Like it bothers me!

The post below is something i wrote earlier this year..sometime in April/May.

I don’t need to watch it. It is of no use to me. Why should I even care about them?....The media frenzy over the Abhishek-Aishwarya wedding this year was frenetic, fast paced, fastidious and made national news for most of April. But why the hype about two people from tinsel town getting married? Here were two regular individuals who did nothing but their jobs of looking good and entertaining people. No personal connections, no ties to bind the audience to them except their work on the silver screen (their onscreen chemistry resulting in more misses than hits!) and yet everything from the menu to the guest list, to what fabric Aishwariya was draping on her toe! - made national news and was headlines. It was being discussed all over, her mehendi, her clothes, his look, and his clothes, will his beard be there or will it be shaved off? Will she wear a sari or a lehenga? Perhaps this one event helped the public take their minds off the colossal loss of Team India at the World Cup 2007, an affair better forgotten. The Bachchans and the Rais tried to keep most of the event that was meant to be “Strictly Private’ so to speak, under wraps, but this Big Fat Indian Wedding had generated more interest than a news piece on the Iraq War!!

And so I watched it – more and more and more of it. I scoffed at it. I loathed it, I secretly enjoyed every moment of it and I surfed virtually every channel to know….what was going to happen next! Watching this small, non-descript piece of news gave me a high, I wanted to catch every word, every move, every sneeze and at the end of it all, when I really didn’t see anything substantial in this coverage, I chose to be happy at the tidbits!

In the aftermath of it all, there is still a debate as to whether the media was doing a great service to a nation that worships its Bollywood heroes or was it a disservice to a lot of other news that deserved coverage. I am yet to make up my mind.