jumabazaar.org

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

cowabunga, yaar!

picture from flickr

i think if we do any more navel-gazing we’ll frighten off any readers we might have. anyways, someone to whom we should be very grateful has uploaded an episode of the mighty turtles dubbed in urdu (videos at the end of the post).

after i’d gotten over rediscovering what a terrible accent they gave michaelangelo, this got me thinking about shared cultural experiences in a country like pakistan.

one think which strikes me about western countries is that there are common cultural landmarks which are easily identified by people from all strata of society. my theory is that this makes it easier for people from even lower income families to reach their potential, especially in careers which require the ability to socialise successfully in order to be successful.

admittedly income equality and opportunity is currently less in america than it has been in recent memory but this hasn’t always been the case. also as john mcwhorter has argued (definitely read this piece btw), for african americans who have often lived in very segregated communities, while race-based affirmative action isn’t really necessary in universities anymore, it can still have a part to play in the business world.

having dispensed with the caveats let me get back to how ninja turtles relate to any of this. pakistan as is typical of many developing countries has horrific amounts of income inequality despite the recent strong performance of the economy. what interests me is the type of access which people from middle and lower income backgrounds have to the best and well-paying jobs careers and once they get into careers, how easy/difficult is it for them to rise.

the starting point has to be language. there is a clear discrepancy in institutions such as the army between punjabi speaking and non punjabi-speaking and then in multi-national corporations between english speaking and non-english speaking. some of this will surely remain, but i wonder if the presence of a vibrant, national urdu medium media will help in developing better equality of opportunities.

when i first got the idea of writing this, i was thinking about how the presence of a more diverse media could actually lead to more cultural divisions. for instance whereas before everyone who had a tv grew up watching the same ninja turtles programmes, now the better off will watch american sitcoms whereas others will watch indian films and dramas and yet others will watch pakistani programming. also whereas a lot of richer kids are watching the english premier league, more middle class ones will be watching the indian premier league.

in fact, i doubt that only having one tv channel was that important in the past i.e the fact that me and some other kid from a different part of town both watched cricket and ninja turtles wouldn’t make that much difference.

on the whole i’m not sure how this plays out but its definitely a fascinating subject.

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