BENGALURU: I was reading a description from Russian author Boris Pasternak’s famed Doctor Zhivago (1957) It goes like this: “In the waiting room, ladies in a picturesque group surrounded a table with magazines. They stood, sat, or half reclined in the poses they saw in the pictures and, studying the models, discussed styles.” It paints a picture of bourgeois women obsessed with popular culture. I showed it to my daughter and she exclaimed, “People back then were not much different than those today!!”
Yes. We love our news channels and the chatter they offer. Over years, television journalism in Karnataka has contributed towards blurring the lines between the personal and the public. People have immersed themselves in the massive biddings of the media as well as the vibrant communication machinery of the social media platforms. Due to the pandemic scare, urban Kannadigas seem to have given in to the onslaught of visual information available to quench their inquisitiveness. We prefer scanning headlines, watching movies on OTT and web surfing. Passive social life has dimmed our desire to take part in cultural events. People, most of them devoted to celebrity news nowadays, are obsessed with people who have considerable mileage in fields such as movies, television, music, and sports. Unbound flow of information that an average Kannadiga is being fed has brought down the attention span.
Thanks to these developments, the language and content related to celebrities has undergone a massive change. British novelist J G Ballard has described this development as: “A kind of banalization of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup.” Clickbait headlines, pictures, sleazy language and ‘reveal-it-all’ stuff grab more eyeballs. While people a couple of decades ago used to throng movie shoots, musical events or games to watch their idol, now these people are just a click away on Instagram or Twitter. Celebrities are under immense pressure as well, with people watching every move they make. Living under a lens is never easy when cancel culture is trending. One hashtag can ruin someone’s career.
Makes one wonder about the kind of stress under which these celebrities must be operating. I was going through several interviews of Korean boyband BTS that recently gained international fame and its members choose their words carefully when asked about the downside of it all. A few of them are known to have crumbled several times. While people like to know every intimate detail about their idols, the same can put them in harm’s way.
What if we meet our idol and they turn out to be much different than what we had imagined them to be? I have been disappointed with several favourite authors of mine when unsavoury truths over their personal lives were revealed. I have wondered if I should stop reading them. “In this post-truth era, everything sounds like a conspiracy and you often tend to believe masked lies. Hence, consume what you truly enjoy and don’t worry too much,” advises my pragmatic sister.