceans never ceases.

Belief in our value as a species is a wholly different matter, and of paramount importance. For when the oceans churn, I remember Shiva the Blue-Throated and his sacred chant, and then I believe humanity does have value. Its greatest value is its ability to perpetually recreate that very value for itself. As human beings, it is both our blessing and affliction that we must forever re-make ourselves anew.

This is our greatest power when harnessed, beyond the power of material wealth production, beyond the power of our political conceits, beyond our power to harness information in knowledge. It is our core ethical endeavour, this power of revaluation. It is our greatest hope.

The future of the Entertainment Industry could do more to inspire this hope. Hope for renewal; hope for the future; to invoke aspirations not for things, but of ourselves; more narratives and stories to hold amongst ourselves, to keep us together. This would be change for the good, but effortful. I hope, but I will not predict: people must be allowed to choose freely. Yet even as I hope, I can only do so if dared together. Old that I am, my daring is not quite what it used to be, and I am not all that confident nowadays handling vertiginous angles. It is time for the younger generations to meet the challenge, where their elders have failed them.

We must inspire our fellow passengers to believe that humanity is worth saving. Unlike the Titanic, there aren’t any lifeboats on board: if we sink, we are all going down together.

Above the presentation at Dubai by royalty.

Will those that recommend and boil over with vitriolic, that desperately seek community representation for their daily bread by seeking other shores, be ever able to prevent and stop the above. Let them try !

Amitabh Bachchan