Artificial Cheese

In many Indian households AVS, the Asian Variety Show, serves as a glint of familiarity for many homegrown Indians who immigrated to the United States for one reason or another.  In the past, this program also acted as a catalyst for nostalgic thoughts.  I would sit with my parents sometimes as they would recount stories of their time growing up in India while the television played black and white Indian film outtakes of song performances.

But that has changed dramatically in recent years.  In purely subjective terms, AVS has become garbage.  To the eyes of a first generation American with Indian roots, its like 90s American pop culture vomiting into a bowl of Indian food.  When you look at it, you can’t tell where the curry ends and the vomit begins.  In objective terms, AVS has always been changing slowly to Americanize Indian pop culture.

Personal feelings aside, what should AVS be broadcasting?  Nehal has written an entry, Bollywood Blunder, in funksysteme.blog where he says:

“…people involved would be more interested in classic Bollywoood than the new, “Americanized” Bollywood. … So, it would be in the best interest of the majority for [AVS] to show less poser Indian material, and more classical art.  There is so much beautiful art and culture, but it is not realized in America because all we get to see is bastardized Indian/American (not American Indian) garbage.”

One important thing to keep in mind is that AVS is purely entertainment with a specific target in mind, which is our parents.  When it comes to anything pop-culture related in an entertainment industry, what you see is never a gauge of what people are, but what people want.  Its a media projection of a culture’s collective desires; devoid of its values, norms, and even respect for itself.

In the case of AVS, we don’t see an honest represntation of Indian culture, and that is not what we should be seeking from AVS.  We see the cultural id without the ego, exactly how the culture wants to see itself when their parents’ culture looks the other way.  Proposing that AVS changes its broadcast material is just hiding the problem rather than being aware of it.  It would be like solving global warming with global dimming, or adding a James Earl Jones voice over for Steve Guttenberg in the Police Academy movies.  He’ll still sound like a chipmunk.

So in conclusion, you should take Steve Guttenberg for what he is, and acknowledge that the voice is a problem that can’t be solved by James Earl Jones.