The Cafe
This photograph is of a wall at a café I was at yesterday. A few famous entertainers, with mugs of coffee in their hand- the café’s logo photoshopped onto the mugs. The implication being that, well, if these famous people are drinking our coffee (not really), then so should you! Would these artists be okay with being misrepresented this way? Maybe Audrey Hepburn wasn’t even a coffee drinker. But most of these people are dead and gone, so what does it matter.
Below this collage of photographs, is printed the café’s slogan, “Coffee is Culture”. What does that even mean? It seems a little grandiose, doesn’t it? A little too much pressure for coffee to handle. Imagine having to be the face of ALL of culture. “Hey I was just trying to wake you up, and be the highlight of your date. I don’t need this kind of attention!”. But it’s the era of slogans that are equal parts ambitious and asinine. Like “Impossible is nothing” or “Open Happiness”. Could we try and promise a little less? No wonder we’re all so frequently disappointed.
What struck me about this collage of photographs is that all these entertainers are American, all of them, White, and only some of them, I recognize. And I wonder how it feels for someone to sit in a café in Bangalore, or Bengaluru, staring up at faces of celebrities, most of whom they may not recognize. The reason for having these faces up on that wall seems ambiguous. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe the conscious or unconscious assumption underneath, is that it’s cool to have American, white faces looking down on you as you drink your coffee. But these cultural “icons” have little cultural relevance to the place where this café is located. And if your coffee truly is culture, then what culture is it representing?
What happens to people when they see images like these plastered across their spaces of consumption; images consisting of “Western” individuals and lifestyles being depicted as aspirational. But images that don’t explain why someone within a completely different cultural, social, and geographical milieu must aspire to these individuals. The question that comes up for me is one that I imagine comes up for various groups of people to varying degrees. “Why aren’t my desires, my aspirations, my choices, my lifestyle being represented by individuals who are more likely to accurately represent me?”. “Why can’t I see myself in the images that surround me?”.
If the images consist of Western, white people, then they inaccurately represent individuals of a different colour and culture. If the images are of upper-class Hindus, then they inaccurately represent those from other class, caste, and religious backgrounds; you get my point.
All of what I am saying, sounds quite repetitive and obvious to me. But as I continually try to “evolve” my self, facing crisis upon crisis of identity, maybe it is important for me to more closely consider the images and individuals who are shaping my ideas of who I want to be, who I ought to be, or what my life is supposed to look like.
The question is not of whether certain images are good or bad, or right or wrong for me to aspire to. But rather, what my relationship is to the content and context of these images. Why do people around me in their early twenties and thirties see Ross and Rachel, or Jim and Pam as romantically aspirational, why do certain forms of clothing or fashion become aspirational, or why do certain kinds of content and content creators set the “trends” on Instagram. The implications of this have recently become apparent on a more personal level.
My three-year-old cousin growing up in Norway, is already starting to develop notions of Whiteness and maybe Norwegian-ness being superior in some way. Very explicitly and verbally, she has stated her preference for her father owing to his lighter skin colour, and her embarrassment of her mother for coming to pick her up from school while wearing clothes unlike those of the other White mothers. She wonders why her black hair isn’t as pretty as blonde hair, and asks that the kids at her birthday party be seated in separate halves of her living room depending on whether they are White, or of colour.
It baffles me that a child so young is already making sense of messages about who she should aspire to be like, and it saddens me that she already sees aspects of herself, her family, and her friends as more or less worthy of acceptance. Who will she become, and who will she eschew. What meaning will words like “roots”, “ancestry”, and “culture” have for her. On a personal level, how will she then treat me, and the parts of my identity that she finds unacceptable.
It makes sense then that there are groups of people in our own country who are both fanatical and concerned about their images, icons, and cultural artefacts being made to seem irrelevant or uncool or outdated, in service of those from certain Western cultures. And while the extent of their fear and subsequent expression of this fear, may be extreme in many of its forms, I find it increasingly tough to dismiss their fear as something totally irrational.
