G Sampath: The importance of being a celebrity

Who hasn’t sat through a panel discussion and come away irritated by a speaker’s waffling responses to direct questions? It happens all the time on TV.

The anchor might ask a politician a simple question like ‘What is your name?’ And the neta would go, ‘First of all, let me point out that I’m not the only MP who has a name. Why don’t you ask the PM what his name is? Anyone who wants to know my name is welcome to pose that question to the people of the country.” If you have absolutely no life, and spend your evenings watching Kapil Sibal on television, you’d know what I mean.

Well, last week, I was moderating a panel discussion between three novelists at a literary event in Bandra. Towards the end, I opened the debate for a Q&A session. I wasn’t expecting questions to come my way, and most didn’t. But eventually one did, and it was directed at me because I’m involved with the book review section of this newspaper.

The question was: why do books page editors give excessive coverage to celebrity authors, often at the cost of lesser known but more deserving writers?

It was a simple question. But I wasn’t sure how to respond because the answer lay beyond the media space — in the socio-economic realities that shape editorial decisions.

To begin with, celebrities are a post-modern phenomenon. They are manufactured, just like toothpastes, automobiles and condoms. Our society employs an army of professionals to churn out celebs: publicity agents, journalists (many of whom are publicity agents in disguise), advertisers, TV and film producers, marketing professionals, photographers, etc.

A celeb performs three functions that are essential to keep a consumerist society running despite all its pathologies. Firstly, celebs focus our mind on the self as opposed to society. By being portrayed as selves to aspire to, celebs make our own selves seem inadequate.

But while they make your life feel somehow ‘less’ than what you deserve, they also convince you that you can become a celebrity yourself, provided you embark on a course of self-improvement — by buying ‘solutions’ to your problems. Thus begins the cult of the self — the ‘if you believe it, you can do it’ kind of mumbo jumbo.

What this achieves is to keep people’s attention away from how the system is rigged so that only a certain kind of person, with certain privileges, is favoured to ‘reach the top’. This is the second function of celebs: they validate a hierarchy of selves, with celebs at the top, and the rest at varying rungs below, depending on their access to power and pelf.

Obviously, not everyone can be at the top, which means the fetishising of competition, as opposed to mutual aid. It is no accident that celebs started proliferating in India only post-liberalisation, when a nation opened up its markets and shut down its conscience.

This dynamic is at the root of my discomfort with even a celebrity like Arundhati Roy, who is often spoken of as the conscience of India’s middle classes. Roy has written eloquently, and often, on tribal issues. But someone like Gladson Dungdung, a little-known activist, who is himself a tribal, does not command similar space in the media even though his is arguably a more authentic voice. At least, nobody can accuse him of ‘adopting’ the cause of tribals — an accusation often flung at Roy.

So this is how the hypocrisy works in a celeb culture: you will rarely give space to anyone who is not a celebrity; and when a celeb speaks for those who are seldom heard, you discipline her by accusing her of speaking for ‘other people’.

So this is the third function of celebs: they’re a means to enforce ideological discipline. You see it in the sham talk shows on news channels, where detergent-sellers pontificate on India’s foreign policy; and in the opinion pages of newspapers, where the banalities of ‘big names’ muscle out voices low on ‘celeb quotient’.

So, the honest answer to the question of why celeb authors get more space than lesser-known but more deserving writers is this: because the media is an enormously undemocratic space, with a hierarchy of voices. But this was not the answer I gave. I waffled. I said, “You should first ask publishers why they bring out crap books by celeb authors.”

Kapil Sibal would have approved. (He is a published poet, by the way.)