Page three needs more wackos

Page three needs more wackos

Society journalism in India is dull because our self-serving, homegrown socialites are  sadly devoid of genuine eccentricities. Among the Chatterati   adds spice in the guise of fiction.

PAGE THREE NEEDS MORE WACKOS

Nandini Lal

Delhi is discovering that skeleton-rattling makes sweeter music than the church organ or prayer bell. "Religion used to bring people together. Now the most powerful common ground is gossip," says Globe¿s editor-in-chief, Richard Addis. He should know. He began his journalism career in Britain with a gossip column for The Evening Standard called "Londoner¿s Diary".

From Addison¿s Table Talk to Tina Brown¿s Talk to worse, idle gossip is dead - it works overtime for better pay and perks. New York-based gossip columnist Liz Smith ranked in 2000 as the highest paid female journalist in the world. Her recent autobiography Naturally Blonde is a bestseller entirely because it has managed to spill the beans on Joan Crawford, the Kennedys, Frank Sinatra and Donald Trump. (It¿s a different matter that it is less than forthcoming about dizzy Lizzie¿s own lesbian affairs.) The cheaper the sleaze, the dearer it sells.

These days kibitzers don¿t even need to blacken reputations with newsprint any more. The power and reach of online scandal is perhaps best exemplified by the Drudge Report¿s hand in everything from almost unseating governments three years ago to creating negative buzz on Oscar winning films on Nobel laureates this year. Ever since the uncrowned CEO of the Net¿s Nosey Parkers Matt Drudge lit up the scene, none of us has been able to look at Clinton and cigars in quite the same way again. Gossip has clawed its way to the mainstream.

So when the desi celeb-bashing Among the Chatterati hit the shops, city supplements went to town. People spotters played guessing games matching apt aliases with readily identifiable traits, far more than they had with a certain book by Shobha De. Nafisa Ali, Rohit Bal, Rohit Gandhi, Rahul Khanna and assorted victims of the book¿s broadsides couldn¿t go beyond splutters of "who does she think she is" and general hints that Kanika Gahlaut, source of their woes, should "go get a life". Loose cannon and ex-gossip columnist Gahlaut, basking in bestsellerdom, called it a bad case of I-know-your-editor-itis and the dreaded "do you know who I am?" disease. The mutual badmouthing gave tabloids like Today weeklong frontpage leads and magazines like Outlook bookpage and backpage grist.

Now and then, some voices feebly asked, is it ok for the media to feed on itself? What brought about this obsession with page three -- Star TV, Swarowski or sexy copy? There were stray phrases heard. Consumerism. Dumbing down. Sensationalism. Finally, after tandoori Naina, hotshot botal Jessica, downwardly mobile Natasha and smashing beauty Pooja, there was another name that gave the ladies who lunch reason to put down their forks and digest numbing news : chugli-chhokri Kanika aka the fictional Aby (a name which not many know means "expiate one¿s sins"). Finally, after genuine tragedy, tragifarce.

Unfortunately, eccentricity, the hallmark of stardom -- as it exists in the UK (natural) or the US (cultivated, but it does just as well, thank you) -- is nonexistent here. England ¿s resident miaow maestro, Daily Mail¿s Nigel Dempster, whose books told the world all about the Queen and Onassis that it didn¿t even know it needed to know, once said, "Without understanding eccentricity, n