What in the name of the geist is happening?

I was reading on DailyO what Rohan Sippy had written in "My Deepika Padukone video in another era" and I stumbled across the word "zeitgeist" and I didn't know what it meant. So I did what every net savvy, Google struck, middle aged person does - I typed zeitgeist and waited for magic to unfold.

The results were instantaneous, at the blink of an eye and before one could say Zeus - Google came up with about 1,51,00,000 results in zero point two four seconds. My "dignitas" was properly kicked in the backside because I had been delusional in the belief that I was averagely well informed. The truth, though not zeitgeist yet, is certainly out there. I am not well enough informed. Today, or rather that precise instant, when the illusive yet important word opened its secret to me, I have christened - My zeitgeist moment. It is that definitive demarcation that would now forever divide who I had been before and who I now am.

Enough blabbering, onward with unravelling the mystery of zeitgeist…

Zeitgeist - Wikipedia through Google informed me - is the intellectual fashion or dominant school of thought that typifies and influences the culture of a particular period in time.

I realised the favour I had been unwittingly bestowed. What an appropriate word to learn in these times when zeitgeist is fiercely ascendant. Though zeitgeist is because it is rampant I feel it is now more influential and more suppressive of non-zeitgeist.

Does that sound complicated? Let me simplify. Zeitgeist in 2015 dictates the following:

1. Making of or/and eating beef is detrimental to the health of cows.
2. Tobacco wrapped in leaf is lesser in quantity and less harmful than bigger quantities of tobacco wrapped in paper.
3. Police to control terror, can beat the "truth" out before presenting it as "evidence" in court.
4. Indian women are darker than white women.
5. A non-investigative, socially relevant, documentary film on a three-year-old incident can be harmful to the biggest democracy in the world.
6. Using social media to criticise those who have the power to order your arrest can lead to your arrest.
7. Cleanliness is when the prime minister tells you to clean your front yard.

So zeitgeist is a big word and as society becomes more regressive in the shade of pliant democracy the aesthetics and morality of the masses become zeitgeist. The masses by definition are numerous and form the base of any pyramid and the aberration is the pinnacle that defines the height and majesty of the entire structure giving it its character. In the case of a society or nation this totality is its "volksgeist".

Today with the base taking over, as happens when either the "left" or the "right" dominates, the zeitgeist is at odds with the volksgeist of India... A volksgeist that had been distilled out of intellectual striving and forged in the furnace of history to give it its identity. A national character that went beyond the petty demands of the lowest common denominator is today being inexorably redefined.

But here is my cynical advice - if you don't like the zeitgeist then just shut up and bear it. Bear it with the false smile that I have been practising in the privacy of my bathroom… With the mirror my only witness.