“If only the media has a way of knowing such incidents.”

“Don’t you think the media is manned by morons?” he said. “Oh, how they carpet-covered the newlywed Bachchans’ temple trysts to save their marriage from the mangalik affect! What message did the media carry to our folks, bogged down by superstitions? Maybe, man was better off without the media and now worse off for the 24 x 7 non-stop humbugs; and what an opportunity the senior Bachchan lost to make a difference to the prejudiced heads by making a statement against the nonsense. Oh how small really the Big B is, and how big the media made Diana the small. It’s incredible how her quest for lust was portrayed as her search for love! No faulting her taking a lover on the rebound as her man thrust a rival into her marital life but for the media to picture her bed hopping as her craving for love is galling indeed. Why in picturing Diana as the icon of love the media made lust a synonym of love and what’s worse, it made a villain out of her man who embodies the best of love that is constancy.”

“Why hadn’t anyone seen it that way?”

“Can one grasp the realities of life in the glare of glamour?” he said. “What is media if it doesn’t feed itself on sleaze and scandal with trivia thrown in between; why blame those who man it as all crave for such to gloss over the humdrum that is life of most. Even if you ever make the media privy to what all transpired between us, the meaningful part of it is bound to be blue-penciled. Whatever that’s the enigma of the media, like it or not, there is no escaping from it but were you to novelize it, maybe, there could be a few takers for your endeavor.”

“Maybe so but as Hitler had discovered, most of us take the media’s word as a Gospel truth.”

“Wasn’t it the basis for Goebbels concept of propaganda?” he interjected. “Back to my dad; he was more like a mullahwhen it came to the segregation of sexes though it had nothing to do with his upbringing either for my grandfather didn’t have a jaundiced eye on that count. I heard that my dad was opposed to his mother and sister resting for a while on the roadside verandah even when he was just twelve or so and that speaks for it. That’s why it was no wonder that he turned out to be a possessive husband and a guard of a father, especially of his daughters. How I wish he had read a book or two on the psychology of sex, especially that of Havelock Ellis, well that could have spared me of that shock and one of my sisters of her bitterness.”




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