Sweet, deathly smell of success

Behind all that fake tinsel lies the real tinsel, said a wag about Hollywood. What the audience and the fans see are glamour and glitz, all carefully planned right down to the last fake smile. The reality is far seedier.

A glimpse of the sordid reality behind all the dazzle became visible last week when details of the murder of a young man, allegedly by an up and coming actor and her Naval officer boyfriend came to light. The manner in which the murder was committed and the body disposed off, are gruesome enough; the more interesting part however is the back story of the young girl.

Maria comes from a small southern town where she was apparently the star of her college, known for her ‘easy’ lifestyle, as one of her classmates remembers it. She drank and danced at parties and was ambitious, wanting to make it big in the glamour business. Soon she found herself in a Kannada film and subsequently landed a role in a Hindi movie. But she wanted more, much more. She befriended a smart young man who had good contacts in many television production companies and who must have offered to introduce her to powerful people.

All this must have come at a price, something that did not please her old boyfriend who one day landed uearly in the morning from Kochi, surprising his girlfriend and her new friend. The holes are pretty easy to fill up after that, though it will be up to the police to prove the case legally.

In Noida, on the outskirts of Delhi, another shocking crime has caught the imagination of the nation. The police claim that a 14-year-old girl and a house servant were both killed by the girl’s father in a cold-blooded manner. The theories abound, but the most popular one is that the girl was upset at the father’s extra-marital affair and was confiding in the servant, which angered the dentist father. He killed both of them, calmly and surgically.

Two crimes, both far away, both dissimilar on the face of it. Yet, they both tell us something — of a changing Indian urban landscape where not only values and attitudes but also crimes are undergoing a metamorphosis. Statistics tell us that love and sex are emerging as the key motives in urban crimes, but statistics do not tell us the whys and wherefores of this trend.

Noida outside Delhi is a strange kind of place. It is not even a proper city; the name is an acronym, standing for New Okhla Industrial Development Authority. It falls in Uttar Pradesh but for all practical purposes is attached to Delhi. There are newly built, leafy avenues where extremely expensive apartments and row houses are coming up; there are rustic areas which do not have proper sanitation. Nithari, where the notorious child killings took place, is a village in the Noida area.

The residential neighbourhoods are new and many of them are visibly prosperous. Yet they have not yet coalesced into communities. Where the common complaint about Delhi is that everyone makes each other’s business their own, in Noida — and many other newer neighbourhoods, such as Gurgaon — people prefer to not mix. Money has bought them privacy without replacing it with any other bond. The newer migrants come with few familial or social links. They may have contacts (especially political ones), but not necessarily any friends.

Urban migration into Mumbai is of course older, but has now assumed a different character. Large numbers of youngsters are moving in to work in the service sector — call centres, retail outlets, hotels etc. Thousands come, with dreams in their eyes, to make it in films. Television is the new, insatiable beast that devours young women and men, with the promise of glamour and money. For a young girl from a small town, even an assistant to an assistant director spells proximity to that world; what wouldn’t she be ready to do in the hope of getting a break? And getting that break is not enough — she must spend on clothes, a lifestyle, an apartment; it requires a handsome and regular income that is not easy to come by. The suburbs of Andheri, Goregaon, Jogeshwari and Malad are home to countless such youngsters all waiting to be spotted, all willing to far in search of their dreams which often turn into nightmares.

With urbanisation come not only malls and expensive properties but alienation too; in the Mumbai murder case the 18-storeyed building was not fully occupied because most flats had been bought as investments. For the outsider, Mumbai can be a scary city and a lonely one. In such a milieu, it is easy to get exploited and get carried away.

There are no mitigating circumstances in the two murder cases; the perpetrators must be punished. But the crimes cannot be understood without some understanding of what we have become. It is almost certain that urban India will see a different kind of crime in the coming years, as social anomie around us grows — these will be sordid, sleazy and inelegant. This is not about a greedy, hungry and poor man attacking the rich; it is the successful feeding upon their own hollowness.

Email: sidharth01@dnaindia.net