I recently overheard the following conversation at a social event. "All actresses are prostitutes boss, just ask me

Fiction Nation

In a country where everyone knows everyone else's business, there is a desperate need for secrets, the covert, the subterfuge, the forbidden, the morally perverse yet salaciously gossipy. It ranges from the taboo vices in Shobhaa De novels to the narcotic snorting dens of seduction in new age Bollywood nightclub scenes to any dinner party chat after midnight when the uncorrupted have gone to bed. The basic theme being thus -- there is a country under the country we see in public, and everyone knows it, though no one has experienced it themselves. After a while, the fact that an actress, some actresses, no actresses, may or may not be prostitutes becomes secondary to the myth that they are. Hemingway once said, "We only live in a world that we make up". Whether there is or is not, we would like to believe, and thereby have come to accept, an India beneath the one we see.u00a0

Examples being, so and so movie legend has an unstoppable sexual appetite outside his marriage, so and so business tycoon is gay and holidays with his lover in the Andamans. It ranges from the absurd to the wildly fantastic. Recently someone said, "X journalist is having an affair with Y CEO and he has built a tunnel to get to her house",u00a0or, "ABC flamboyant billionaire has a bed that becomes a diving board, so at the press of a button, he can slide into his pool and frolic with models" or "Y producer is so scared of an underworld hit that he has a pole next to his bed (like Batman) so he can slide into his car and escape. His car knows". Of course, none of the narrators have seen any of these first-hand, but are completely certain of their source. "Someone who was with him told me," is a common reply. Of course, what this source is doing close to a man sliding down into a pool or between homosexuals at a beach holiday, will poke holes into a basic fantasy, that's unfair to destroy.

Even a grown nation needs to believe their dirty version of Santa Claus being real.

The great irony of course is that as I write this, perhaps some readers are wondering, Who? Whom? Give us some names. Tell us some specifics. Which goes to show what Oscar Wilde said, "If the lives of those we glamorize were not filled with lies, gossip, and feats impossible, they would just be everybody else."u00a0

The most common rumors are of course for people rich, famous and especially both, so movie stars and politicians are in the eye of the middle class gossip. Affairs, sexual preferences, drugs, drink and violence, connections to underworld, have now become pass ufffd so the rumors now go to foreign hideaways for money laundering, orgies on yachts, secret ownership of sports teams and airlines, underground gambling dens. I counted once that if a particular star had done all the things that many people told me he did with "100% guarantee" they promised, he'd have to be in 12 countries on the same day, sleeping with 36 women, while defrauding several banks and being shot at. Even the movies can't get screenwriters to imagine this. One person told me with confidence that he had extremely authentic information that a living, breathing movie star was long dead and the family hired a body double to keep the money coming in. "It's standard" he insisted.

Deviance, excess, decadence whether it be wild parties or drugs or gambling or sex outside marriage, in themselves hold no shock value to the west because it's understandable that every culture will have some people that will do secret dirty things. Hence, someone says, "You don't know what goes on in a Delhi farm house party man," it's not hard to imagine the things that do, which perhaps shocking to us because it's hidden, is perhaps a standard Friday night in a London nightclub.

So why do we make up a world of vice and closet skeletons for these celebrities that most likely don't exist?

Someone summed up, "If the ICICI relationship manager came home after a long day and gossiped with his friends about x famous person, they would want a world they couldn't have. A world with women and foreign places and booze and parties etc. It would be their world of fiction. There's nothing more frightening to think that people who you think have achieved things, sit at home on weekends and watch NDTV, just like you.

Everyone needs to believe in something, especially myth".

u00a0My friend who was previously the authority on the dead star being kept alive by an imposter, now told us this at a dinner party, "XYZ has an illegal stake in this airline. There was a tax raid and they found secret ownership documents" to which I inquired, "If it's illegal ownership, what will ownership documents mean? Where would he get legal help if something went wrong? In an illegal court of law?u00a0 But another friend just said, "Really?"u00a0 and the storyteller turned away from me to his believer and continued, "Yes, in fact ufffd" and more stories were spun.

Another nation was being created.

Anuvab Pal is a Mumbai-based playwright and screenwriter. His plays in Mumbai include Chaos Theory and screenplays for Loins of Punjab Presents (co-written) and The President is Coming. He is currently working on a book on the Bollywood film Disco Dancer for Harper Collins, out later this year.u00a0 Reach him at www.anuvabpal.com

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