Maybe a ringtone from 2020 will tell us — a crazy 10-second piece about a time when there used to be these longish things called film songs, and ringtones used to be made from them, instead of the other way around.
The future? Ringtones would give birth to film songs and Oscars might move to India. The aam aadmi will be a walking multiplex, and a thousand micro-theatres will bloom.
In 2020, when lakhs of Indians will be stuck to their mobile slate-phones, hooked 24/7 to their 9G networks or other oxygen equivalents, life may be a bit different. The average cellphone would have turned into, at the very least, a talking-viewing-projecting personal device, and the average person, a walking multiplex. When a cheap theatre ticket would cost Rs 2,000 and a bucket of popcorn half of that, would the young be still as excited to go to the nearby multiplex?
Or would they prefer watching films on their unrolled slate-phones as they travel to college and back? When the urge to watch a movie on the “big screen” strikes them, would they download the movie in seconds and simply project it on the walls and save themselves a lot of money?
Would there be hundreds of micro-theatres across each city, with one-person entrepreneurs projecting movies, to be watched for an entry fee which would be a fraction of what a multiplex would charge? Would each Friday movie see a simultaneous release on thousands of horribly expensive multiplex screens, lakhs of cheaper micro-screens, personal devices, and thousands of digital TV channels? Would pirates be in trouble, left with no option but to join content creators? What kind of films would they produce? Or would still choose to walk the wild side, producing easier, inexpensive and unregulated entertainment, like porn? Would porn explode? (It already has, but then we are nice Indians. How would we know?) Would today’s multiplex chains have spread to the farthest corners of India, and the word ‘combo’ become valid in all Indian languages?
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/sheila-is-just-a-ringtone/731243/1
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