Why this analysis? Whether you are stunned at the rakish confidence of the guy who serenaded his girlfriend in the theatre surrounded by strangers, annoyed with Indian tourists doing garba around the world or disgusted by Himanshu ‘370 rupees’ Jangra’s misogyny, every instance begs just one question: how has a country that has always been so obsessed with social optics become so unaffected by embarrassment?
This question popped up in my head when, upon being asked which ‘lost art’ should make a comeback in an interview with The Wall Street Journal last year, Jacob Elordi promptly responded with, “The art of shame. I wish people could experience shame a little heavier.” Evidently, shamelessness is not an India-exclusive phenomenon. “There’s a lot of need for validation from others, even when you are getting it from strangers,” explains psychiatrist Dr. Akshata Bhat. “A lot of people don’t get that validation from their own friends and family. I have spoken to content creators, and they are wary of who they allow into their inner circle because they don’t know if they can trust anybody. They tend to be lonely, and attention from their Instagram followers is very validating.”
It wasn’t so long ago that we constantly gave a damn about what everybody else had to say, and while it is great that we have been able to shed that, how did it happen? How did we go from awkward family vacation photos to full-blown multi-cam, multi-generational vlogging? A research paper published last year in the Social Sciences & Humanities Open journal states that “collapsed context” has changed how shame works now. While earlier, the circles of judgement would be smaller, direct and local, today, every person with an open profile is judged by people with different expectations at the same time. To use a digital metaphor, it’s like collapsing the layers of an image on Photoshop—once flattened, you cannot tinker with any attribute individually. The image is protected from elemental edits and can only be affected superficially. Replace ‘edit’ with ‘hate comments’, and you get the drift.
