“Page 3 people” taking the stage as India’s elite
By John Lancaster
The Washington Post
The Associated Press
NEW DELHI — They wear silk saris, well-cut Nehru jackets and incandescent smiles. They are practiced in the art of air-kissing and social banter. They are often beautiful, usually rich and sometimes genuinely talented. They are India’s new elite. They are India’s “Page 3 people.”
Named after the place where their parties and polo matches are breathlessly chronicled in the lifestyle sections of the English-language press, the Page 3 crowd is a broad category that mixes traditional celebrities — Bollywood stars, cricket players, literary figures — with new-money admen, fashion designers, high-tech entrepreneurs and other beneficiaries of India’s growing integration with the global economy.
The Page 3 scene
Celebrity coverage is a relatively recent addition to Indian newspapers that traditionally have tended toward stodgy government news. But it has proven a big hit with readers, reflecting the soaring aspirations and rapid expansion of the middle class.
It also provided grist for a popular new movie, “Page 3.” The film spotlights the sometimes-jarring emergence of Western-style celebrity culture in this conservative nation of more than a billion people, many of whom remain desperately poor.
The plot centers on Madhavi Sharma, a conscientious reporter who covers the Page 3 scene. Initially bewitched by her glamorous subjects, Madhavi comes to see them as cynics and hypocrites, such as the wealthy businessman who turns out to be a pedophile or the society maven who seeks out the television cameras at a friend’s funeral to promote her new line of herbal cosmetics. The movie mocks the social ambitions and crass commercial motives of those who’ll do anything to get their pictures on Page 3.
Though well-received by critics and audiences, the film triggered a defensive reaction among some. “Page 3 people are certainly not artificial,” art promoter Kalyani Chawla told the Hindustan Times. “They are busy, successful and good-looking people. I run three businesses, am a single mother, work hard and have a right to socialize.”
Public-relations consultant Rajiv Desai sees in the phenomenon a healthy democratization of the Indian elite. “I celebrate the Page 3 culture because it’s a thing based on achievement,” he said while attending a recent Page 3 function at New Delhi’s Oberoi Hotel.
Director Madhur Bhandarkar insisted his movie wasn’t meant to offend. “I’m not making a judgment,” he said by telephone from Bombay, describing the movie as “a documentary, realistic portrayal.” He added, “I myself am on Page 3 so many times. … They are not creepy people.”
“We are way behind”
Celebrity isn’t a new phenomenon in postcolonial India, where the public has long been infatuated with Bollywood stars and larger-than-life political figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister, and his daughter, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1984.
But this is also the country of Mahatma Gandhi, who dressed in homespun cotton and eschewed all but the most basic necessities, a country that often teetered on the brink of famine in its first decades of existence and whose government pursued a socialist model that discouraged conspicuous consumption.
Celebrity coverage is still relatively tame by the standards of American or British media, in part because celebrities enjoy greater privacy protections under Indian law. In December, for example, India’s supreme court opined that the airing of a camera-phone video purportedly showing two Bollywood stars locked in a steamy kiss — something that would hardly have raised an eyebrow in the West — “cannot be in the public good.”
“We are way behind other countries when it comes to paparazzi,” said Kanika Gahlaut, a former Page 3 reporter who now writes for India Today, the country’s leading newsmagazine. “You can’t write about a chief minister’s girlfriend.”
On the other hand, she said, it is permissible to “talk about his clothes,” and that in itself is something of a breakthrough. Media analysts trace the shift to the mid-1990s, when major English-language dailies such as the Times of India, with a daily circulation of nearly 600,000 in Bombay, came under growing competitive pressure from new private television stations. They began publishing full-color feature sections with a page reserved for social exploits.
Expanding the glitz
In the last several years, celebrity coverage has expanded beyond the English-language press to regional-language newspapers, glossy new magazines and television shows such as “Night Out.”
India’s booming economy, meanwhile, provides Page 3 and its ilk with an ever-expanding supply of new faces. By the end of 2003, there were 61,000 millionaires in India, a 22 percent increase over the previous year, according to a survey by Merrill Lynch and the Capgemini Group.
Sometime during the past decade “it suddenly became OK to flaunt your body, your wealth and your wife, in that order,” said Dilip Cherian, a New Delhi-based public-relations consultant. “You created two classes: One who actually had the wealth and the other who felt they were close enough to smell the roses. They could sense it was coming their way.”
“The people who look down on Page 3 are the ones who want to get on it,” said newspaper columnist Bhaichand Patel. “Everyone looks down on it, and everyone reads the bloody thing.”
Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company