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本文选自《经济学人》7月4日刊文章。受中印边界紧张关系的影响，印度政府屏蔽了TikTok（抖音的国际版）等中国应用软件，这给印度人民带来很大困扰，很多人因此失去生计。TikTok在印度拥有约120万内容创造者和1.2亿月活跃观众，这款软件承载了被边缘化的平民百姓的乐趣，与精英阶层创作的宝莱坞影视不同，TikTok上的创作更怪诞、朴实、多样，但他们反映出印度老百姓的真实需求。 
选文精讲 Fifteen seconds of fame 十五秒成名India’s ban on TikTok deprives the country of a favourite pastime印度对TikTok的禁令剥夺了这个国家最喜爱的消遣The app provided a window on the heartland
IN INDIA, AS elsewhere, TikTok looks like a cornucopia of bright and busy nonsense: an endless, blooming, buzzing confusion of shaky videos and cheap special effects, dispensed free of charge in 15-second doses. But time spent on the app—or on its Chinese-owned peers, all of them abruptly blocked by the government on June 29th—had a way of leading curious users far from the big cities and celebrities that typically define Indian pop culture. Not just TikTok, but also Helo, Likee and Bigo Live, were virtual highways to places no actual highways serve, in small-town and rural India. They revealed a part of the country that is changing rapidly.- cornucopia: 原意是“丰饶之角”，可以理解为“百宝箱、聚集地”
在印度，就像在其他地方一样，TikTok看起来就像一个欢快热闹的胡诌段子的聚集地：一个没完没了的、花样百出的、喧闹混乱的抖动视频和廉价特效，15秒免费分发。但是花在这款应用上的时间——或者花在中国其它应用软件上的时间却能引导那些远离大城市和名人(这些大城市和名人定义了印度的流行文化)的好奇用户，所有这些应用都在6月29日突然被政府屏蔽。不仅仅是TikTok，还有Helo, Likee和Bigo Live，他们是通向印度尚未通高速公路的小城镇和农村地区的虚拟高速公路，他们揭示了这个国家正在迅速变化的一部分。Thousands of people around India appear to have made a living recording and broadcasting short videos, mostly of shimmying, lip-synching and prat-falling, for millions of other Indians to whom they would otherwise have remained utterly obscure. TikTok had about 1.2m content creators and 120m monthly viewers. A striking proportion of the creators hailed from marginalised groups. A scrawny cloth-seller from a small city could start an overnight dance sensation; swaggering young Muslim comics found audiences as big as those of mainstream Hindi films; transsexual performers shared make-up tips with fans and gawkers; rural grannies taught cooking and a girl built a fanbase while lip-synching to a rap in Hmar, a language spoken in a few small patches of the sparsely populated north-east. A cottage industry of disdainful urbanites had sprung up on YouTube to mock the TikTok army, in classist and sometimes casteist terms. Yet an aspiring dietician from the state of Haryana could build a following of 11m on the strength of his resemblance to Virat Kohli, captain of India’s cricket team. Eventually Mr Kohli himself became his collaborator.- on the strength of: 基于、凭借
印度各地成千上万的人似乎以录制和播放短视频为生，这些短视频大多是跳舞、假唱和出丑的视频，对数以百万计的其他印度人来说，如果不是通过这种方式，他们就会完全默默无闻。TikTok拥有约120万内容创造者和1.2亿月度观众。创作者中有相当比例的人来自边缘群体。一个来自小城市的骨瘦如柴的卖衣服的人可以在一夜之间掀起一场跳舞狂潮；刚出道的年轻穆斯林喜剧演员找到了和主流印度电影一样多的观众；变性表演者与粉丝和看客们分享化妆技巧;农村老奶奶教烹饪，一个女孩用Hmar(一种在人口稀少的东北地区的一小片地区使用的语言)对口型唱着说唱，建立了粉丝群。Youtube上已经涌现出一批由轻蔑的都市人组成的家庭手工业，用阶级和种姓的用语嘲弄TikTok上的表演大军。然而，一位来自哈里亚纳邦的有抱负的营养师，凭借与印度板球队队长维拉特·科利长相相似的优势，拥有1100万名粉丝，最终，科利自己成为了他的合作者。
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