We all have our share of quirks and idiosyncrasies. For some of us, they are so very opaque that even the bats can see them without using their sonars. And for the more fortunate, they are like plexiglass, providing just the tad bit required to make us interesting enough. Lets take the celebrities for example. We all know that there are three categories of them. One always manages to stay in the news for all the wrong reasons. The media love them for the moolah that their stories bring in. The public love to hate them. Then there is the second or the balanced category which involves those who lead pretty interesting lives which make good for the inner pages of gossip weeklies but never really scourge the front page. They are the plexiglass group who manage to stay interesting without causing a media frenzy. And as for the third category of our darling celebs… they are the ones who shun the limelight completely. Now I know that’s an oxymoron ( celebs shunning the limelight !). But then there are quite a few of them who appear on entertainment magazines in articles only announcing the birth of their babies or their marriages. And they only grace the covers of magazines like Good Housekeeping or Interiors and stuff like that. They are the celebs that make us go … who cares!

So that was about the celebrities. But we have these three categories of individuals everywhere. In school, at work, in the gym, in the restaurants. All the people that we see lurking about us fall in to one of these three categories. The only difference is that we don’t know the facts since these ordinary folks are of no interest to that nosy bitch called the media.

Now of course, I mean no offence to the media here. They are just doing their job, catering to what the people want. A majority of the people especially in the age group of ten to thirty five, love these kind of news ( commonly referred to as gossip). They constitute the loyal clientele of the gossip weeklies that horde the magazine racks.

Even in politics, the news that sell like hotcakes are the ones providing evidence of how corrupt the administrators really are. So when the politicians start presenting a foolproof façade, the media ( always one step ahead) starts of with its sting operations to expose what lies behind the plastic smiles and fake promises. And we rush to the newsstands and grab copies of national dailes, watch all kinds of news programmes and political chat shows that we wouldn’t have bothered to watch otherwise.
If there were TRPs for the kind of articles read, the ones elaborating the faux pas of todays society and the ones vilifying known faces would win hands down.

So what is the deal here? Are we so vicious that reading malicious gossip gives us pleasure and entertainment. Or are we so progressive minded that we give primary importance to the faux pas of today ( then to all those ‘ progressive minds’ what are you doing about it apart from exclaiming that nothing can be done?). Or should we call it simple mindless entertainment that one requires to protect ones sanity. Just to be fair to the majority of humankind, maybe it is the last explanation that holds true.

There is only one sphere ( at last!) which is extremely popular and attracts people by use of talent rather than quirk. It is the one and only magical world of sports. You must be thinking “ Hello! What about Mr. Beckham?” C’mon folks, the dude did have some talent for the game before we discovered his talent for attracting the media. He is human after all and falls in one of the three categories I postulated earlier ( do I need to say which?). But letting aside Becks, there are loads of other sports stars who are stars in their own right. We love reading about how good they are, not how screwed up their personal lives are ( well, we do read about those too but they don’t come in the sports pages that we devour everyday).

So anyway, as most of you have realized, my last hope … sports to has succumbed to the pressures of mindless entertainment. After all being infamous has plenty more perks than being simply famous ( which has now become a boring outdated concept). So for all you dudes and dudettes who would love to have their face splashed in print… you know what to do ; ).