Paparazzi

AMRITA MUKHERJEE / TNN / Feb 19, 2006, 21:05 IST

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If fraudulence is the crime, publicity is the means by which the caper is brought off. Page 3, we say, has moved to Page 1.

If fraudulence is the crime, publicity is the means by which the caper is brought off. Page 3, we say, has moved to Page 1.
Businessman Vikram Chatwal's wedding to be attended by the Clintons. Valentine's Day is celebrated more than Diwali. Abhishek-Aishwarya's kundlis being sent to a swamiji to check if their match would work out.
In the last one week these are the stories that have come out on Page 1 and more often than not readers are voyeuristically lapping it up, making it the topic of drawing room conversations.
Celebrity at this moment is pandemic, and it's spreading fast like the virus. Television like the retroviral provides celebrity dance contests, celebrities take part in reality shows, perfumes carry the names not merely of designers but of actors and singers.

Without celebrities, whole sections of the Fourth Estate would have to fold up. So pervasive has celebrity become in contemporary life that one now begins to hear a good deal about a phenomenon known as the Culture of Celebrity.
'Culture' no longer stands in most people's minds for that whole congeries of institutions, relations, kinship patterns, linguistic forms, and the rest for which the early anthropologists meant it to stand.

Words, unlike disciplined soldiers, refuse to remain in place and take orders. They insist on being unruly, even picking up all sorts of slippery and even shady meanings.
As for 'celebrity,' the standard definition is no longer the dictionary one.
The celebrity is now a person who is well-known for his wellknownness, which is improved in its frequently misquoted form as a celebrity famous for being famous or infamous as the case maybe, often enjoying 15 minutes of Warholian fame.
But to say that a celebrity is someone well-known for being well-known, though clever enough, doesn't quite cover it. Not that there is a shortage of such people who seem to be known only for their wellknownness.
Many moons ago, scribes used to refer to royalty as 'face cards'; today celebrities are perhaps best thought of as bold faces, for as such do their names often appear bold face.
That explains why we relate to a Cameron Diaz better than Condoleezza Rice or Sushmita Sen better than a Sushma Swaraj.
Actor June who has been a part and parcel of Page 3 since its birth pangs in Kolkata, says, "We can look at it as a recognition of the glamour world."
An actor on conditions of anonymity says, "If you wear a skimpy outfit and boogey your blues away in a disco you make it to Page 3 headlines. But it takes a lot more to graduate to Page 1.
Because if you do not have something more substance in you (even if it's substance abuse) people will not be interested to read about you.
But there is no denying the fact that a case of sexual harassment in Bollywood or a sting operation on some ageing star, generate more interest."
Drawing from her own experience actor Raveena Tandon says, "It was embarrassing to see my dog's photograph on Page 1 when he got lost.
But it helped in the search. It's bashful if you end up on the Page 1 for all the wrong reasons." Love them, hate them but you just can't ignore them.

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