A new generation of short-filmmakers are leveraging the power of YouTube to shine light on social behaviour.
Several videos that show how the Indian public reacts to socially unacceptable behaviour – be it harassing a girl in public or even disposing of litter right in front of two policemen – are engaging the online audience, who appreciate the videos by ‘liking’ them and also engage in conversations based on them.
Three such videos have gone viral in the past month.
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Two of them tackle the subject of sexual harassment: one posted by a group that calls itself ‘Troubleseeker Team’ focuses on the harassment faced by a girl from North East India; another video has been posted by a Chennai-based group called ‘Awkwardness unlimited’. Both the videos are tagged as “experiments” where the motive is to see how citizens react to situations unfolding in front of them. Both videos have garnered over 2 lakh views in the past three weeks.
A third more ‘radical’ video is from a group that calls itself ‘Clean Indian,’ in which those urinating in public places get hosed down by volunteers on a tanker lorry. In less than a week, the video has garnered two lakh views as well.
Bhavjoth Anand, the 23-year-old behind the ‘Awkwardness Unlimited’ team, says he created his YouTube channel originally to put out videos of the popular hidden camera pranks but recently moved into the category that YouTubers are calling ‘social experiments’. He gets his friends, mostly aspiring actors, theatre artists and models, to act out the scenarios in public.
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For the video ‘Harassing a girl in public – what would you do,’ Bhavjoth got his actors to enact a stalking scene. The girl in the video walks up to persons on the road and asks for help against the stalker who follows her. In one instance, the actor Arjun Chidambaram, a 24-year-old model and aspiring actor, while in character as “the stalker” nearly gets beaten up.
Bhavjoth explains: “He actually dodged the slap from the stranger and just evaded it at the right time. Immediately, we explained the situation to the stranger and other onlookers and also what we were trying to accomplish with the experiment. Some of them stayed back and had a long discussion with us on the topic, while others were just glad that it was an experiment.”
Far from being mere enthusiasts putting out such videos on YouTube, groups like ‘Troubleseeker Team’ and ‘Awkwardness Unlimited’ hope to build their audience online. “The whole YouTube culture still hasn’t peaked in India. We live in a world where the internet is taking over, and I feel it’s high time we started focussing on the entertainment industry on YouTube. The internet will soon make television obsolete.”
This brand of content from some of the channels seems to blend reality, entertainment and social cause.
But there are some caveats though. While the ‘social experiment’ videos by ‘Troubleseeker Team’ and ‘Awkwardness Unlimited’ seem to have gotten by and large positive comments, the guerrilla tactic employed by ‘Clean Indian’ in hosing down those who urinate in public has received several negative comments. Most feel that public humiliation would never cure anything.