The Indian Love For Dated American Pop-Culture

I spent my 20s groovin' with Boomers

I try not to write about social media-based discourse, because it feels like eating junk food. But the weather seems right for broccoli tater tots if you will - sure, they are as junky as regular tater tots, but there’s this sheen of respectability endowed by the broccoli.

Anyway, this discourse was triggered by this scold who is mad people go to Coldplay concerts in India.

Sure, no one listens to Coldplay, but the North American leg of the Music Of The Spheres tour sold out in hours.

Some Indian-Americans getting in on the action to bring out their pet peeves:

Is Fossil a ‘high-end’ brand? No one I know who buys high-end brands seems to think so, but surely someone does and keeps the brand in business.

There’s a grain of truth to this, though.

Brands that are bottom of the barrel in the US are somehow upscale brands in other countries. Like McDonalds, Taco Bell, Subway, KFC, H&M, Payless.

However, it’s ignorant to attribute this to think Indians consider these brands to be premium just because they are American. While it’s definitely a novelty that offers a respite from boring home-cooked food, American brands also tend to elevate their food and customer experience abroad. A brand like McDonalds positions itself as a fast-premium dining experience, more akin to a Cava or Shake Shack, at a stretch, Chipotle. The older people in the family think it gives them indigestion but go along because the kids asked.

Same with clothing brands. The stuff in Payless or H&M India has better patterns, uses better materials, and lasts a while as opposed to the cheap stuff in these stores in the US. But we know this already if we’ve spent any time in India.

A Little Segue About Khushwant Singh

This purported Khushwant Singh quote in the replies caught my eye:

I couldn’t find this quote anywhere else. Maybe Khushwant Singh put it in one of his many joke books. But it sounds like the kind of attitude he’d have to these things, though I can’t imagine him mentioning NSYNC.

For the uninitiated, Khushwant Singh was a diplomat, journalist, and copious writer. He published his first book in 1950 when he was already 35, and his last book was published two years before his death, in 2013. My introduction to him was through all the ‘joke books’ he published. So it was a bit of a shock to read excerpts of his novels in newsmagazines - they were full of sex.

The plot summary of his novel, The Company Of Women, begins thus

Mohan Kumar is an Indian student. He wins a scholarship to Princeton University in the United States, where he soon develops a reputation for having an unusually large penis.

This one was probably a lot of wishful thinking on his part, especially as he was 80+ when he wrote this, but other books and columns of his had a lot of explicit writing as well. He seemed to enjoy his reputation as a ‘dirty old man’.

I assumed he probably was leading a life of much ayyashi, but I went back and read his books and interviews a while ago, and realized he wrote all day from 4am and had no time to lead a profligate life. HOWEVER, his wife did. She stepped out on him with a senior bureaucrat FOR YEARS and he had to make his peace with it. So the dirty old man image was pure cope.

Khushwant Singh had a very Congressi idea of India, Indians, and our relation to the world. Like, friends from abroad were a status symbol, and you had to constantly vacillate between apologizing for India and feeling guilty that they couldn’t cope with India. I came across this post by a writer close to the Congressi establishment lately, and it illustrates well what I mean. But essentially, this involves facing the world with no self-confidence.

So if he did critique Indians for being 20 years too late in engaging with American pop culture, that is on brand for him.

And, it is oddly accurate. Or, at least, was.

The Awkward Few Weeks When I Had An American Accent

When I was 11 or 12, we got cable TV. And at that point, cable had Star Plus. And they just aired syndicated American sitcoms all day. This was the late 90s, and I was mainlining The Wonder Years (last episode aired in 1993), Doogie Howser (last episode aired in 1995), and Small Wonder (last episode aired in 1988).

There was also Cartoon Network, which aired Scooby Doo episodes from the 70s, Top Cat (last episode aired in 1962), Centurions (last episode aired in 1986), and Swat Kats (last episode aired 1995).

Coming from grainy Doordarshan, I had no immunity to this onslaught of entertainment and was GLUED. Within days, I was speaking in an American accent. My friends at school first ignored it, then were concerned, and then ended up making fun of me. Eventually, I decided it was ridiculous and knocked it off.

Over time, everyone around me decided to watch Friends, Seinfeld, and Just Shoot Me, which were in syndication then. Eventually, we graduated on to Sex And The City, which aired quite late on HBO, and it was always a game to sneakily watch it, and hope to god our parents didn’t come upon the title or any of the naughty scenes.

In college, kids who hadn’t had more than a few continuous hours of electricity a day were bingeing Limewire rips of The OC and The Wire. Most of us didn’t adopt American accents, but our brains did get fried by sitcoms, classic rock, and Oscar-winning Hollywood movies.

Apparently, this was not American enough

When I did eventually get to the US, it turned out, people in our demographic watched… other things. I eventually caught on, watching Girls and 30 Rock and all the late-night shows. But when I’d discuss the comedy I was watching with those who grew up in the US, I realized I was missing a whole layer of references.

When I met my husband, we went through the IMDb top 100 movies together, marking off ones we each had seen. We’d both watched at least thirty movies, but there was NO OVERLAP. We didn’t even share an appreciation for the same seasons of The Simpsons. We didn’t share too many bands in common either. Heck, it seemed like my taste in music was more akin to his parents’.

I went to watch The Doors in their The Doors Of the 21st Century avatar, Ringo Starr’s All-Starr Band, and other artists of that vintage that were still performing. I’d find I was by and large the youngest person at the concert. At the Doors concert, I found myself next to a very old, very pink man who said “Out here, we don’t get many colored people like you. Not much mixing, like the cities” and we sang along to LA Woman.

Thankfully, at this point, my self-esteem didn’t rely on how attuned I was to the hottest pop culture trends, and I survived.

But it bothered me why I liked old-people media.

Not everything has global appeal

My husband liked movies like Caddyshack and Napoleon Dynamite in his teens. I didn’t get them. I had fun memories of watching Men In Black and Oceans 11, 12, 13. And they seemed too trite to him.

I realized that the IMDb top 100 movies I’d watched were big-budget mass-appeal movies that were simplified enough that a penguin in Antarctica would understand them. They had famous cast members who set the tone for the movie, the plots and themes were straightforward, and you didn’t need to have a grip on American life to enjoy them.

The ones my husband had watched, in contrast, were indie darlings that were niche, cult hits. Or, at the very least, highlighted very specific things about American life. I have tried hard to find National Lampoon Christmas Vacation funny and I’ve failed, despite reading A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever from cover to cover. I attribute that to my lack of experience watching Christmas go wrong.

And it made perfect sense why we were listening to NSync years after they stopped being hot in America.

Things go global only after they’ve had resounding local success. If you’re going to invest in screening your movie across ten Indian cities, you’d better have some indication that there’s some appeal to it in that market.

Understandably, a movie about playing golf at a country club is not going to have broad appeal in India. In the same way, a cute little Konkona Sen movie is not going to get a big budget to be marketed in the US the way a Rajamouli movie would.

NSync’s music wouldn’t even be marketed widely in overseas markets until the local market was maxed out. When they are heavily touring and building their audience, they are going to be performing a lot locally. They’ll only go overseas after they are confident of a large audience there.

So, Americophiles in Mumbai, Singapore, and Cape Town are going to be “behind”. Maybe less so now thanks to Netflix, but behind nonetheless. This is a feature, not a bug. The content that comes to them is going to be content vetted to appeal to them.

This is similar to how you can go to a former Soviet country and they’ll sing songs to you from the 1954 movie Awaara. The newest it would get is probably Disco Dancer from 1982. Those are probably the few movies in all of history to be marketed widely there. It feels weird to us to have movies from before we were born, that we’d never watched, be associated with us so prominently. One part of you wants to say “We’ve moved on from then”, but also that’s the content that appeals to those people. Seems unlikely that the dulcet melodies of everlasting Bangalore rock band Thermal And A Quarter will attain widespread appeal in Uzbekistan (but here’s hoping).

And… the stuff that appeals across cultures will appeal for the unlikeliest reasons. Every time I showed my husband one of those pretentious Indian movies that tried its hardest to be Hollywood, he hated it. To my consternation, he liked the massiest movies with cartoonish characters and item songs more. In stark contrast to what we’d been told for years, that our popular movies are too garish to appeal to anyone from a ‘more advanced’ culture. I find Bahubali and RRR too Tollywood for my tastes, but that’s not a criterion my entire cohort in a San Francisco writing workshop used to decide what to enjoy watching.

My pet peeve is how those in India identify with Sex And The City and keep trying to make an Indian version. We got Veere di Wedding and Four More Shots and I disliked both. I feel like they don’t get the soul of the show and how it could only really have been set in New York City in the ‘90s, and they don’t dig into local sentiments and culture to the same extent to draw up a similar soul that they can knit a whole show around. But… I don’t get to choose that. The appeal of SATC to me and my friends back in the day was vicariously living lives that would never appeal to us IRL. And that’s exactly what the shows seem to be going for.

Ultimately, your tastes in media are not going to be the same as people from a completely different geography. If they are, you should probably turn off your screens, go outside, and talk to people. It’s all about context—geography, culture, and timing shape what we consume and how we connect to it. The media we grew up with, whether NSYNC in India or National Lampoon in the US, reflects a unique intersection of local taste and global trends. It’s why some content resonates deeply across borders and others remain gloriously niche.

And maybe that’s the beauty of it. The things that feel out of sync—or even behind—aren’t shortcomings. They’re markers of how globalized yet distinct our experiences are, proof that no matter how much we’re connected by the same wires, what we love will always carry the imprint of where we come from.

Khushwant Singh, if he did say this, identified this phenomenon correctly. But the derogatory phrasing is unnecessary. I don’t think Khushwant Singh would particularly mind if his 1956 novel Train To Pakistan suddenly started appealing to people in the border areas of North and South Sudan.