Holes in the perfect aesthetics

Chasing trends vs building a culture

As I sit in my usual spot in my favourite café with my laptop in front of me, I see all kinds of people. Fellow workers fixated with the screen in front of them. An extra social girl who I see almost every time I’m here. I know her order too, a hazelnut latte with the same special request—hazelnut thoda zyada. She seems to know many people who wander in and out to work and always makes it a point to strike a conversation with them. Some engage, while some don’t share the same enthusiasm—they’re more captivated by the screen in front of them. I often see some monks-in-training who have dropped in from the nearby Sakya Centre. Somehow there is a more diverse crowd here than I would usually see in my old Blue Tokai in Delhi. Or maybe it is just me being more observant. Has the slow pace of a smaller city finally caught on?

The other day, I saw a reel of a trend that is catching on in Indian metro cities—lectures in bars. Inspired by the American “Lectures on Tap” series, the formula is simple enough: academics deliver forty-minute talks on subjects ranging from quantum physics to postcolonial theory in a bar. I was at once fascinated and decided to keep it in mind the next time I’m visiting Delhi to see if I can make it to one of these gatherings. The algorithm worked its magic and surely, I began seeing more of these reels and a proliferation of similar ventures, each promising to make learning “accessible,” “casual,” and “fun.”

I get it. Learning is fun, particularly in a casual, relaxed setting without an exam at the end. Besides, we seem to be running out of options of doing things. There are far too many music gigs, plays, cultural performances, pub quizzes, film and sports screenings taking place! Enough, sarcasm is the refuge of losers, as Greg Kinnear’s character in Little Miss Sunshine reminds us.

I don’t have a problem with the concept itself, and those trying to make learning fun. Call it an ‘event’ and call it a day. My concern is the claim from those driving these spaces that these lectures are “democratising access” to these speakers and learning, when in fact, they require a set of prerequisites: Rs 600 for entry, and the cultural and social capital to go to feel comfortable in these spaces which are taken up by English-speaking, upper-middle-class urbanites with disposable income and the “right” aesthetic sensibility.

Barely any “communities” are trying to work towards building a culture, they all seem to chasing a trend that they saw on Instagram and wanting virality. Run clubs, for instance, became very popular in India a few months after we saw the same happen through our screens in other countries. Running, the most accessible sport, somehow now requires an aesthetic if you want to be “in” with the crowd. Then came the coffee raves, that some localised into chai and samosa raves. Good god.

Guy Debord in his 1967 book, The Society of the Spectacle, describes “Spectacle” as an overall social phenomenon where everything directly lived recedes into a representation. He calls it “a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at”, created from the rearrangement of fragmented images taken from every aspect of life. These new, interesting and aesthetically pleasing trends that reach us through social media are precisely that separate pseudo-world that can be looked at from the outside, from our screens. Jean Baudrillard further showed how this Spectacle was perfected, becoming an inescapable “integral reality” where the aesthetic trumps all.

It is a world of appearance and illusion. Baudrillard, in his book The Perfect Crime, begins with:

“This is the story of a crime – of the murder of reality. And the extermination of an illusion – the vital illusion, the radical illusion of the world. The real does not disappear into illusion; it is illusion that disappears into integral reality.”

The illusion that we are part of a community or learning things through a curated, consumable aesthetic is the force that prevents us from building the messy, inconvenient, unaesthetic reality of community in the first place. We are left with cultural movements that require a visual aesthetic before they require a purpose.

In a world optimised for the perfect image, how do we begin the difficult, sometimes ugly work of simply living the reality the Spectacle has successfully displaced?

Phones are out, and we’re trying to document that we’re there, wearing the best running shoes and attractive gear, getting our sweat on, on a Sunday morning before grabbing a Rs 300 coffee. After that, we’ll go to a bar and attend a lecture on bats, with a beer in hand, of course not missing the opportunity to share that we did. When we’re asked “How was your weekend?” on Monday morning, we’ll have a good answer.

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These are thoughts and reflections in progress, and I’m still working through them. There’s a lot more to unpack here—about access, aesthetics and what genuine community actually looks like. If you have thoughts, critiques, or would just like to share what community looks like in your city, I’d love to hear from you.