New Delhi : A growing celebrity obsession now invades our lives like never before, turning virtual unknowns into media stars. A look at the giant celebrity machine and how it feeds on itself, and us.

Meet paris husain. Is she a reality show contestant, a calendar model or Bollywood’s new item girl whose act has played on YouTube 26,000 times? There’s something familiar about that name. Maybe she is just someone rich and designer-draped who parties a lot?

Paris Husain is all of this. An imported socialite as well as an urban Indian hostess with a branded bag, a Botoxed body and Husains on her walls. Paris Husain debates whether she should write a society column, tweet about the sexy chef at The Taj or save the girl child. Anything to bag a TV reality show. After her “learning experience”, she will tell us which soap to wash with and which soap to watch. She is a creature of our times; a fictional product of The Great Publicity Machine that mints celebrities, a dime a dozen.

Celebritocracy, celeb cult, celeb suffocation. Choose your term but there is no escaping the fact that India is afflicted with CCD — Compulsive Celebrity Disorder. CCD is a coinage quite like the celebrities who surround us 24×7. They launch neighbourhood gyms, dance at weddings of the rich and throw T-shirts at us in malls. We lap it all up, choosing gossip channels over daily news, Page 3 over Page 1, Rakhi Sawant over Irom Sharmila. We may call it a fad — superficial, consumerist and plain sensationalist but CCD pigeonholes us. It reflects India, 2011. In the words of Shohini Ghosh, professor and media scholar at Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University, “It has blurred the important distinction between short-span celebrityhood and fame, narrowed the lines between the public and the private, ordinary and extraordinary, fame and notoriety. Only in this era could Rahul Mahajan be considered a celebrity.”

Some argue that this democratisation has made the entertainment industry an equal opportunities playground, where the latest Item Girl is as well known as MS Dhoni. Columnist and filmmaker Fahad Samar says we have become voyeurs rather than real purveyors of celebrity. “It is an alarming trend constructed by the tenacity and self-aggrandisement of Mallika Sherawat and Rakhi Sawant, fed by the media.” Samar says that a barely-known model like Poonam Pandey riding on an unoriginal idea of stripping if the cricket team won (borrowed from a Brazilian football fan) indicates that our tabloid culture is a pastiche of the Western notion of celebrity. Ghosh would agree. “In post-globalisation India, there is an unprecedented focus on visuality, staging and display,” she says, adding that she sees an anxiety among people to be “seen” and in “circulation” all the time.

Samar also points that Bigg Boss contestants are a representation of who our celebs are. He has a point. Throw in some item girls, a model, out-of-work TV anchors, a screen villain known, the wife or a moll of a gangster-criminal, and a now-obligatory transgender or homosexual person and you have a group of almost-celebs. If we compare the most famous personalities five years ago to those now, there is a yawning difference in achievement. Among the most followed Indians on Twitter are a couple of politicians but the list is dominated by small celebs, Riteish Deshmukh included. It is the rise of the B-lister celebrity that mirrors the aspirations of India, in a hurry to arrive and announce that arrival in 140 words.

It wasn’t always like this. Television in the early Nineties, which meant Doordarshan, had no celebrities and an excessive engagement with gossip was considered flighty. But when Michael Jackson came to India in 1996, his signed pillow left behind at The Oberoi in Mumbai as well a visit to the loo in the Bal Thackeray household became newspaper headlines. Star News hired Ravina Raj Kohli, an entertainment programming person from Sony, as its CEO in the early 2000s, indicating that the Fox News format would unfold here too. But it was the first season of Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) in 2000 that introduced us to a new kind of celebrity ¯ an ordinary person who would become famous for winning a contest. Today, various slices of the middle class are in the hot seat, thrown up by a dozen variants of KBC on regional channels. In a continuum, this has spawned celebrity hierarchies, puffed and chuffed by The Great Celebrity Machine.

The celeb cult cannot be understood through lament. Behind it is The Machine. It comprises agents and publicists, managers, marketers, image gurus, tabloid editors, bodyguards, make-up artists and stylists. The Machine has thrown talent aside to carve celebrities on the basis of bags, shoes and wine lists. It has made being idiotic cool. “The funny thing is our definition of celebrity. Anyone makes it to Page Three more than twice is one,” says Nonita Kalra, editor-in-chief of Elle, who is strongly against the celebrity cult. This is exactly what American society observer Peter Scales remarked. “What Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan actually signify are behaviours that are not evidence of high self-esteem but a shallow idea of what it looks like.”

The Machine thrives on such behaviours, publicising them to manipulate our views. It has also created a new tyrant called “integrated PR”. This is the same beast that brings Shah Rukh Khan as a special guest on the finales of a string of reality TV shows. Wherever, whenever you surf, there is SRK promoting Ra.One while the channels promote their shows. What is termed as overexposure by some is seen as “the moment of a lifetime” by others.

Pooja Kumbhare, assistant manager, marketing and communications, Star Plus, who witnessed the shoot of Just Dance telecast last week, says, “Winning a reality show is no longer about the cash prize or the trophy. For the contestants, it is about shaking hands with SRK, matching a step with Hrithik Roshan, standing next to Deepika Padukone or Priyanka Chopra.” It is the The Machine at work making one kind of winner subservient to another.

Integrated PR also takes Ranbir Kapoor to Nizamuddin dargah in Delhi while promoting Rockstar, Katrina Kaif to cut ribbons at jewellery stores while promoting Mere Brother Ki Dulhan, Dharmendra to Chandigarh to woo Punjab. Even till a year back, integrated PR meant stars making reality TV appearances; now they also troop into fictional shows. Before Bodyguard released, Salman Khan was scripted into the fictional narrative of Na Aana Is Des Laado on Colors.

The Machine works laterally and vertically. Agents push for their client’s appearance at fashion events, on magazine covers, at a mall, an NGO, even a religious place; for brand endorsement, on TV punctuated with flying trips to Tier II cities. The star exhausted or bored must fall in step. Ask Archana Sadanand, publicist for Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Ashutosh Gowariker among others. “It is all about being in the media; stars understand the competition too well and agree to all promotional activities,” she says. Many saw Imran Khan’s filing of a PIL against underage drinking as a publicity ploy.

“October to June is controversy generation time. It is after June that the race towards reality shows begins, so if a celeb has a fresh controversy on the resume, her chances of bagging a show are higher,” says another publicist.

Pareina Thapar, a Delhi-based media consultant, agrees that many clients wish to announce their arrival through a celebrity. She puts responsibility on the media which only agrees to cover an event if a celeb attends. This is indeed the sharpest dichotomy of The Machine. “It’s almost absurd that this trend is a media creation to fulfil a role for the media only to be questioned by the media when it succeeds or exceeds beyond anyone’s expectations,” says Kalra. “I wonder what has led to this. Is it the fact that there are so many TV channels, newspapers and magazines and we need to fill content? Or are we lacking genuine heroes?

The Machine is also about money. Front row or party appearance, everything has a price. Consider this: a fashion designer or a jewellery store invites a celebrity who charges a fee unless his or her film is about to be released, in which case it is seen as a barter. If not, the fees are a few lakh rupees depending on the league the celebrity belongs to (nothing less than Rs 2 lakh, insiders say), a business class ticket, a few economy class tickets for assistants, a five-star hotel suite, a local make-up person and bodyguard, plus a luxury car. Thapar says celeb fees depend on the Clout Index: a combination of Twitter and Facebook following and publicity generated by the celeb’s former appearance. As sponsorships depend on star appearances, many designers and brands give in. “Everything is in lakhs,” says Thapar adding that you can’t even get a socialite for Rs 50,000. “Some stars are discerning about the brand fit but there are a quite a few who will do anything, wear anything for money,” she adds. So if you see a Bipasha Basu greeting you at a Ludhiana wedding, you know why she is there.

Which is why, cautions Ghosh, it is important to distance fame from celebrity. “Living the Great Indian Dream through only celebrity culture has many dangers. It eclipses all other realities that are less ‘shining’,” she says.

In other words, we should not confuse Paris with Husain.

(With inputs from Jaskiran Kapoor)

https://archive.indianexpress.com/news/the-celebrity-circus/857436/