Fame, success, name, stardom, esteem, reputation, popularity, celebrity... who doesn’t want it all? ‘You can never be too rich or too thin’ goes an old quote – add to this in big bold letters of 70-point size: You can never be too famous.
Fame has a slightly notorious past; it didn’t start out all good. It was openly sexist for one thing and was considered a pact with the very devil about an age or two ago. In some era being wealthy was enough to make you known, in another it was beauty. Cleopatra and Helen of Troy must have rolled their eyes – nicely drawn with kohl and all – a million times at how their looks were always the talk of the town, yawn. But famous females were most of the time femme fatale, women of disrepute because they were making too much money and having too much fun.
Men though got good press from day one. They were powerful and macho, matching their bank balance to their baritone. When they smoked and drank and womanised, they gave off powerful vibes that were agreeable to societies everywhere. Women had to wait a century or two. Of course, they got a lot of dusting done during that time; sofas, TV tops, shelves where their author husbands displayed their books etc.
In fables like Faust, protagonists sell their soul to be the who’s who, tut tut. A whisper campaign hinted at fame‘s dubious origins, the suspicious beginnings of the suddenly well-known, the wheeling and dealing, the hustling and bed-bustling they had to do before they were mentioned on Page 3.
It is only now, after the 1990s turned into the 2000s, that fame became famous for itself and lost its ‘infamous’ tag. Any publicity is good publicity, as any savagely critiqued artist or actor will tell you. Fame itself offers no formula, so that shock-value and gimmickry have gained respectability. It is all about PR – if you can create a buzz about yourself, you are a star.
By and by, everything was up for glory, a dialogue here, a body part there. Songwriters could take one so-so line and pad it up with mediocre lyrics to come up with a hit. Kim Kardashian’s posterior and Katie Price’s cleavage – more silicone than flesh and blood – have their own bank accounts.
Yes, we do hear about a diamond merchant here or a beer seller there whose good times are followed by bad times, but mostly we see them during their two minutes of fame. Okay, so we have heard a lot about the flip side of fame, of it being lonely at the top, of the paranoia, of the nervous wreck it makes of us human beings as we climb up and up the fame ladder, every rung someone’s neck, but that’s blah blah blah.
We want to grumble too that our arm is numb from signing autographs all day. We want to live life king-size, have the masses chant our name, and is that Satan at my door to buy my soul?
Shinie Antony is a writer and editor based in Bangalore. Her books include The Girl Who Couldn't Love, Barefoot and Pregnant, Planet Polygamous, and the anthologies Why We Don’t Talk, An Unsuitable Woman, Boo. Winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Asia Prize for her story A Dog’s Death in 2003, she is the co-founder of the Bangalore Literature Festival and director of the Bengaluru Poetry Festival.
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