The stars and their cars, or the stars and their stars: which is more odious to follow as a ‘story’? The extended Bachchan family and the Rais have been amply providing both strands of entertainment, and India being India, these stories are being ‘followed’ in more senses than one. It is of the nature of Bollywood to provide its consumers not only cinematic pleasure but also ways of living and thinking — or not thinking. Hence, its icons are also, like the Mahatma or Netaji, role-models and exemplars. Their actions, from the banal to the histrionic, often inspire uncritical emulation. Fortunately, not many of the Bachchans’ Indian watchers can afford to copy the “Was it my Bentley or yours?” sequence. It is certainly cheaper to do the junior Bachchan’s combination of hairband and designer stubble. But the families’ astral dealings have provoked another kind of response altogether — something that is more difficult to take merely in the spirit of entertainment.

The Martian jinx in Aishwarya Rai’s horoscope is now part of what Indian schoolchildren and quizzers would call ‘GK’. Rai is a manglik woman, and the spectacle, partly hidden and partly flashed, of ritually ridding her fiancé and his family of this unholy influence, in all its vermilion opulence, seems to have taken over the bourgeois Hindu nuptial imagination. Astrological superstitions come into play in more or less innocuous forms during many Indian marriages, and not necessarily only among Hindus. But ensuring a proper horoscope for one’s offspring is beginning to take on extreme and dangerous forms of meddling with nature. And the ostentation with which the Bachchans have been publicizing their Vedic purification ceremonies has something to do with this benighted trend. A rising number of women are now being persuaded or coerced into induced or delayed labour, or surgically facilitated deliveries, at a considerable risk to mother as well as child. Families force doctors to choose the mode of birth on astrological, rather than medical, criteria. Often, it is bad enough, in India, to be born female (and there are appropriate forms of medical intervention to prevent such ill luck). But being manglik on top of being a woman might mean a whole new order of harassment when it comes to marriage.

In the case of the Bachchans, not only is the family a Bollywood icon, but the spectacle of their ‘private’ lives is also played out on a political, or perhaps quasi-political, stage. Their wedding arrangements involve not only the right conjunction of planets, but also the right bit of time between assembly elections and parliamentary sessions. Hence the glamour of these preparations inevitably combines the extravagant, the superstitious and the political. The emulation works at all these levels, and those ostentatious visits to the temples and runnings around with birth-charts become, therefore, all the more pernicious.