The Celebral Cortex: The ever-growing Indian obsession with ?The Celebrity?

By Aditya Gupta

Given that the Indian Film Industry (the politically correct word to refer to ‘Bollywood’ these days) is the largest producer of films in the world it is to be expected that cinema would form an important cornerstone of our national culture. If anything we, as a nation, exceed expectations. We crane our necks over the shoulders of people far taller than us to catch a glimpse of an actor, we start hyperventilating if we spot a celebrity at the airport, we cause traffic jams and roadblocks is there’s an ‘outdoor shoot’ happening in the vicinity, we manage to weave films in even the most casual of conversations – in short we behave perfectly normally; like mortals would if they came in contact with the Gods.

Being star-struck is definitely not new for us – many would have heard tales of how girls would get married to photographs of Rajesh Khanna, how people prayed frenziedly for Amitabh Bachchan’s speedy recovery from a ruptured spleen due to an accident on the sets of Coolie or how Hema Malini was revered as the enchanting ‘Dream Girl’ by an army of adoring fans.

No, what is new is how our appetite for ‘all things Celeb’ has grown by leaps and bounds.  We seem to be catching up with the American way of life – that of being compulsively obsessed about the life and times of silverscreen and, thanks to the pantheon of endless daily soap operas which derive their increasingly clunky titles from the deep recesses of a Hindi dictionary, even smallscreen thespians.

On the demand side there has risen a race of famished consumers who hungrily fall upon and devour any scrap of information if it concerns a media personality. These are the people who swell the legions of Facebook fans or Twitter followers of actors or actresses (and usually insist on posting positively asinine comments); the people who sign up on their mobile phone networks to receive ‘Daily Entertainment Updates (only Rs. 30 a month)’; the people who make fan-art and fan-videos of their idols and fondly hope for instant YouTube fame and glamour.

Not that the supply side lags behind. Every wannabe worth his or her photoshopped portfolio is busy providing a glut of information about all the ‘fun shoots’, the ‘fun parties’ and the ‘fun life’ via a multimedia collage comprising of selfies, twitter feeds, interview soundbytes and behind-the-scenes pictures of shooting locations and cover shoots. Entire television channels have sprung up with the sole purpose of dissecting every single look, gesture or careless movement made by celebrities on camera in order to hypothesize about whom they are dating, whom they have jilted or whom they have been jilted by. Any news about celebrity marriages, divorces, live-in relationships, adoptions or surrogacy becomes the topic for next day’s editorials while their casual comments acquire headline status.

There is something vaguely unsavoury about the picture this conjures up – that of people willingly offering up their lives for public consumption and of people who devour such choice tidbits quite happily while retaining an almost Oliver Twist-ian hunger for ‘wanting more’. Indeed, the ‘Mystique of the Star’ seems like a thing of the past as people gain an increasing intimacy with the objects of their adulation – be it in matters of their diet, their selection of clothes, their favourite holiday destinations, their preferred eateries, their choice shopping destinations and what have you.

The problem with such a scenario is the blurring of lines which has happened – smartphones have all but ripped away the last veil of privacy for stars as they are now not safe even if they want to head out on incognito vacations, self-proclaimed Twitter humorists think nothing of composing astoundingly hurtful tweets which attack any celebrity who hasn’t found favour with them and we are finally witnessing the rise of the paparazzi – that dreaded entity which hounds Hollywood bigwigs and hasn’t spared the British royal family either – in India who seem to spend all available spare time in trying to get tell-tale shots and controversial quotes.

And it can subtly harm people too – making them long for unrealistically perfect body-types (from size zero to six-packs), urging them to spend unnecessarily on acquiring that jaw-dropping ‘look’ sported by their favourite in the recent film or creating a need within them to lead a ‘happening’ lifestyle so that they could cultivate ‘fans’ of their own (not a far cry if one looks at social media behaviours of so many of our naive contemporaries).

Maybe the answer lies in going back to an era where neither the stars gave such untrammelled access to their lives nor did the people spend so much time wrapped up in the lives of the rich and the famous.

One can’t help but feel that both – the celebrities and the fans – would be better off in such a scenario.