Hard Pass

I see independent manga and comics artists of this country selling a few copies. Comics are stories and pop culture and they matter only when they are read and discussed among a group of friends. You are sitting with your group of friends and you are discussing Doomsday, and then someone mentions this independent comics or manga, the friends get it and read it and then discuss among them the characters and storylines of the manga and comics. It's a nerd thing and discussion of pop culture needs a circle of friends or at least people with common interests. Earlier this discussions used to happen in person, and then during the early 2000s there were chatrooms where you could discuss and roleplay characters and I would suppose this was the last time it was all organic, especially in India. What I learnt about India in the past decade is that the for the influential in this country its less about I read this comics and more about I own this many comics. People do not discuss pop culture, literature and philosophy anymore especially the middle class people and people have shifted to online platforms to have dialogue about their interests which again when you see platforms like Letterboxd you would see mostly upper class crowd showing off their knowledge of cinema. The middle class now, just like the lower class crowd, doesn't have time from hand to mouth and in the free time they watch shitty series like Mirzapur which is not shitty in its own regard but shitty given the political climate and totality of the situation in this country. The draining of meaning from the general narrative of this nation began somewhere in the early 2010s and I refuse to believe that it's BJP, I however know that it's also BJP. By now meaning from the lives of people has been thoroughly dismantled and now pop culture only means that a bunch of upper class kids show how they attended a Diljeet or Tailwinder concert. There used to be a thriving rock scene in this country once and now it's either dead or a niche and privileged community. Things like pop culture, philosophy and literature are a form of recreation and people who are neck deep in survival do not have time for this sort of recreation which is now true for every class except the upper class in this nation and unfortunately the upper class doesn't have time from generating and showing off wealth to focus on pop culture and mythmaking and there are political and economic reasons too for why mythmaking has stopped or its quality has severely decreased. Also, one of the main problems with pop culture, philosophy and literature that I discovered in the past decade is its systemic gatekeeping in this nation. It has been quite a while I have read a good book written by an Indian writer and India in general churns out trash like Chetan Bhagat's slop and Amish's made up mythology which again were a phenomenon when they came out. Amish's books are a valid genre and so are Chetan Bhagat's. I am not a snob when it comes to literature and belive that every book has its place but then that doesn't negate the fact that options are very less it's either Chetan Bhagat, Amish and Durjoy Dutta or poverty porn and depression fest by people like Aravind Adiga. If we talk western literature, there still are a lot of writers and especially in the genres that I love like fantasy. There is Stephen King, George R. R. Martin, Brandon Sanderson, then there are people writing transgressive fiction like Chuck Palahniuk. I doubt the well of fiction of the West is going to dry up like it did in India. If we talk comics, there are still a lot of comics in the West. There is DC, there is Marvel, I personally prefer 80s and 90s comics from the West and have my issues about current stories of Marvel while DC kind of still maintains its superiority on narrative in comics but my dissatisfaction with the Western comics of present times was assessed when I came across creator-owned comics publications like Image comics and other less mainstream comic book companies, imprints and publications from the West. I saw the panels of comics from Image comics and I saw the depth that is lacking in Marvel comics of today. As far as India goes, comics industry has collapsed and I doubt it will ever recover, and I think India is better off feeding its coaching industry and mafia as mythmaking given the draining of meaning from the lives of people doesn't seem to be returning.