My wife and I accomplished this by the way but it was tough вЂ¦ The perversion of reality has often rampant consumerism at heart вЂ“ try and talk a kid out of buying an Elsa doll. I doubt it very much that my seven year old daughter would even wish to change the DisneyвЂ™s Elsa for the next ten years at leastвЂ¦ Disney found it difficult to work with this symbol and found it easy to reduce her to an amiable girl-child, who has been misunderstood and who is restless because of this inner turmoil. The original fairy tale version depicts the Snow Princess as cold-hearted, neutral, and at times villainous.

The Indian physique is worked with through distortion and substitution.ДЄnother example that I would like to talk about is Elsa вЂ“ the Disney version of the Snow Princess, famously depicted in the film Frozen, and which has captured the imagination of kids, especially young girls worldwide. No Indian models are used! These alien symbols promising the prospect a developing a great body (by occidental standards) and an enriching experience of fitness are already in the stage 2 of the precession of the simulacra. Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.ДЇor example, have you discerned how gymnasiums in India use symbols to peddle their offerings вЂ“ whether it is the humble gym across the street (the traditional akhara) or the luxurious gym cum spa in a five star hotel вЂ“ the array of posters, drawings, images, and pictures placed outside and inside are most likely to display the golden haired white-skinned lean women or the muscular pumped up dark skinned man. This is where we believe that the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which ' masks and denatures' reality as an 'evil appearance-it is of the order of maleficence'. Stage 2: In the second stage we experience a вЂperversion of realityвЂ™.Not many examples come to my mind beyond a 3D image or a map today. Stage 1: In this stage, the symbol or the sign is a faithful image/copy where we believe, and it may even be correct, that a sign is a ' reflection of a profound reality' that we encounter.

This precession was very useful for my understanding: It took me some time to understand Simulacra, but I was more fascinated by his confident claim that the human society has become replete and saturated with symbols and signs (simulacra) and that all meanings today were being rendered meaningless by these being infinitely mutable and thrown at us.Д«audrillard explains this saturation process of symbols and signs, thus creating simulacra through a four-stage evolution (for lack of better words) - a phenomenon he termed as the 'precession of simulacra'. Baudrillard defined Simulacra in 1981 as вЂњвЂ¦ copies that depict things that either had no original to begin with, or that no longer have an originalвЂ¦вЂќ It was almost two decades ago, I had read Jean Baudrillard вЂ“ a French post-modernist, who wrote about hyper-reality in his epic work вЂ“ Simulacra and Simulation.

But then an old memory cropped up in my head, a spoiler alert of sorts, countering this amazement like an aching knee on a lovely walk вЂ“ a memory of having read about Disneyland from Jean BaudrillardвЂ™s lens. As a professional, I was in awe of human creativity, craftsmanship, and engineering feats that had created the park, impressed by how the Disneyland customer was managed at all interfaces, and truly amazed by the systems and infrastructure created and sustained to manage huge traffic. I cannot deny that I had fun that day вЂ“ I did. They were stoked to no end as the amusement park reinforced their own fantasies - driven by what they have encountered in movies, television, comic books, and hopefully some aspects of their own individual imagination.Д«ut I was left with mixed feelings and questions as I trudged back to a grimmer reality, leaving behind screaming ecstatic kids, excited adults relentlessly flashing their selfie-sticks amidst that вЂdramaticвЂ™ music buzzing in my ears the whole day - permeating all and sundry across the park. The kids had great fun of course вЂ¦ they were more than willing to walk miles and patiently wait in long queues to encounter Mickey, Elsa (originally the Snow Queen), games, rides et al.

All dialogye simulacra 2