Right now, it doesn't matter if you don't have an opinion on Israel's bombardment of Lebanon or whether you believe in Dr Manmohan Singh as prime minister. You have to know where you stand on Karan Johar's cotton-candy take on infidelity,
Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna. The subject isn't new even in Hindi cinema: off the top of my head, I can name
Guide, Silsila, Masoom, Yeh Nazdeekiyan, Arth, Griha Pravesh, Aastha, Ek Hi Bhool, even
Paheli....
And yet, the media began to behave as if the film had actually investigated marriage as a serious text instead of a way of showing pretty people doing petty things against a backdrop of extreme privilege.
| | | | TV channels are tying up with films. Soon, editorial control will be offered up for access to stars. | | | | |
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For that is what Karan Johar's cinema is about but you'd think he was actually making something important and meaningful. So meaningful that NDTV literally couldn't stop talking about it.
But then, this is the way it is going to be from now on. Watch Barkha Dutt talking about remakes on
We the People, when the remade
Don (Shahrukh-Priyanka-Kareena) comes out. For you see, NDTV has managed to tie up with Farhan Akhtar for that one and he might just give them a little spot in which some extra holds up a mike saying NDTV. Industry sources say that CNN-IBN has tied up with
Jaan-e-mann (Salman-Akshay-Preity), so we will have Rajdeep Sardesai on love triangles, perhaps? No one knows which way J.P. Dutta will jump when his version of
Umrao Jaan (at Kargil, perhaps?) is released but someone will snap up this one since it has Aishwarya, Abhishek and Sunil Shetty and then we'll have indepth interviews with the designer of the costume and the zari workers who slogged for hours....
They tie up. Nothing wrong with that, is there?
Well, not really, not unless we're worried about the nature of journalism, even film journalism, which Khalid Mohammed once described to me as being tantamount to having "third class citizenship in the nation of the media". It is not unusual for a television channel to commit to a thousand spots, some of which are promos, but some of which are also editorial. So while everyone goes around saying that the
Times of India pioneered the sellout of journalism to the interests of the bottomline, watch while the television channels offer up their editorial control for access to the stars.
"You see," says a straight-talking critic from one channel, "the industry is savvy now. They take along another crew to shoot the crew so that they have material for those 'Making ofs'. Those are huge. A channel can play them and look like they were there and if you think viewers are going to feel a bit of deja vu, they add a little of their own masala, a few interviews with the editor or the cameraman to make it look different. Or they give you access to the set and let you shoot some stuff with them. That kind of thing."
But
KANK was the textbook case. It generated hype on its own because it was a Karan Johar film and there is something so unbearably glossy that all the little girls will go and spend the commute home asking each other who would stray if she were married to Shahrukh/Abhishek (depending on whether the little girl in question likes her men camp or clumsy). But the media was on the same bus. You couldn't turn around without a journalist of stature having a magisterial say about the problem of marital infidelity, the unbearable lightness of cotton-candy cinema and other such earth-shattering topics.
At this year's Osian Cinefan, the French were preening themselves on how they treated cinema as a cultural event and how a new film would sometimes be given three pages in
Le Monde. Then Hubert Niogret, also French, pointed out that while the paper would give a film three pages, they would give it this kind of saturation coverage even if their critic thought it a bad film.
That's what we've done here. We've taken our star worship to its natural conclusion. In our desperate desire to know anything about them, everything about them, we've allowed our media to turn into panders for the producers. The next time we watch a saccharine Simi or a cosy Karan, we should know what we've done. We've thrown out the baby and now we've got into the bubble bath. Bring on the froth....
(Jerry Pinto is the author of
Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb.)