If you are an Indian teenager and you spend a couple of hours on YouTube India each day, then you might already have a sense of what I am talking about. Yes!! It can’t be denied that we Indians are going crazy about ‘Reaction and Review Videos.’ People sitting in their rooms with a camera and a laptop are gaining our attention and our time, without any such creative content. Indians are finding new channels every day that react to or review Indian movies and online content. I, myself, am subscribed to at least a dozen such channels.
Starting from two Spanish girls reacting to Hrithik Roshan in their channel ‘Cross Cultural’ to an American ‘Jaby Koay’ reacting to AIB’s podcast with Shahrukh Khan, YouTube is becoming a reaction hub. Even the channels from across the border like ‘Pakistani Reactions’ or ‘Reaction Express’ are getting more and more hits each day. Some new channels from the United States, ‘I Show My Daughter Trailers’ and ‘Daniel and Gian Talk’ are bringing their kids on the channel to react on Indian songs or videos. Even United Kingdom is not far behind in this race with popular reaction channels like ‘Bert and Sykes’ and ‘Head Spread’.
One might ask, why are we getting so addicted to such content and how are some reaction videos garnering over a million views? Why are we so keen on other people watching our movies?
I feel a lot of it has to do with our age-old nexus to the sentence ‘Log Kya Kahenge?’ (What will people say?)
We Indians are in constant need of validation from others. In our culture, we are taught to care about what our relatives will think, what our friends will think, or what the neighbour will think. Most of our parents tend to compare us with that topper in the class or that cousin who is a genius, which often leads to, us forming, a perception that we might not be good enough. Thus we are in constant need for external validation.
Another quite valid reason that comes up when we talk about the success of channels like ‘Jaby Koay’ or ‘Pardesi Girl’ is the fact that they are becoming more of a two-way exchange for the Indian Web and Movie community. Smart Indian directors of lesser-known cinema want their movie to be reacted to by popular YouTube channels so that they get some publicity online and sell more tickets; the channels, on the other hand, profit from the views they are getting from the Indian audience.
The mobile revolution in India is, to an extent, a contributor towards the growth of such channels. The average Indian now has a mobile phone through which he or she can access the internet at fast speeds, which was not possible even a decade ago. People who have been YouTube surfers since the past decade will be able to recognise how drastically the surfing patterns have changed. Even five years ago the YouTube India trending feed was more or less filled with stand-up comedy routines or web series content; which has changed to local music videos, vines, random fact channels and religious content. It is evident that the common man has access to the internet, which, earlier, was the brooding place for India’s rich kids and the upper middle class.
How long will this obsession prevail? — is the big question.
I believe it has just started and with more and more Indians getting access to the internet, it is not going to end any time soon. The best part about all this is that foreigners who once had no idea about Indian cinema or the ones who had the perception that it is only about songs, dances and larger than life sets, are getting a taste of our good films. Anurag Kashyap is now popular among most of these reviewers and Nawazuddin Siddiqui has become the favourite of many such channels.
I just hope that with the growth of these channels we get more viewers around the world who are interested to watch our cinema, and more people keen to invest their time and money in our lower-budget films with amazing stories which weren’t able to fetch enough of an audience even a few years back.