Celebrity Craze

On the 24th of February, 2018, Sridevi, one of the most celebrated and talented actors of Indian cinema, died due to an accidental drowning. However, the Indian news media, particularly the television media, made this tragic incident into a sensational story. The coverage became more of an intrusion and less of information.

Further, I felt that such an excessive coverage is probably due to Sridevi having been an movie actor. This, probably, would not have been the case, had the deceased been from a different field. This idea prompted me to write a short note.

With no disrespect to the recently departed Sridevi, I think we have become too attached to celebrities. We, tend to keep ourselves updated with the lives of politicians, sportspersons, movie stars and businesspeople.

From my experiences:

I had no trouble recognizing Aamir Khan, and knew that 3 Idiots was based on Chetan (Yuck!) Bhagat 's novel, but, had to Google the name Sonam Wangchuk, when he came for an interaction.

I had to look up who this 'Venki' Ramakrishnan guy was, and was embarrassed when I noted that he was a Nobel laureate and I had not known it.

When Kailash Satyarthi was given the Nobel prize, I, along with many of my friends here, who talk about 'education for the economically backward children'.. were all left red faced. I knew of Salman Khan's Being Human Foundation and Nagarjuna and Amala's Blue Cross of Hyderabad. But, we did not know that Satyarthi was doing all this work less than 10 km from us, in Saket.

We are impressed by the Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, more because of their business acumen in developing Facebook, Microsoft and Apple Inc., than for their technological expertise. But, don't seem to care of  Dennis Ritchie (who developed the C language) or Tim Paterson (who created 86-DOS, which was the 'seed' for MSDOS), and Büyükkökten (who created Orkut, the precursor to Facebook) is now just a faint memory.