For 15 minutes of fame

Publicity is a relentless, cruel, ruthless goddess once you start worshipping her. No matter is evidently too big or too small when it comes to taking your chances with getting a bit of her. Every journalist knows this because all too often we deal with the bottom-feeders of the human species. The suspected suicide of TV actress Pratyusha Banerjee, best-known and beloved for her role as Anandi in the TV serial Balika Vadhu, has brought out the worst of our extreme desire for Andy Warhol’s satirical 15 minutes of fame.

Within minutes of Pratyusha’s death making the headlines, mini TV celebrities were out, searching for TV cameras to “share” their experiences of having seen Pratyusha in a corridor once or exchanged two words with her on a set. The person who came out the worst was possibly TV actress Dolly Bindra. She not only recorded and released a conversation with the dead girl’s mother, she also took a video of the dead body.

The conversation between Pratyusha’s mother and Ms Bindra is chilling. The complete callousness and aggression with which Ms Bindra interrogates a grieving mother goes against almost every tenet of accepted civilised behaviour.

You hear the mother weeping inconsolably and incoherently and mentioning that all she has heard is that her daughter was found hanging and that they were going to the hospital. Ms Bindra asks in a matter-of-fact tone: “Hanging? What was she hanging from?” Ms Bindra then demanded to know the name of the hospital and the room number. She went a step further and recorded a video of herself beside Pratyusha’s dead body at the hospital. She released both these to the media, so her motives can hardly be defended on any grounds except a morbid need for fame. A social organisation has filed a police complaint against her for both these actions.

It may be remembered that Ms Bindra has claimed victimhood many times, especially when she did not win the reality TV show Bigg Boss 4. But Ms Bindra is not the only person involved in extracting as much publicity as possible out of a colleague’s death. Newspapers report that some TV people took hair and make-up staff along to the hospital and to Pratyusha’s home so that they could compose the perfect look of pain for the press. I have seen a wannabe socialite spend half an hour with photographers getting her “red carpet” pose correct for a very minor social occasion — much of her focus was on her pout. A lot of what went into Madhur Bhandarkar’s film Page 3 is very true.

Meanwhile, everyone from Pratyusha’s former assistant to her dress designer to her boyfriend’s friends have been blabbing away, calling press conferences and being genuinely upset that the police had not yet got in touch with them.

Compare this to the fact that most friends of Peter and Indrani Mukerjea vanished when Ms Mukerjea was first accused of Sheena Bora’s murder. It was as if they barely existed in Mumbai society. Most people who spoke to the media were from Assam and Kolkata.

Allegations were made against Pratyusha’s boyfriend and his ex-girlfriend, while theories about her career were forwarded for reasons of her suspected suicide. A dress designer thought it fit to share the sort of wedding outfit he had suggested for the late actor. It is as if the presence of a camera or a reporter brings out the worst in humanity.

It is tempting to come to slick conclusions about the shallowness of life in entertainment television or the levels of desperation to get fame and work. A TV producer was very candid on a news panel when she talked about how writers would not pick a person who was identified too strongly with any one character before a longish cool off period. Even our current Union human resources development minister is best known for only one iconic TV role.

Undoubtedly, this makes the life of a TV actor very difficult. Unlike film stars, they cannot hop as easily from role to role without upsetting audiences. Because they enter our homes and drawing rooms, acting out one long and complicated story in which we get personally invested, they become trapped by their own success. I make the concession for film actors, though usually in India, at least, they act in some tweaked version of the same film again and again and again.

What the reactions to Pratyusha’s death show is that people who work in and around television do not get as much or enough success as they crave. This makes the desperation easier to understand, though still unacceptable. Human decency sounds like a self-righteous nicety when compared to the behaviour of Pratyusha’s friends and associates. The media is often a party to this lack of decency, but the media is also a mirror: the image is only as ugly as whoever is looking into it.

And then there’s social media and its own compulsions, where everyone wants to be first with their two-bit opinions and advice. All of us on it are guilty of this at one time or another. But perhaps former filmstar and current member of Parliament Hema Malini went too far when she tweeted that suicide is “senseless” and that “the world admires a fighter and not a loser”. She was accused of being insensitive — and not for the first time.

TV personality Rakhi Sawant put forward the theory that ceiling fans should be banned in India, since that is how Pratyusha died. Ms Sawant suggested table fans as an alternative. One might applaud Ms Sawant for her compassion and public thinking, if only she did not sound so absurd.

There is however no need to be sanctimonious here. Death has this effect on most of us: we want to show our connections to a human life if only because we start to feel our own mortality. But it is very difficult to be generous with this false world of glamour-seekers as they trample on our sentiments and basic decency. The rap star Eminem had said, “Fame hit me like a tonne of bricks.” What happened to us after Pratyusha’s death is that a mad rush for fame hit us like a tonne of bricks. And it hurt.