I’ll never forget when Shah Rukh Khan had attended the Don 2 premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in 2010
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I’ll never forget when Shah Rukh Khan had attended the Don 2 premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in 2010. Thousands of fans stood for hours in the snow outside the Friedrichstadt Palast, waiting for a glimpse of divinity. They screamed when Shah Rukh Khan arrived, and he came forward to shake the hand of a near-hysterical fan. At the moment of attaining godhood, the fan turned her back on Shah Rukh Khan, and ignoring his handshake, tried to take a selfie instead. The long-awaited experience of finally meeting Shah Rukh Khan was not so important; the record of it was. She needed to show off the moment to her friends, even if it was only a blur for posterity.
Earlier this week, I accompanied my sister Sarayu and an American visitor to Elephanta island. It has some extraordinary cave sculptures, believed to be among the greatest masterpieces of Hindu art in its first phase of development from the 4th-9th century AD. But, almost everyone was mainly busy taking selfies with the sculptures. Nobody looks any more; people shoot with their cameras instead of seeing. The selfie is a visual equivalent of doggie piss: an I-was-there marker. Most visitors were totally engrossed with the best angle, best light, pictures with and without girlfriend, and impatiently waiting for the others to get out of the frame. A woman in a sari and plastic chappals posed inside the sanctum sanctorum, leaning her elbow on Shiva’s large stone linga, as if it were her buddy Sallu or Akki, grinning broadly for the camera. I wondered if anyone would have leaned thus on a linga in the sanctum sanctorum of a regular temple, if they went for a darshan, to gaze at the Lord. But, lack of supervision makes everything permissible, and the only darshan we need is of ourselves.
Only a few foreigners and students had hired guides. Sarayu and I have done the wonderful Jnanapravaha course in Indian philosophy and aesthetics, and Sarayu was the only one who devotedly referred to George Michell’s book Elephanta before each sculpture, and we gazed at each in wonder. There were some remarkable sculptures, including the Sadashiva (with three faces), Shiva and Parvati getting married, and gambling (which could be the same thing, really), Shiva as Ardhanarishvara, Shiva bearing Ganga, and Ravana lifting Mount Kailas. Earlier, Elephanta was a forest of palm, mango and tamarind trees; now it is a retractable forest of selfie sticks.
As John Berger wrote in Ways of Seeing, “When the camera reproduces a painting, it destroys the uniqueness of its image. As a result, its meaning changes. Or, more exactly, its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings.” All our glorious national treasures, I realised, are mere backdrops, against which people can pose for selfies. So, it seems wholly unnecessary to deal with all that heat and dust, the inconvenience of actually going there and experiencing all that stuff: the wind in your hair or the scent of bhutta roasting at the Queen’s Necklace. Someone can simply put up a studio with images or diorama with miniature models, of Mumbai’s must-see sights, including the Gateway of India, Queen’s Necklace, Shah Rukh Khan and Elephanta, somewhere convenient in the city. People can simply pose against all the images, tick off all the boxes and “finish” Bombay in one afternoon.
You can see the world’s wonders in a day at Window of the World in Shenzhen, China, including the Eiffel Tower, Pyramids and Angkor Wat. Likewise in the Dubai Mall, UAE, which apparently got 80 million visitors in 2014. In Mini-Europe, Brussels, you can see the best of Europe in a single morning. This way, you can save a lot of time. In which you can take more selfies.
Meenakshi Shedde is South Asia Consultant to the Berlin Film Festival, award-winning critic, curator to festivals worldwide and journalist. Reach her at meenakshishedde@gmail.com.
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