On the DaVinci Bandwagon

I havent read The Da Vinci Code, yea i know in today's age that is a sacrilege, but I did read Angels and Demons (before Da Vinci Code came out) and the best compliment I could get Dan Brown at that time was that hes a wannabe Umberto Eco, though leagues and mega-miles behind him. So I gave TDVC a miss, and suddenly there was a huge ruckus all over the world. Everybody in the english reading and speaking world was talking about this book. Even the poor Sallingers and the Hellers and the Huxleys and the Kerouacs combined did not get as much press and media footage as Dan got.

But I continued to give TDVC a miss, result of some kind of a mental block on my part, and instead focussed on the Deception Point, another pre TDVC Dan Brown work. And till this day, afer almost an year now, I still have a good 50 pages of that book to read.

An interesting common denominator that all of Dan's work share is the following: all his books are publicized as From the author of TDVC. Angels and Demons' tagline goes like this Before the DaVinci Code Langdon faced the Angels and Demons. It is as if the publishers have realized that they can flood the market with Dan's trash and the people wil lap it up as long as the DaVinci word is visible on 20 sized gothic font on the cover. Now that surely counts for shrewd market research, but gets a huge zero for literary content. Have you heard of the Chrome yellow been publicized as from the author of the Brave New world??

And now Hollywood is about to do what it does best. Convert a potboiler into a money minting movie. And I know they are excellent at it. But what I fail to fathom though, is why for Pete's sake is the Vatican and other churches and Christian organizations and religious groups and what not leaking press releases at an astronomical rate as to how this movie might reshape the christian belief. The pope has even set up a panel to rebut the TDVC story.

Guys, fathers, sisters, whatever, please, you over-estimate us, us --the present teeming mass of humanity . At our best, we are a society that lack any kind of long term sensibility, we suffer from selective amnesia, we are a seeker of fads, we like thinking of books and movies as some fashion label that we can proudly flaunt during summer and move onto a different label once summer is gone, and most importantly we arent into re-shaping anything. The thing we do best is sit in front of our 36" tv sets or a DTS equipped multiplex and mutter to our girfriends/wives sitting next to us with that all-knowing tone "The world is going to the dogs" and once the show gets over we try and devise a plan to get laid for the night. And that is why the hit count on this blog rises to an astronomical number whenever a sex post comes on, while this languishes in solitairy isolation.

Trust me father pope we dont have any sensibility left to re-shape, what we have is the penchant to ride any hyped bandwagon properly packaged and placed in front of our greedy eyes.