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Fifteen seconds of fame
India’s ban on TikTok deprives the country of a favourite pastime
The app provided a window on the heartland
（for English-learning use only）
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 *** all-town and rural India. They revealed a part of the country that is changing rapidly.
A cornucopia of things is a large number of different things. (N-SING) 丰盛;丰富;丰饶
...a cornucopia of fruits...
丰盛的水果
dispense-V
1. ~ sth (to *** ) 分配；分发
The machine dispenses a range of drinks and snacks.
这台机器发售各种饮料和小吃。
2. ~ sth (to *** ) (formal) 施与，提供（尤指服务）
The organization dispenses free health care to the poor.
这个机构为穷人提供免费医疗。
to dispense justice/advice
3. 配（药）；发（药）
to dispense a prescription
按处方配药
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 *** all 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 *** all 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.
lip-synch
假唱
pratfall-N 出丑；洋相
Theyre waiting for the poor little rich girl to take a pratfall.
他们等着瞧那个可怜的富家小姐出丑。
scrawny-ADJ (disapproving) (of people or animals 人或动物) very thin in a way that is not attractive 干瘦的；瘦巴巴的
gawk-V ~ (at *** /sth) (informal) 无礼地瞪眼看；呆头呆脑地盯着
Tens of thousands came to gawk.
成千上万的人赶来看热闹。
文中 gawker 指看热闹的人
Amit Varma, a podcaster from Mumbai who ran an online course about TikTok, puts the app’s success down to timing. It arrived in 2017, just after Reliance Industries, a huge conglomerate, had launched Jio, a 4G telecoms operation which radically reduced the cost of mobile data. Instead of a gigabyte a month, *** artphone users suddenly had a gigabyte a day to play with. Cheaper Chinese handsets, meanwhile, made owning a *** artphone more affordable.
“This is not content made by clueless elites,” Mr Varma says. “In Bollywood a few big shots run the whole thing. But they have outdated ideas about what people want.” What they really want, if TikTok’s algorithms had it right, is weirder, homelier and more varied material than they could find on television, YouTube, Instagram or any of the English-first apps favoured by wealthy urbanites. Bidding fans farewell on the evening of June 30th, one TikTok star after another urged them to regroup on one or another of those apps, or on one of the close to 100 Indian copycats that have sprung up.
clueless-V (informal,disapproving) very stupid; not able to understand or to do sth 很愚蠢的；（对某事）不懂的，无能的
Hes completely clueless about computers.
他对计算机一窍不通。
If you bid someone farewell, you say goodbye to them.
If you bid them goodnight, you say goodnight to them.
道（别、晚安等）
She bade farewell to her son...
她和儿子道了别。
copycat
盲目模仿者
文章来源：经济学人
图片来源：网络
