A knot not shot

Reporting Amitabh Bachchan's illness had already made me a persona non-grata among my non-journalist friends, who held me as culpable as the more aggressive electronic media for generating what they called ‘constant gibberish’ in the name of news.

Yet, when I read about the stories from Bhopal and Philadelphia, where anxious fans had erected Big B Temples to pray for his wellness, or Assam where two poor buffaloes were sacrificed by equally concerned souls, I knew that my urban elite friends did not represent the real Indian news consumer.

Taking solace in this, I embarked yet again on another project, that of covering Aamir Khan's wedding bash at Panchgani, Western Ghats, one in which I risked losing approximately seven friends per news report I wrote on the subject.

Reaching Panchgani late morning on December 28, 2005, I gathered the facts: Aamir Khan, Bollywood's most selective actor, would wed his girlfriend of two (or so) years in Bandra, Mumbai the same evening and then arrive with a contingent of Bollywood's who's who to Panchgani the next morning to spend four days eating, drinking, singing, dancing, playing cricket, listening to nearly every genre of music in the world and keeping prying scribes, who had nothing better to do than to scoop microscopic details about the event, off.

Of course, he was right, because we really had nothing better to do. Celebrity lives, especially during weddings, are under public scrutiny all over the world and Indians are no different.

Reaching Il Palazzo Hotel, where Aamir would host his party the next day, I tried to enter through the main gate. At once, four hefty moustached men, who until then seemed to be snoring away in their chairs, suddenly became active and brandished their lathis towards a large board that read, "Trespassers will be prosecuted." The lathis subsequently changed their aim and pointed toward the gate, where I was standing. The Hotel officers were equally uncooperative when contacted on phone.

Walking away from the hotel toward the bazaar, I asked a random bystander what he knew about the celeb wedding that was taking place in his town. The three-minute non-stop information outflow that I received for an answer exceeded all my expectations. These chaps probably knew more about the wedding than Aamir himself!

Next, he offered to take me to a secret place from where I could get a bird's eye view of the party venue. Climbing for an hour through silver oak forests, we reached the top of a hill from where the property of Il Palazzo was visible in spurts and bits through a canopy of trees.

A TV journalist had already reached the 'secret point' before me and was excitedly shooting away blurry zoom shots of a swimming pool inside the hotel where in his words, "Aamir Khan would probably throw a pool party." That shot, an hour later, would run as 'exclusive breaking news' on that news channel. No kidding.

But just like the sight of even an ankle through a burqa excites men in some countries, unearthing this swimming pool before anyone else did translate into beating the competition for the paparazzi on the Aamir Khan wedding beat.

For the rest of the day till the next evening, nothing happened. Editors were screaming into mobile phones for 'the dope' but no information was coming. And then the unthinkable (read expected) happened. After all the guests had arrived on December 29 and Aamir's party was in progress with Satara's Divisional Commissioner as chief guest, one particular TV crew decided that enough was enough.

"Attack!" they hollered in their minds and a cameraman barged into the hotel to get some exclusive shots. He managed to penetrate the hotel premises three meters more than the best media attempt yet, when the able and strong-armed security guards of actor Ronit Roy's side business, Ace Security, spotted the uninvited guest and pounced on him. A bullfight ensued, joined by other media personnel resulting in two broken cameras and an injured cameraman. The mood was very tense. Shaadi aur barbaadi, I said to myself.

The next two days were no better. The evening's scuffle had left a bitter taste in everyone's minds. The occasional photographer triumphed, succeeding in catching an arm, a leg or a scalp of a supposed wedding guest.

I myself saw the futility of it all and instead used the time to do a travel story on Panchgani and even delivered a talk on Media as a Career to a bored class of adolescent students at a 150-year-old boarding school there.

At the end of it all, it seemed that Aamir Khan was bent upon proving a point, that of "defeating" the media by not providing them a single news moment. I still believe, had he stepped out for even five minutes to give the journalists what they wanted: a sound-byte and a photo-op, he'd have been left alone by the Press and everybody would have had a happy vacation in Panchgani.