Eternally Yours, PG 3

Shobhaa De has been the Queen of Page 3 in Mumbai; Satish Gujral the Dada of them allin Delhi. Rarely a day goes by when you don’t see their pictures or names in print.Do they ever eat at home? Lunch maybe.

Other heavyweights in the celeb circuit this year: Nalini Singh and Nafisa Ali inDelhi; Parmeshwar Godrej, Marc Robinson and Nina Pillai in Mumbai. Bina Ramani’sstars dimmed after the Jessica Lall incident. Pavan Varma is now making waves in Cyprusand Anita Pratap, ex-cnn, is based in Norway. This gives those on the editors’ B andC lists a fighting chance to make it to the hallowed space!

For those of you living in Andaman Islands, Page 3 is in the supplement, notnecessarily on the third page of the papers. And devout readers turn to it before theytake in front-page news. It’s about fashion launches, cigar promotions, restaurantopenings but mostly partying. It is the preserve of the glitterati and the chatterati inthe big cities, Pune, Ahmedabad and Bangalore included. These are the rich, the famous andthe cool. But moolah by itself won’t get you on it.

Services of publicists have been known to be employed by the truly desperate. It mayeven work. A publicist’s wife writes a column for one of the smaller papers. But theCatch 22 is: if you try too hard, you won’t make it. Nalini Singh is a natural;she’s famous, glamorous and has amazing manners.

So, will Page 3 be any different in 2002? Not likely, unless some genius comes up witha better idea. But we’ll be seeing some new faces. In Delhi the diplomatic crowd isnomadic. Jacqueline and Richard Celeste, ever so big last year, are back in Ohio. The newUS ambassador prefers the jnu set. The French ambassador’s wife Countess Catherine deMontferrand is the current toast of the diplomatic party circuit.

Of course, there’ll always be complaints, from wannabes, that the same facesappear time and again on these pages. That’s like asking movie mags to cover thestarlets and the extras instead of Shahrukh and Kareena! The day Page 3 starts coveringthe bhangra and dandia raas set in Karol Bagh and Jogeshwari, it’ll lose its draw.The readers want to know where Rohit Bal and Aarti Surendranath chilled out on Saturdaynight.