You cannot really blame Jaya Bachchan every time she snaps at Bollywood's rapidly growing tribe of the paparazzi. Can you?
If a lensman has the temerity to yell 'Aishwarya' at the top of his voice just to draw the attention of her doting daughter-in-law, the veteran actress is bound to feel offended. Aishwarya, after all, is nobody's 'school buddy' from the teeming crowd. She is well within her rights to think that the former Miss World (and a top-notch film star) does not deserve such a casual treatment from them.
But Bollywood's paparazzi, like their brethren from the West, are incorrigible. They love to do more than me shouting to get the angles of the stars and the starlets they want. They can go to the extent of chasing Land Rovers of the celebs in their pursuit of clicking their pictures at any cost, at times even falling over one another.
But someone like Jaya Bachchan who belongs to the Hindi film industry of yore still cannot bear the sight of a screaming bunch of shutterbugs telling the stars to look 'left, right and centre' for the sake of one viral photo. Unlike her husband, son and daughter-in-law, Jaya appears to have not kept pace with the changing times or, for that matter, trends in the film industry.
Jaya belongs to the good, old world in the tinsel town where a photo shoot with a celebrity used to be a quiet affair. It would happen either on the sets of an underproduction film or inside a studio for a film magazine cover, never in a crowded bazaar by an open nullah.
But now, the mystique of yesteryear stars has gone down the drain, thanks to the paparazzi capturing each and every minute of the star lives on their camera. Little surprise then, all the stars who want to be seen every day on social media these days have to be forever ready for an impromptu photoshoot at any godforsaken location. They can run into the paparazzi just about everywhere, who are forever on the prowl either outside a gym in Bandra or an eatery in Juhu or at the departure and arrival gates of the Mumbai airport. If not tipped off, they do not mind even lying in ambush at the fish market of Versova, anticipating the arrival of a Bong starlet on a Sunday morning.
The paparazzi are ubiquitous in and around B-town these days. Senior celebs such as Jaya may resent their presence but there is a whole bunch of new-age stars and starlets who love their ‘privacy’ to be breached by the paparazzi of Bollywood.
Jaya’s ‘Jawani Diwani’ (1972) co-star Randhir Kapoor, for one, is not known to have ever blown his fuse at the sight of the paparazzi over the way they have hounded his grandson, Taimur Ali Khan over the past five years. But he has always been amused to see the constant attention on the little boy, which has catapulted even his nanny to stardom. It is the price that she has paid for appearing with the ‘munchkin’ in every picture by default.
Taimur owes his stardom primarily to the paparazzi, who took a liking to him more than anybody else, including his star-parents, Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor. Ever since he stepped out of his house, he found himself constantly under the lens of dozens of cameras. For months, social media surfers loved every photo of the boy that made him an overnight sensation even before he was enrolled in a school. None of his celebrity parents or grandparents had experienced anything like that in their formative years. But then, there was no paparazzi culture back then, which has now spawned a whole new bunch of social media stars who have stayed in the limelight primarily because of the shutterbugs.
From Rakhi Sawant and Malaika Arora to Urfi Javed and Anjali Arora, celebs of different hues owe their popularity to their pictures and reels circulated by the paparazzi, more than anything else on their CV, including their films and TV series.
Thankfully, the smart Gen-X actors such as Sara Ali Khan, Ananya Panday and Janhvi Kapoor have learnt to make the most of the paparazzi phenomenon not only to expand their fanbase but also to further their careers. They know that one viral photo of theirs can get them more eyeballs than all the articles and interviews, paid or unpaid, written about them or their performances in various print or digital media.
Alas, the entertainment reporters appear to have outlived their utility for such stars who seem to know that the paparazzi are the new arbiters of their destiny. They may be looked down upon by the seniors like Jaya Bachchan as 'necessary evils', but the new-age Bollywood cannot afford to avoid them now.
