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| Fatal Attraction: (Top): The Shiuli- Dhoni clasp. (From left to right) Steven Spielberg, Madonna, Catherine Zeta Jones and Brad Pitt |
So you just love Abhishek Bachchan’s soulful eyes and can’t imagine what he saw in that Aishwarya. Or, if you are a young Indian male, maybe you really dig Bipasha Basu — she of the hot bod and sexy pout. It’s all harmless idol worship, you’ll say. Nothing but a bit of pleasurable adoration from afar. After all, isn’t that what fans are for?
Well, last Sunday a young, unremarkable girl from Baharampur, in the interior of Bengal, crossed the thin line that separates a star-struck fan from one whose adulation borders on the obsessive. Eighteen-year-old Hasina Nasreen, Shiuli to friends and family, dodged security at Calcutta’s Eden Gardens where the Indian cricket team was attending a conditioning camp and managed to give hunky cricketer Mahendra Singh Dhoni a tight hug.
Naturally, the media swooped on the incident gleefully, playing and replaying the TV footage. Enjoying her moment in the sun, Shiuli too has been free with her sound bytes. Among other rapturous statements she made about her long-time love object, she has been quoted as saying “I can give my life for Dhoni… All I want to do is marry him.” Her father had this to add: “She stops eating if Dhoni doesn’t manage to score too many runs.”
Given Dhoni’s erratic form, Shiuli has probably had to go without quite a few meals of late. But her fanatical devotion to the swashbuckling cricketer with the mega watt smile may well be an example of the growing incidence of obsessive behaviour among celebrity fans in India.
Last month, actress Celina Jaitley filed a police complaint against an unidentified man who had got hold of her mobile phone number and was continually calling her up, each time from a different number, and insisting on talking to her. Bollywood super star Shah Rukh Khan regularly gets love letters written in blood — always a chilling testament to the weird intensity of the writer’s feelings. Juhi Chawla, though no longer in her heyday, gets repeated calls from a male fan in Chandigarh. “He calls up at all odd hours, sometimes at 2 or 3 in the morning and demands to talk to her,” says K.S. Sanjay, Chawla’s secretary. “And he gets extremely abusive when he doesn’t get his way.”
Evidently, these fans are not quietly swooning over a poster of their favourite star. Nor are they merely in the throes of a teenage crush. “This is much more than a simple infatuation,” says consultant psychiatrist Dr Debashis Roy. “It could denote a serious obsession on the part of these over-ardent fans. It’s a condition where a person wants to impose himself or herself into someone else’s life.”
So what has prompted this sudden spurt in the number of celebrity fans who take that dangerous leap of faith and begin to believe that they actually have, or ought to have, a relationship with the star they are crazy about? Experts believe that India’s growing cult of celebrities could be part of the problem. In a society that is increasingly fixated on the rich and the famous, where television channels pursue every bit of celebrity trivia tirelessly, the exposure to and the impact of celebrities on people is greater than ever before.
“India is the only country in the world with more than three dozen 24-hour news and current affairs TV channels,” says former journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, director, Convergence Media Centre, Delhi. “Because of the intense competition among them, they go to any lengths to outdo each other.” Continuous celebrity coverage is, they think, one way of doing that, he adds. With the media so madly and irrationally focused on celebrity fare — the three-day breathless, and mostly fruitless, vigil outside the Abhi-Ash wedding venue is the latest example of this — “it is but natural that some of that obsession will filter into the public at large,” says Anjan Ghosh, a sociologist at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.
The stars too play their part in whipping up this frenzy. An army of image builders is employed to make them desirable and turn their fan base into a screaming mass of adulation. “The star propaganda machinery, in tandem with technology (television or the Internet), creates a kind of an artificial obsession, which in turn may sometimes fuel aberrant fan behaviour,” points out sociologist Ashis Nandy.
This is not to say, however, that obsessive fan behaviour did not exist in India before. A Bollywood insider recounts how, after Rajesh Khanna got married to Dimple Kapadia, one of his female fans renamed her dog “Dimple” and began to beat it mercilessly. Eventually, her parents took away the unfortunate animal and gifted it to director Hrishikesh Mukherjee. Madhuri Dixit too is said to have gone in fear of her jealous fans after she got married.
That obsessive fan syndrome can quickly become a terrifying condition is more than evident in the many instances of celebrity stalking in the West. A woman claiming to be in love with Hollywood actor Michael Douglas stalked his wife Catherine Zeta Jones for months and wrote her violent and threatening letters. In one letter she sent to Douglas, she wrote, “We are going to slice her up… and feed her to the dogs.” The woman was finally put behind bars in 2005. Pop goddess Madonna has also been a repeated victim of stalking. The latest instance was in the summer of 2004 when a middle aged man took to attending all her concerts, tried to enter her London home several times, and sent her innumerable notes urging her to have sex with him.
Other Hollywood biggies, IN- cluding Gwyneth Paltrow, Brad Pitt, Kevin Kostner and Steven Spielberg, or rock stars like George Michael, have also had to deal with the scary attention of demented fans. Tennis star Steffi Graf too had one such deranged devotee who in 1993 went and knifed Monica Seles to literally “kill” the competition for Graf.
Of course, celebrity worshippers in India are yet to display quite such extreme behaviour. Here, a Jhanvi Kapoor, who claims to be Abhishek Bachchan’s wife, has merely waved her bandaged arm about (she tried to slash her wrist, she said) and delivered a disjointed rant to the gaping media; unlike Zeta Jones’ tormentor, she has not taken to shadowing Aishwarya Rai or sending her threatening notes. But the portends are there. In fact, Dr Roy believes that left unchecked, celebrity sickness such as the kind Shiuli suffers from, could easily lead to acts of stalking.
“That’s the sequel to this sort of behaviour,” says Dr Roy. “In extreme cases, a fan may even develop erotomania where the person suffers from the delusion that the celebrity is also in love with him or her.” That is when he or she is likely to pursue the star relentlessly.
Clearly, it’s time Indian celebrities became a little afraid.