The Awards Racket

If Rahman is indeed the better music composer at this year's Oscar nominated films for this category, then I am very amused, and a little mad - because this Jai Ho bit is a terrible composition, with neither rhyme nor reason for being considered great. If his work in the rest of the film is indeed so wonderful, he hasn't done anything so remarkable for many an Indian film, where he possibly could have. That means the rascal has double standards - the lower one for Indian producers and the better one for the foreign producer who's likely to fetch him an award or two, and maybe more business from more lucrative foreign currency spending productions.

The "Award Whore" will create something just to win awards and notoriety through reasons other than the worthiness of the art. Rahman, if capable of actually going beyond the novelty factor to Oscar award judges (does anybody actually believe any of those white skinned coots can really understand Jai Ho?), is yet to prove himself, precisely because he has produced a lot of mediocre trash for over a decade, and covered himself with the brothel glitter that Hindi cinema oozes from its clogged marketing sewers. And now, he's produced utter trash that has won a coveted award! The joke is - the award is now belittled, not Rahman.

Now, why would Rahman show up on the Jay Leno show, performing the tail segment where student groups from obscure American towns perform as the titles roll over? That's the level at which he probably sees himself. I have no idea why he has to drag his "Indian"ness into everything. What was Indian about his show at the Oscars (and it doesn't have to be, but we're celebrating this as an Indian win, aren't we?) - the costumes were some weird designer nonsense, the dancing was somewhere between Chinese jungle and African desert, and the dancers did something like a Mumbai cinema routine? At the end of the day he performed a song that won't stay in our minds long enough to care about, (while SP Balasubramanyam shows up as a magnanimous judge, mentor and inspiration in a little known talent show that bleeds class for its quality of music and discussion that you can't switch away from - on Jaya TV).

We all know the kind of mediocrity that infests the FilmFare awards and the idiotic "shows" that Indian TV channels put on without any real substance - either in the show or in the art being appreciated and felicitated. The Oscars have fairly consistently stood for better cinema, and though capable of being swayed once in a while by political and liberal causes that cinema stories tend to be based on in order to win the Oscar, for most part, it is usually a decent showcase of talent. This year, though, has been a let down, like a few other.

True art needs no glittering awards functions, no television, no viewership ratings, and most definitely, no globalized, listless "format" to celebrate the goodness of such art. Cinema, unfortunately, is ripe for the picking when the intent is to promote product at all costs, and the innumerous film festivals around the globe make it imperative for a lot of films to put one or two awards on their promotional materials.

It is timely to consider the fact that the Oscars as a TV show has fallen way below needed viewership ratings and the show is willing to do anything to prop up the machinery. It wouldn't hurt to have a business decision leading to roping in a theoretical billion people to achieve the face lift. Considering the judges on the Nobel Prize committee are being investigated for improper relationships with potential and eventual winners of the coveted prize, one cannot be so naive as to dismiss the possibility of Rupert Murdoch "fixing" the Oscars, in much the way he "fixed" the coverage of the Iraq war with his Fox network.

After all, it was his own Star Movies that brought us the Oscar show in India. And what a neat coincidence that Star TV also promotes "Kaun Banega Crorepati" and was suffering to survive before Amitabh Bachchan stepped in and isn't exactly a flagship program now after he stepped out! Of course Murdoch's stake in Slumdog Millionaire is easy enough to follow the money with, and if TV ratings are an issue, what better way to prop it up than with a potential billion viewers - the same way India is a powerhouse in cricket?!

See how Russian and eastern European women are suddenly winning beauty pageants? India is already selling enough shampoo and beauty products, so... time to prop up other markets. There is virtually nothing separating Miss Venezuela from Miss Romania once the metronomic, sterilized standards are applied at the point of entry to these paegants. It isn't as if Ethiopia will send a little pygmy who only speaks her native language and Nepal will send a shepherd to these events.

What is definitely easy to see is that Slumdog Millionaire is probably a better film than most, and you can't really lie about who makes it to the top ten in any contest in cinema. It is subjective to some extent, but there is no way "Jaane Tu ya Jaane Na" will compete against "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button". That's obvious, but once past that stage, there is enough wooing going on to affect the results. It's all about the award!

Are Barkha Dutt and Rajdeep Sardesai as worthy of the Padma Shri as Kamal Haasan or Kapil Dev? I would squirm to be in this kind of company if I was Kamal Haasan or Kapil Dev. The falling standards are already too obvious to continue giving the same kind of respect to the award. But then, life is short. Who cares?

Awards are used to sell products - it doesn't matter who gives the awards and what standards are applied. If you get an award, you sell more. Period. The Sundance Film Festival was set up expressly to avoid the noise that big studios typically create and to encourage independent cinema. Slowly, that changed to become another whore of the studio system, where studio executives regularly showed up to buy rights. Now, the speciality of Sundance is completely lost and the truly special films that do not know how to pander to these studio executives have to look elsewhere to showcase their art appropriately.

The car industry dies for awards. But there are enough and more avenues to win awards from. Virtually every car in the world market has won an award or two somewhere in some segment, and although anybody can see cars have improved overall in the last ten years, there isn't anything special to separate one from the other qualitatively. So, if you want to spend the extra money on an "award winning" brand new car, (which nobody has driven for over two months), go ahead, make someone's day.

Booker prize winning "The White Tiger" by Adiga is by no stretch as good a book as Booker prize winning "Life of Pi" by Yann Martel, but now they have arguably equal street credibility. The fact that the book has the award mentioned on the cover should tell us how our judgment is expected to get skewed. An award is no longer a token of appreciation, it is a mandatory marketing tool to apply for, like a badge! Once you have the badge, you are allowed entry into some pretty cool clubs!

We have a world where we are no longer allowed to use our own judgment, and we are happy to be told what is good, because we are too lazy to improve our own intellectual bandwidth, and we are actually allowed to say, "I don't have the time to inform myself" in a few different ways. The marketing machine has managed to club us down to this level of dumbness and it isn't about to stop.

There is a machine for producing goods, there is a machine for telling us what goods are good, and there is a machine telling us to listen to the other machines, and we get to be lazy as a return for making this system smooth and convenient. There is also a part of this system telling us how we can be "weird" and out of place if we don't subscribe to the majority view. There was a time when the majority view maintained that the earth was flat and the minority were burned at the stake!

It would be rather impolite and to some, even unpatriotic, to belittle A R Rahman's achievement, even though the Oscars are an American award and do not really stand for any global standard. But Rahman (introduced with great difficulty as Rakhmaan) talking about him making a choice between hate and love is a bunch of borrowed, C-grade, unoriginal, trite nonsense, like a schoolboy memorizing an essay and spitting it out a year later when all context has vanished. It isn't even cute, and it is plainly pitiful.

Rahman and Resul Pookkutty, the Oscar winning sound mixer, botched it all up when the time came to be professionals. In their speeches, both hung on to the "patriotic" and "Indian" elements as if India begged to be represented by these two clowns. Gosh, it must have been overwhelming for both of them just to be amongst so many white people and being appreciated! After all Rahman has stolen so much from foreign bands! Practically all of his "great" stuff is stolen, and if you disagree, you just haven't listened to enough music. What is worse is probably that these two fools imagine that all of us as Indians are dying to be rescued from our oppression!

So, for a guy who loves to bathe himself in the tricolour, why isn't his music very Indian? Because it is hard work being Indian! He doesn't have the mettle to be like an Ilayaraja. He just doesn't have what it takes to be great in a fully Indian context. He is a product of technology, gimmickry and the modern marketing machine. He is a very good sound engineer, an excellent arranger, and has a good ear for sounds, but he simply is no good as a composer.

Rahman would not be who he is if not for globalization and the dilution of classical art and music in the process. The world of art is not poorer for honouring him with a fairly high token of recognition for the new has to be acknowledged. The award, however, is a tad poorer for having come for a piece of work that is hardly in the top 80% of what he has produced so far!

The awards racket is a thriving one. It exists to support the marketing machine, and the marketing machine is capable of arm twisting its way upwards to get the results it wants. To believe it doesn't do this would be terribly naive. If Rupert Murdoch's Fox TV could actually present the Iraq war as a positive thing, reporting from exclusive "embedded" positions within the ranks of the US military on the battlefield, just to support Murdoch's conservative agenda, you can imagine what a piece of cake the Oscars must be. Rupert Murdoch is a slamdunk millionaire, and Rahman is just another ball going through the hoop.

This Jai Ho song, please give it a pass. It isn't even as catchy as any of the numbers from Rangeela, and hardly as fresh as the music from Roja. It is a dumb, flat, piece of crap. It is the kind of music Rahman has always "come up" with and he's disturbingly regular at producing crap. Let's not make this our national anthem, please.

So, what gives? Go figure! This is what it takes - spot the few people who don't fall for marketing hype. Make them your friends, and win their trust to tell you what is out there that is worthy of any consideration at all. The fact that they might draw a blank time after time doesn't mean that they are setting standards too high for everyone else. It means you aren't constantly disapointed. Now, you decide if "you're worth it".