79. The fake beauty of winged creatures

The Cottingley Fairies hoax

Even today if you give any child a pair of crayons to draw fairies, without fail winged creatures in different hues will erupt on the drawing sheet. Despite fairies being mythical creatures, these are imprinted on the human mind as omniscient and omnipresent beings!  Perhaps the reason for this belief has to do with us being a storytelling animal, thinking in stories rather than hard facts. Our emerging virtual world has only amplified and consolidated our interest in fakes. 

I recall how the Irish story collector Eddie Lenihan was chided by a woman a decade ago for broadcasting his beliefs about fairies, and the gentleman had defended himself by saying that everyone believed in God although no one had ever seen him. Ironically, not only fairies but witches and ghosts too have lived through times, with as many contesting their so-called existence. The famed images of ‘Cottingley Fairies’, the fake photographs that shook the world in 1917, could fetch £20,000 a century later in 2018 is testimony to their unceasing popularity in literature, and in arts.      

Shot in the village of Cottingley in Yorkshire, this famous picture shows a teenage girl looking at the camera as dancing fairies with butterfly wings appear in the foreground. Claiming to have found the winged creatures gamboling near their home, Elsie Wright, 16, and her 9-year old cousin Frances Griffiths could convince the world, including the great rationalist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, with indelible proof of the existence of the supernatural beings. Although the fairies in the pictures looked anything but fake, it took some sixty years before the myth was finally busted. 

Despite fairies being the stuff of fancy, whimsy, and childhood,  researchers have drawn fresh perspectives on the cultural meanings of the unceasing fairy-belief. If Sir Doyle could create the literary myth named Sherlock Holmes, Elsie and Francis complimented it with their unforgettable icon, the Cottingley Fairies. It may seem a strange coincidence but the desire to be taken in by faith of some kind during a war-ravaged period could have been the innate cultural compulsion.    

But why would such a notion persist in the present times? One would imagine that the technological revolution across the hundred years between 1917 and 2017 would have buried the numinous otherness of the fairies for good. Conversely, these continue to persist not only in English, Scottish, or Irish imagination but are part of folklore literally across every continent in the world. Every culture has its stories of fairies or nature spirits, from Ireland to China, South Africa to India, and Canada to Australia. 

We live in the times wherein what the majority believes in becomes the truth by default. Should then it matter whether or not fairies are fake when the world has accepted fake as the new real. Hasn’t the world long believed Kardashians to be real without anybody watching them? Should then the belief in fairies not be reinvented to make sense in the present? The belief in fairies has the power to respiritualize nature, much like what the nature spirits, the Navi, demonstrated in James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar. If faith in fake can have a real impact, let the fairies prevail. 

First published in The Hindu on Jan 9, 2022. 

50. Social beverage of our times

German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's 19th century remarks 'people never lie as much during a war or before an election' have come to life in recent times. Perhaps, it is the most convenient thing to do, and more so in a situation wherein a war (or a warlike situation) precedes elections! How does one fake the facts holds the key? With 'lie' having outlived its relevance, both as a noun and a verb, its less offensive and universally acceptable avatar - fake - has replaced it. In fact, fake is a potent currency in the market which earns rich dividends in a short time as it travels faster than the speed of light.

A lie may need to be told often enough times to become the truth, but fake has become a one-time wonder. You release it once, and what returns to your inbox is nothing but fake coated in the guise of the truth. It will earn you mass following on Twitter, help you receive unprecedented number of likes on Facebook, and inundate you with innumerable compliments on WhatsApp. You begin to wonder if the world was waiting out their to lap it up, and give it a cooperative legitimacy. I am beginning to learn that fake is fast becoming euphemism for instant fame! Is it the new normal lurking around?            

Had Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn been alive he would have rephrased his remarks by replacing lie with fake to read: 'fake has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the state'. To rally along fake is considered an act of cooperation, that politicians use for projecting so-called public good in the guise of justifying vested interests/entrenched violence. Far from being challenged, the enduring qualities of fake engage the social media and the public like never before. Like milk, the more you churn it the better it is. Utterly butterly fake-cious!

I don't know if it worries you that fake is fast gaining public recognition, as an essential aspect of our collective existence. George Bush Jr. must be credited for setting up the stage for it. By virtue of having stayed in the White House for almost a decade, the former US President had inadvertently become fond of telling white lies. Else, he could not have convinced the world that there were 'weapons of mass destruction' hidden in Iraq? The fact remains that no such weapons were ever found. The shocking truth is that it led to writing a new history, rather a bloody history, in the middle-east on a rather fake edifice.  

One problem with fake news is that it works, and the message that 'fake it till you make it' is loud and clear. I checked with my intellectual buddies who are as much awe-struck as anybody else is. On the other hand, psycho-analysts are still juggling on their diagnosis, almost close to arguing that fake is but an evolved form of lie which has got a short-time therapeutic value too. Nor surprise, for every thing real there is an equivalent fake too! Not only are goods fake, but fake facts are being produced too. 

My conclusion on the subject is that we have come a along way - it could easily be called a 'fake yug'. While truth could be 'half-truth' or even a 'quarter', fake is the new truth that we may have to live with for the rest of our lives. I hope I am not too early with my judgement, but as of now fake seems essential to humanity but not truth. While truth is desirable, fake is inevitable! 

Isn't it a social beverage that most of us are getting addicted to?

First published in Deccan Herald, issue dated July 25, 2019.