Did you know Bigg Boss was inspired by this famous author's book?Jan 23(AZINS) For the last 100 days, I’ve been subjected to the popular reality show called Bigg Boss in a gruesome re-enactment of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. While I’ve stayed away from it with a fastidiousness as strong as Narendra Modi's when he refrains from tweeting about uncomfortable stuff, this year I’ve been forced to listen to the contestants of the show screech inanities at one another because my colleagues watch it on the opposite end of my work desk. Like the people chained in caves who see only shadows throughout and ponder if it’s reality, I’ve been forced to listen to the contestants (Mandana, though hot, has such a screechy voice that it’s a cruel and unusual punishment) complain, shout and fight.

Now I wondered if the people watching the show (and a lot of people do, as our traffic numbers suggest), know which author’s greatest work inspired the concept of shutting a bunch of people in a house where their every move is monitored.

I asked a young colleague if he knew the name of the author and he guessed “Chetan Bhagat”, which perhaps is a testament to Mr. Bhagat’s popularity among this generation. The answer, sadly, isn’t Mr, Bhagat but George Orwell, the master of dystopia who was born in Motihari, Bihar in British India. A popular journalist and author, Orwell’s greatest works include 1984 and Animal Farm.

While Animal Farm’s plot (which was inspired by Soviet Russia) seems to have been copied by the Aam Aadmi Party, 1984 was the inspiration for subsequent authoritarian regimes and the format of most popular reality shows.

But first, who was George Orwell?

For the uninitiated, George Orwell was one of the greatest authors to walk the face of the earth and among his greatest novels was Ninety Eighty-Four. Published in 1949, the novel imagined a world where democracy was destroyed and the government was run by a shadowy figure called Big Brother who penetrated every single pore of everyone’s lives. In the book's dystopian world, people were told what to eat, when to sleep, when to exercise, what to read and even what to think, not unlike the Bigg Boss house.

Interestingly, the original show format was called Big Brother and originated in the Netherlands where contestants were first forced to stay together in one house for a hundred days. CBS bought the rights to that show from the Dutch broadcasters before airing it in the US. This actually landed them in a lawsuit for copyright and trademark infringement which was filed by George Orwell’s estate. The case was settled out of court.

This wasn’t the first time people had ripped off George Orwell. In fact, Steve Jobs’ Apple was also accused of using aspects of the novel in their historic 1984 commercial for the Mac, which was hailed as a watershed moment in advertising. However, the Orwell Estate sent a cease and deist letter to Apple and the ad never aired on TV after that.

To be fair, CBS and Apple aren’t completely at fault because such was the popularity of Orwell’s work that many of the terms and concepts used in the novel are now used in common parlance. Terms like the big brother, doublethink, newspeak, telescreen (this was before televisions were ubiquitous) and memory hole are oft-used terms now.

What would George Orwell have made of Bigg Brother and such reality shows?

There's no denying that George had predicted this.

In the novel, a group of people made up of 85% of the population was called proles (based on term 'proletariat' which is the term used in Marxism to describe the ‘working class’). These people were never part of the power structure and were distracted by trivial things such as entertainment, songs, novels and even porn, and exhibited an inability to revolt because they had no need to as long as they were distracted. If Orwell were alive today, he would’ve considered much of that we hold dear, from Twitter to reality shows to music to porn, simple distractions to keep the mindless busy.

In fact, Orwell’s 1984 was often compared to Huxley’s Brave New World to ascertain which fate was more in tune with reality. Orwell feared that the government would try to ban books, Huxley feared that there would be no need to ban books.

The best comparison between the two was done by social critic Neil Postman who wrote: ‘What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.’

To be fair, despite the notion that the trivial does go viral, there's also the internet, whose power no mind, not even those as brilliant as Orwell or Huxley could've imagined. While it does help us share trivial nonsense faster, it has also heralded a new age where everyone, including powerful governments, are accountable for their action. And that is why 1984 or Brave New World's grim future, will never, ever become a reality!