6 minutes reading time
I wasn't planning to think about this. I was just somewhere, and there were kids, and the TV was on.
Chota Bheem. Tamil dubbed. The one where a small boy in some ancient-looking village somehow holds the entire political and military fate of his kingdom together by eating laddus. Sugar-dense, calorie-bomb laddus. That's the power source. That's the writing team's entire metaphysical framework — the boy eats a round sweet, his biceps inflate, and he punches the problem until it stops being a problem.
I sat there for maybe three minutes. Couldn't do more.
The thing is, I used to watch Ben 10 when I was young. And Dexter's Lab, which is basically just slapstick comedy — not high literature — but even the slapstick had structure. Dexter's sister broke something, Dexter tried to fix it with science, the fix went wrong in a specific and internally consistent way. You could follow the logic. There was logic to follow. Ben 10 had lore, consequence, alien biology that had actual rules. Ben's powers didn't scale with how many samosas he ate.
The laddu thing is not just lazy writing. It's the signal. It tells you what assumption the writers made about the audience before they typed a single word: these kids won't notice, and they don't deserve better.
And in most cases, they don't. Not because the kids are stupid. But because nobody ever asked them to be otherwise.
Here's the thing about attention spans, about the tolerance for ambiguity, about what feels "normal" in a story — these aren't fixed features of a person. They get trained. Years of consuming content that follows the exact same arc — hero eats thing, hero gets power, hero beats villain, reset — and you're not just watching a show anymore. You're being drilled. Your brain is learning what a story is, what a resolution feels like, what it means for something to make sense.
And then you grow up.
And you watch Vaarisu. And it makes complete sense to you, because the hero does the things a hero does and everyone cheers and the villain falls and the music swells and you are satisfied. No ambiguity. No cost. No actual human beings in the room.
You can't watch Virumaandi after that. Not really. Not the way it's meant to be watched. The structure is wrong. The hero does bad things. The ending isn't clean. The story refuses to tell you who to cheer for. Your brain — conditioned, trained, reward-circuit fully calibrated to laddus — sits there waiting for the punch. And the punch never comes the way you want it.
So you call it slow. You call it boring. You call it "arty nonsense."
Anbe Sivam tanked at the box office. You already know this. A film about love, solidarity, and what it means to be human, with Kamal Haasan doing arguably some of his finest work — and it bombed. And the same year, or thereabouts, complete garbage made money. That's not a coincidence. That's the feedback loop completing its cycle.
There's a familiar defense at this point, always. Someone will say: correlation isn't causation. People are shaped by so much more than the shows they watched at age six. Education, family, peers, class, all of it.
Sure. Fine. Nobody's saying Chota Bheem directly causes Bigg Boss fandom. That's not how conditioning works anyway. It's not a single input. It's an ecosystem — years of low cognitive load content, families that treat TV as a babysitter rather than anything worth discussing, schools that don't teach critical thinking, a media industry that observes "this is what people watch" and makes more of it.
The producers see ratings. They make more of what gets ratings. The kids grow up, and the adults they become also want the comfortable, familiar, brainless thing. The producers observe that too. The loop is not broken. The loop is business as usual.
What actually bothers me about Motu Patlu — and I've only seen fragments, I want to be clear, because I have some capacity for self-preservation — is that even the comedy doesn't trust the audience. Every joke is telegraphed. Every punch line is underlined. The sound effect hits before the reaction shot in case you didn't know it was funny yet. It's not just writing that assumes the kids are dumb. It's pacing that assumes they cannot infer anything. That cannot tell when something has happened unless they're told.
South Park from Episode 1. That show does not explain itself. It does not hold your hand. It is frequently absurd, sometimes vile, and the satire works because it trusts that you are following along. You are not following along when you're seven, probably. But the point is the default assumption. The posture. We are speaking to people who can think, as opposed to we are managing the attention of organisms.
That posture matters. It shapes what the work becomes.
There's something Goya understood — he painted it in 1799, so he wasn't thinking about Motu Patlu — but he understood it: when reason sleeps, monsters emerge. Not scary monsters. Comfortable ones. The kind you stop noticing because they've always been there, in the background, part of the furniture.
The monsters in this case are adults who cannot sit with a morally ambiguous scene, who need the music to tell them how to feel, who find intellectual patience physically uncomfortable. They didn't choose to be this way. The content chose for them, early and often, while their parents were busy and the TV was on.
I'm not standing outside this either, to be clear. I have my own damage. There's stuff I reach for when I'm tired that I'm not proud of. The difference is I know what it is when I'm doing it.
That's the only meaningful distinction I can locate. Not never watching trash, because everyone watches trash. But knowing you're watching trash. That requires having seen something that isn't.
And that requires someone having assumed, at least once, that you were worth the effort.
Most Indian kids' TV never made that assumption. And here we are.