We DID start the fire - Part 1

The 1960s and 70s were times of change for the Western world. Bob Dylan was so moved, he even sang about it. There were revolutions on many fronts – Social, Financial and Technological. The Counter-culture movement was sweeping across the West and the phrase “anti-establishment” was in widespread use. The West was inhabited by “Baby Boomers” who took it upon themselves to liberate society from racial segregation, sexual repression, suppression of women and the likes. Nothing symbolized this better than the Woodstock festival in 1969, which led to the term “Woodstock Generation” becoming a part of the common lexicon. Truly, a watershed in modern history.

Back in India, we were still reeling from the effects of the 100+ years of British domination. We were slowly getting back on our feet and middle-class prosperity was still a fair distance away, which brings us to the crux of this post. Our nation has been known to be a few years behind the West in all major forms of development – which, by the way, isn’t too bad for a country with only 65 years of independence. And so was the case with our society as well.

During my many “sessions” with Messers Madan, Joseph, Dumpala and Balasubramaniyan, we sat and we listened to a great variety of music, as was necessitated by the neuronic activity in our systems. It was the usual suspects at play – The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Mark Knopfler, Eric Clapton etc (Notice how a LOT of brilliant music originated in Britain). There was also some popular Indian music from the 1990s, which, almost always, led to a YouTube exploration of other stuff from the 90s. And more than once, we ended up discussing – courtesy our newly stimulated minds – how the 90s were to India what the 60s and 70s were to the West. Now, we may be biased because we grew up in the 90s, and so did not experience the awesomeness of the 80s (Mithun Da’s gyrations, Ramsay Brothers’ movies et al), but the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced.

The 90s brought about a great transformation in the Indian society. Starting with the economic liberalization in 1991, which opened up the markets and introduced tax reforms, the nation started witnessing a shift towards post-modern attitudes in all spheres of life. License Raj was abolished and foreign companies started to be seen in the markets more regularly. Cable TV was launched in 1992 and the country finally got a choice to watch something else apart from Doordarshan. Realizing that competition was only going to grow, DD rebranded its channel DD 2 into “DD Metro”, which increasingly started catering to the urban population. There were more and more Women protagonists on TV – Shanti and Tara to name a few – and this was an indicator, albeit a small one, that women were finding their place in society. With the availability of “english pictures/serials” on TV came a more liberal attitude towards colourful content, on TV, Cinema and society in general. This was in stark contrast to television and cinema in the 80s, as chronicled by Arnab Ray (Greatbong) in his very readable book. My dad was fairly enthusiastic about cable TV and I remember having cable at home at an early stage. Zee TV pioneered Hindi content on cable, and Star TV showed international content. A few years later Sony entered into the fray and from then on, there was a steady addition of Hindi channels on cable TV.

Another agent of change in the 90s was Indi-pop. Until that time, music in India could easily be classified into Classical and Bollywood, with nothing much else challenging this duopoly. And then in the early 90s, we had Baba Sehgal and Alisha Chinai leading the way, taking on Bollywood. Suddenly, we had young singers churning out albums, aided by record companies such as Magnasound, who were also keen to compete with T-Series, Tips and Veeenus. Interestingly enough, Pop music grew in Pakistan in the early 80s and artists like Nazia Hassan (of the Aap Jaisa Koi fame), Vital Signs and Junoon were already established stars before India started producing its own Pop music. The increasing demand for this new music led to some of Indipop’s best years, when Lucky Ali, Shaan, Colonial Cousins, Euphoria, KK, Bombay Vikings and Silk Route gave us some memorable music. This was also the first wave of “Remixes”, when popular songs from the 60s and 70s were remodeled to suit the tastes of a new Young India which had been brought up on a steady diet of MTV and Channel V. This would later be mutated – nay, damaged irreparably - with the coming of “Kaanta Laga” and its cousins. From then on, it was more about the “video” than the “audio”, and thus ended my cordial relationship with Indipop. Soon, the industry started experiencing overkill when every Ram, Shyam and Ghanshyam started coming out with an album, and when Bollywood started adapting to consumer needs, record companies no longer wanted to work with raw talent but instead chose to play with the big boys of Bollywood. I’m just glad that some of my formative years coincided with the best years of Indipop’s 15-year existence.

Over in Bollywood, we started seeing stars from the south such as Prabhu Deva, Hariharan and A.R. Rehman, and Hindi movies were richer for the experience. A new genre of goofy comedies was born, with Johnny Lever, Paresh Rawal, Govinda and Kader Khan being the leading acts, and directors like David Dhawan carving out a niche for themselves. Of course, the decade belonged to SRK and his brand of romance, before he decided to do a Ram Gopal Verma and file for mental bankruptcy. Anu Malik brought the Macarena to India, along with the path-breaking piece of teaching that “inspiration” and “plagiarism” are two separate things. However, I also believe that Bollywood finally turned a corner not in the 90s, but in the early 2000s, with the arrival of movies such as Dil Chahta Hai. Movies like these rode the pop culture wave from the 90s and changed the face of Indian cinema. But that’s a topic for another post and I encourage my Bollywood connoisseur friends to take a stab at it.

Ads on Television also benefited from this new age of freedom and we were no longer subjected to the “vanilla” content that was staple on DD. Some unforgettable ones that come to mind are for Dairy Milk, Tata Indica, Coke, Dhara, Pepsi. Thank god for YouTube. I remember sometimes watching TV only for the commercials. Good Times.

When I sat down to write this post, I wanted to do something in the style of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire, where he refers to the major headlines from 1950 to 1990, a few for each year, via a song. But then, I decided to save it for the second part of the post when I realized that I could do a two-part version. Needless to say, I’m only writing from a pop culture perspective and there were many other things that changed the way we lived in the 90s. More to follow in Part 2.

P.S: There were, however, certain things that survived the winds of change of the 90s. I am talking, of course, about the Vicco Vajradanti ads