Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
That's Edutainment
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2006 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
Sometimes the TV spreadsheet magazines in the Sunday newspaper have summaries of what happened in the soap operas over the previous week. When I see one of those, I scan each summary for a mention of some technology that did not exist when soaps started broadcasting sixty years ago. Now we have cell phones, email, DNA tests, GPS locators, and so on. Usually it's about one mention per show per week. I'm not counting the exorcisms. Old-school soapiness meets the information age. The margins, the borders, the friction makes it interesting.
I used to watch shows on Saturday morning that featured the song-and-dance clips from Bollywood movies. I eventually realized that I was looking for the weird cross-genre or cross-cultural hybrids. Any movie can toss a man and a woman together in a field, or on a beach, or in a ruined temple. But children dancing with a cartoon Osama bin Laden? A straightjacket-bound hero popping, locking, and rapping under bright interrogation lights? That's the stuff.
It turns out I really wanted Indians filking "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" in Hindi. Here's the video. It only makes sense as a pure hybrid of sixties style and Bollywood tropes. It is wonderful.
