It was this tweet from Amitabh Bachchan aka God in Bollywood which first caught
my attention “...And Oprah in sari .. looking lovely !!” Of
course I promptly retweeted it first, then paused to check out the veracity of
picture.
It really was her.
The goddess of chat-shows looking slightly uncomfortable in her new designer
Indian clothes no less. First Lady Gaga (who on the other h and wore the sari
as if it had been made for her), now Oprah welcomed warmly into the bosom of
Bollywood. What was the world coming to?
Here she was rushing
to the home of Bollywood star Bachchan to bless his new born grandchild, being
driven to a socialite’s Bollywood party, then walking through the slums near
her hotel, gushing about the famous Indian tolerance credo.
And you could count
on the Bombay politicians stepping in on cue, in the hope of some of the
limelight rubbing off on them....what with a call from the socialite’s
neighbour (who just happened to be a local legislator of course) complaining to the police about
loud music being played after 10pm, and the cops stepping in to fine the
organizer not once but thrice the same night!
Then
in true Bollywood melodrama style, Oprah herself added to the fray with her
personal bodyguards getting into a scuffle with the over-enthusiastic Indian
press.
In
India to film an episode of her new series, Oprah's Next Chapter, she is
expected to film at the Taj Mahal and interview that most famous of self-help
guru’s Deepak Chopra.
The
sentiment of the moment could perhaps be neatly summarised by this tongue in
cheek tweet from Desijourno “Me: Did you hug Oprah last night? X: Yes. Me: How was it? X: It was like
hugging the Amma of Hollywood.” (get it?)
As I spoke to my
husband in Bombay attending the Jaipur literary festival where Oprah put in an
appearance, he confirmed the news reports. Crowds whipped into a frenzy by the
media exposure of her trip raised noise decibels to screaming levels welcoming
her on stage as she was interviewed, jostling to be let in when the security
guards shut the entrance gates.
All of this
confounded me. While Oprah seems to be genuine in ‘getting India’ and making
all the right noises, commenting accurately on the paradox of the chaos and the
calm living side by side in the country , still I could not get rid of the
cynicism which bubbled up everytime I viewed her progress across the country.
Wasn’t she just
climbing onto the India/ Bollywood bandwagon to further her show? Perhaps she
was going to interview Deepak Chopra on how meditation could help star couples
get over the pain of their notoriously short marriages? Or it was simply to
draw attention to her confidence in Barack Obama’s re-election in the upcoming
elections. Somehow she just did not seem to belong in India and is largely
irrelevant to most of the country.
Or should I look
beyond this and believe her when she claims excitedly that she will be back
again? Well at-least she got one thing right. The red lights on the roads are
just for entertainment. No serious driver on Indian roads ever pays attention
to road rules. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/jaipur-lit-festival-2012-my-life-is-a-taj-mahal-oprah-winfrey/1/170108.html
