CHINESE CIRCUS TO CHANGING REALITY

Friday, 05 February 2010

Last week I went to see a performance by Chinese state circus. It was more of a theatre presentation than a proper circus but nonetheless it was a circus with jokers, jugglers, unicycles and lots of pretty faces. The performers were amazing, doing almost impossible feats. Young children seemed very appreciative but among the teenagers and adults it was not so.

In the era of computer generated cinematography nothing seems impossible and we kind of get desensitized to real human achievements. We have become so used to the acrobatics in the Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon and House of Flying Daggers that anything less does not satisfy us. We have started to expect the same from reality which we get from imagination. The boundary between media generated virtual reality and our day to day physical reality seems to be getting blurred.

I was in India in November last year. I attended a marriage ceremony in a small provincial town. I was astonished to see how closely it resembled a Bollywood film set. The rituals which have never been a part of that community were adopted effortlessly because they have been shown in the recent films so often.

The films, theatres and arts did have an effect on our behaviour before but because we had only limited exposure to them, it did not overshadow the raw reality of our physical surroundings. Now a days the time for real interaction with people and objects around us has been heavily encroached by the films, television, and computers.

Because we are getting our information more from virtual than real, our reality is changing. The reality is not truly real anyway; it is only what we perceive to be real through our limited sensory input and with a profound modulation by the brain based on our past experiences. And if our experiences are mainly virtual, so will become our reality. A frightening thought !