MY WORD!

SANGEETA WADDHWANI SEES THE END OF AN ERA OF SUBTLE AND PROFOUND WORDSCAPES GIVING WAY TO THE DOPAMINE HITS OF IMAGERY…

As we see another year winding up, I ask myself to reflect on the discoveries I have made this year. I found that the art of writing is fast being replaced by a monstrous Armageddon of imagery. ‘Influencers’ were laughed at by seasoned print journalists from Australia, Panama, Japan and India, who I met on the #NorwegianEncore cruise ship inaugural sail I was a part of this past Fall. It’s like none of their visual storytelling had the quality and depth of what we were used to writing, observing, digesting.. Yet, it was these same influencers sharing front rows with seasoned magazine editors. More interesting, these bootylicious babes were wearing threads by the very same designer whose show they were covering. The line between coverage and promotion is non existent in their pixel paradises. Most get paid to ‘cover’ shows. Not only was print media looking old school with its demand for in depth reportage, filtered by qualified opinion and thoroughly fact checked content, it was losing out on the currency that hot babes sitting in the middle of the action had, with phones switched on record mode. (Let’s not forget the new visual vocabulary of boomerangs, visual effects from SloMo to glitter showers falling down the screen).

In a funny way, we are going full circle. My years attending the #jaipurliteraturefestival in Rajasthan, showed me that India’s ancient storytelling culture was hinged on images painted on cloth or sometimes on temple and cave walls. Kathakas or storytellers would narrate their epics while standing in front of elaborate scrolls which illustrated the characters and moments from these stories. They travelled with these scrolls, which overtime became infused with the Spirit of the divine story, protecting and providing for the wandering narrators.

This was our precursor to cinema. The stories were sometimes filled with song, with narrators expressing the joys or pathos that their characters underwent. There was a great tradition of passing both stories and superstitions, dance drama poetry and even dance forms through oral instruction. It was as if at our core, we believed so deeply in the power of oral transmission, that it’s the reason we have the largest film industry in the world! All our great epics and musical arts have passed down throughout time, from guru to shishya.

From the Age of Truth (Satya Yuga) to the Age of Kaliyuga)… where is the fine art of writing going,? It’s struggling to survive…in our Insta captions…in those micro tales we share on FB. Like the digital revolution has summarized so many feelings in emojis, the email revolution was the first to wipe out the three dimensional character of handwriting, instead offering typed out pixelated alphabets which flattened feelings of hope, joy, into bytes of data that were tossed out to travel far, wide and indiscriminately.

A golden age of print journalism may rise again when humanity seeks her own soul. When the quest for truth becomes a new thirst. When quality narratives are yearned for over the thrill of immediacy and sensation.

Bye bye 2019…..we put our year’s last issue of HELLO! to bed feeling a sense of relief – we lived another episode of hard working, curated and brand worthy content.