Now that we are done with the click-baity headline, time for a slightly academic diversion. Get out your Oxford dictionaries — only British versions please — the Americans can’t claim spellings as a trump card — and look up two words which are often used interchangeably. They can sometimes have overlapping qualities, but they are not synonyms. Far from them. Here are the two words – ‘celebrity’ and ‘achiever’.
‘Celebrity’ and ‘merit’ can be related, but sometimes they can be totally, and mutually exclusive. ‘Achiever’ and ‘merit’ on the other hand, are joined at the hip. You can be famous for doing practically nothing, but you can’t be an achiever unless you achieve something. Duh. Which brings us to the most talked about species this side of the Arabian sea — ‘star kids’. Surprisingly, the Oxford dictionary doesn’t seem to have a definition for these omnipresent entities. So, let me venture one.
The Khushi Kapoors & Taimur Alis
Let’s squash that envy and get to the crux. A star kid is therefore, a celebrity in the true dictionary sense of the word. How he or she got that fame, is not the point of this discussion. Because, as we have concluded earlier, being famous is not necessarily linked to achievement or success. Shweta Bachchan Nanda is a celebrity who will figure in an advertisement with her dad Amitabh Bachchan, because she shares his gene pool. Taimur Ali Khan is currently India’s most famous baby, and I am not ‘tiger mum’ enough to demand achievement from a toddler.
Star kids are therefore not nobodies, even if their achievement is mostly zilch.
Their high school prom and party photos are widely circulated, photographers are parked outside their gyms and play schools, and most of them have huge followings on Instagram. Nobody has forced either the media or people on social media to give these kids this kind of attention — but they get it anyway. And you and I consume news around them avidly — be it Khushi Kapoor’s prom dress, or Aaradhya Bachchan performing at her school function.
You and I have created the market for celebrity kids — and if a filmmaker or publisher wants to cash in on that, so be it.
The Big Fat Family Business Called Bollywood
An inevitable aspect of celebrity — either earned or inherited — is marketability. When you are a fashion magazine that thrives on celebrity access and pretty clothes, getting the daughter of one of India’s biggest superstars to be on your cover is a victory. The kind of chatter it gets you — no marketing spends can buy. ‘Merit’ would have been Suhana Khan making it to Time magazine’s ‘100 most influential people’, at this stage in her life. She didn’t — she is wearing pretty clothes in a magazine about pretty clothes.
Suhana is only 18 — she might still, at a later stage, make it to something more consequential, but for that, she will have to cross over from ‘celebrity’ to ‘achiever’.
We will wait and see.
Which brings us to the rather boring and done-to-death topic of nepotism in Bollywood. Yes, star kids get launched a lot easier, but like I have repeatedly said in this piece, it is because they are hugely marketable. It is business. ( BTW, Dhadak apparently just crossed 100 crores at the worldwide box office. Just saying). And it is totally okay to resent them — but you should be equally resentful that you don’t get to run a company as big as Jio in your early twenties either.
Think of Bollywood as a family business — think of your chances to strike out in any other family business, where genes are your calling card.
It is the same. Deal with it. And if it still bothers you, don’t buy a movie ticket. Simple. Having said that, I am actually quite pleased that star kids generate so much noise and fury on social media. It is an index of development — as a country and an economy, we have the time and mindspace to devote to these issues. It means we are doing well — celebrity gazing and obsession is a first world problem after all. It is a luxury that developed countries can afford to have.
They were right about the Acche Din. The ‘good days’ are here.
(Naomi Datta is not famous for anything, unfortunately. She tweets at nowme_datta where she remains quite deluded about her actual consequence. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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