Television as Sri Lanka's cultural birthplace
A television program in which the chief protagonists form a group of people producing pornography for a living? That's "Coupling'', a British television program that's aired on a local channel. Detailing pornographic episodes in not this column's speciality, but "Coupling'' pushes the limits. Women discuss the sizes of male organs here in detail - - along with the sizes of pay-packets and the lengths of breakfast sausages.

More beans, I shall not spill. A docu-drama on the same channel is a hagiography on the lives of David Beckham and his wife. Their obscene wealth is paraded by two gushing program anchors as if they had prematurely reached the state of Nirvana. But even that program didn't reach the plunging standards of another, where plunging necklines plunged so fast that in the end the program was riding on flesh alone -- the necklines having disappeared altogether.

The program which was supposed to be about supermodels or some such theme (who can remember?) metamorphosed into a nudity-show, where the envelope was pushed to the point that the only aspect not displayed was full frontal nudity.

True, Sri Lankan social training maybe in the general direction of idolising Amadeus Mozart and putting Amaradeva in the trash can. But yet, even for a culture which endures a split personality with one half modelling itself after the coloniser, "Coupling'' with its pornographic bent, and similar programs, indicates that the battle was lost before it got started. What used to be the grainy medium of television has grown up, dictated its terms, and taken over as the grandmaster of mass culture.

As a result, now we the mimic men and women. You could go to a party these days, and find youth almost right out of "Coupling'' except that they look hollow and totally deracinated in their imitative role-playing. They define the word 'impressionable.''

Ajith Samaranayake wrote sometime back in the 'Observer' of the culture of television commercials, where he focused on plummeting advertising standards. One advertisement, he wrote, encourages the cutting of classes. The advertising, Mr Samaranayake, is probably growing to mimic the content??

But, this exposition of television voyeuristic soft-porn is played out at a subterranean level, inasmuch as it doesn't seem part of mainstream society's responsibly to map out its effects, or dissect its import as an instrument in manufacturing mass culture.

The Sarath Amunugama type social commentators have chosen to ignore the phenomenon of this type of television culture-colonisation, perhaps in the in wishful hope that what's ignored doesn't exist.

But, while Amunugama declaims on television about regaining the Sri Lankan culture for which he is sadly nostalgic, the same medium keeps cutting the ground from under his feet.

None including Amunugama want a throwback to the cultural puritanism of the Anagarika epoch, but to hear the cultural punditocracy, the Sri Lankan identity has never been more secure. They will tell you that a moral police is at work today. People do not want a moral police at work, but they will tell you in spite of it that never before has the Sri Lankan identity been so well preserved. Bars close, they will promise, at the drop of a hat, whether it's Poya Christmas or Ramadan, and each time a Buddhist monk of passing recognition dies, the taverns put up their shutters…

But while they live this make-believe existence of fronted wholesomeness, the Sri Lankan identity is subverted even as they keep their eyes averted from the everyday fare of Western packaged television.

Decision makers seem to believe that what they do not acknowledge can be wished away, or they seem to believe that the influence of television programming such as mentioned above is not pervasive. The stubborn if not self-gratifying belief is that there is no need to keep a tab on television programming because the good Sri Lankan boys and girls who are brought up on a culture of closed bars on Poya days, and of Soma Hamuduruwo, will know to treat such programming as the aberration - a titillation meant only for the deviant few.

The convenient wish in other words is that the youth will self-censor, and take the jaded prurience of Western television as something that happens 'out there' in London or Hamburg, of which they are not part of. The reality is the exact opposite of this wish.

If audiences are shown a set of people on television whose main vocation is manufacturing pornography and whose main hobby is discussing the relative merits of the size of the male organ -- there is a guaranteed response to that, which is there is an impressionable set of young people who would ape if not experiment with this kind of glamorisation of adult libido.

That's not to say that anybody should be prohibited from discussing the size of anything, in the appropriate circumstance and setting. But if we are about to replace the general Sri Lankan social intercourse with dialogue borrowed from packaged television, we have sold out - - and are no longer what we used to be as a community.

The last thing we need to do is to enthrone puritan ethics; that's not the intention here and certainly it's not a question of self-righteously correcting a skewed moral compass. The quest, on the other hand, is to expose the hypocrisy in a society which thinks nothing of hurling bombs in the name of a dead Buddhist monk, but deludes itself into thinking that while its engaged in such cultural cleansing, there is no such thing as a burgeoning mass culture (…over which these moral arbiters haven't even a monkey-wrench's worth of control.)

Morals aside, we do not want to be clones of the West, and even if rebellious youth want to think that decadence is chic, they shouldn't want to borrow those notions of "decadence'' from the West?? But Hindi television and Western canned entertainment has its own self promoting momentum, which mocks the inertia of our hypocritical moral police that will shed copious tears on behalf of a monk -- while on television this brigade's own offspring regularly watch British youth manufacture pornography as a cottage industry.

In one sense these young people are striking back and mocking the moral hypocrisy of their elders by allying with a decadent Western medium which they still see as glamorous, and irreverent of the moral charade enacted by the older generation. Suffice to say importers of canned television programming have a lot of money to make in the bargain.

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