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Malavika’s Mumbaistan: Secret Diary Of A Bollywood Reporter
Dear Diary,
Dear Diary,
The thing about Bollywood is just how blatantly everyone is doing it.
Hunky heroes and their curvaceous GFs, hit producers, star wives and kids and celebrated script-writers and directors, you name it and they’re all doing it.
When I look around me, I cannot think of one person among the new lot in the industry who has not done it, at some point or the other.
Who hasn’t heard of the starlet who was doing it on a PJ on her way to Cannes last year?
Or the character actor who does it on his sets between shots? Or the producer who is even known to do it during script narrations?
To say that it is rampant in Bollywood would not be an overstatement.
Every one you know and their great aunt is doing it. On couches and in groups, at recordings and launches, on their way to premieres and parties. In fact, no sooner have they entered the party and greeted their host, then they are up to their favourite past time and not a minute too soon it seems, doing it.
You would think that they would show a modicum of embarrassment or at least respect for other guests, especially the elders present, but no, nothing stops them, not social mores nor public etiquette. It is almost as if they could not exist without doing it and that their entire existence depends on it.
Often, we have wondered why they just do not sit at home and do it in the privacy of their own rooms, instead of making a public spectacle of themselves. Perhaps, this is a matter for social scientists to deliberate on: does the company of their colleagues and peers encourage them in this alarming and unhealthy behaviour? Is it more rampant in social settings and in the later hours of the evening? What craven need does doing it satisfy? What accounts for the alarming increase in the frequency of it? All this should be examined so that some cures and solutions might be arrived at, because the fact is that not only are they doing it with impunity, but also being role models to vast numbers of young people across the country, they are setting the wrong example.
Some of the more habitual offenders say that it is a requirement of their profession and helps their careers. What we would like to point out is that it is just an excuse and that their seniors seem to have done just fine without having to resort to it.
Just the other day, we heard of this get together at a popular director’s to celebrate his birthday. Everyone who mattered was there. The invitation had said that it was to be a game night, with drinks and dancing, but no sooner had the evening gotten underway, when one-by-one the guests were seen to give up all pretences of any other social activity, not even polite conversations and instead spending all their time doing it.
We hear one actress did it that evening almost a dozen times in the spate of an hour!
What a sad reflection of our times this is. To see such talented and successful people wasting their lives away, occupying themselves in such a futile, unhealthy pursuit, when they could be doing so much more with their talent and their lives.
Indeed, it is a matter of grave concern and should be taken up by all those who care about the industry and want it to flourish and grow in a healthy atmosphere.
It is time we put an end to the practice that has brought so much ignominy and disrepute to Bollywood and its denizens; that has singled the industry out for criticism and censure. That has afforded it so much disrepute and derision, and that appears to have captured its young men and women in a vice-like grip, making monsters and zombies out of them.
Yes, without further ado, it is time to call for a ban on the practice that is depleting the time and precious energy of Bollywood’s best and brightest: the odious and objectionable practice of taking selfies.
Say no to selfie-taking. Save our young men and women. It is the need of the hour.