Elections, Bigg Boss, and the Note3

The neta has changed, his smile now solicits, his words have a ‘yes’ fed by default into every sentence, and the past isn’t mentioned even once unless it is to remind you of a good deed done or a task completed. These reminders of the past deeds don’t come very often as we all now know what the truth really is. There is enough buzz on the social media, enough instagram pics float around, and enough enough-is-enough kind of words are there even in the conventional media to show him that he is a neta and we know what he has been doing these past years.

I read the paragraph aloud for some comment by Specky, my wife, and it came with quite the promptness that has now become her trademark. She said, ‘What you’ve written is correct but I’m unable to understand how this change in a neta is linked to Bigg Boss.’

‘Ah! That’s simple,’ I said, ‘What you have been seeing isn’t what you’re getting now – is the connecting mantra for all three. The neta has changed. So has Bigg Boss. And I don’t mean just the sets on this reality show. It is the people who have suddenly found that it isn’t possible to keep the façade of good behaviour stable for any longer now. So we see the true characters pop out to rampage through the house waving flags with ‘I am bitching’ written boldly across.’

So change is what connects the two. One has changed from the real to fiction and the other from fiction to what is real! ‘Life is so like that,’ I muttered and then said, ‘the Note 3 that Samsung has just launched also proves that what you have been seeing isn’t what you’re getting now, so to say.’

‘That’s true, but the Note 3 is an evolution of technology. Are the netas too a vibrant format of evolution or just a change?’

‘You have a point there,’ I said and recounted how the pappu Yuvraj is desperately attempting to transform himself into something that mews, growls, and grovels all at the same time. ‘And this,’ I said triumphantly, ‘is what evilution is all about in the case of netas.’

Specky, my wife, thought for a while and said, ‘No. The neta evolving is a rather hypothetical assumption, but change and the neta do go together. I have a feeling that the netas we see today are not going to be the netas we will see in a post-election India. So, in a way your theory of ‘what you have been seeing isn’t what you’re getting now’ might just seem correct.’

So elections this year and in the year to come are surely poised to thrust a change on us all. But will the neta really change?

BIGG BOSS has certainly changed the concept of what viewers want to see and is such a brilliant example of armchair psychoanalysis of a society… of what people think and how people behave. This one-hour show takes us into the depths of human nature which otherwise would take us years to read and understand.

It is almost the same with the Galaxy Note 3. The S-pen has brought about an revolution of sorts… it makes sure that your tasks are completed in much less time than it would take with any other smart device existing today. You can write an email id and send an email, write a number and call, write a name and open it in your contacts folder, cut and save in a scrap book, save videos straight from YouTube, open multiple windows and work on them simultaneously.. arrey, what else does an intelligent consumer want today? The Note 3 epitomises the rise of technology to a level where human endeavour takes the form of fast, precise, and goal-oriented. Work and fun seem to have finally shaken hands with each other because a gadget like this one will make sure that users will work more, get more done, and all while they smile!

I hope that the elections too change the political environment that has been existing for such a long time now… we need it to change like the Note 3 has changed the face of technological interaction with us or Bigg Boss has changed the way we perceive a reality show.

This post is a part of Write Over the Weekend, an initiative for Indian Bloggers by BlogAdda. We give out themes for creative writing each weekend for Indian bloggers.

Arvind Passey
27 October 2013