Boxers and Beauty Queens

Ash – just in case you didn’t know it - has a boxer called Sunshine. The Ash I am referring to – also in case you didn’t know - is the first lady of India’s beauty business and queen of wooden acting in Bollywood. Aishwarya Rai of course. Chap called Daboo wants to marry off his boxer Flash to Ash’s boxer Sunshine but Ash hasn’t yet indicated whether it’s to be yes or no.

This is only one among several similar golden nuggets of info filling eight pages of DNA’s supplement “After Hours” along with mountains of ads for silly and sillier films. Of course there is not much to differentiate it from the Bombay Times which goes along with the main Times which as everyone knows is the queen of crap. Mmmmmm. Delicious. Pages and pages of photographs of celebrities grinning over glasses of wine and grinning at each other and filled with details of who eats what for breakfast and who wore what at whose wedding.

Why do I even bother to glance at it? Because the “news” items are accompanied by photographs. And photographs of human beings somehow interest me far more than drab print. Of course the truth is that the person in the photo doesn’t have to be a celebrity to attract my attention. I am equally happy to look at and read about, say a housewife with a green thumb, or about gentlemen who feed pigeons in the park. But all newspaper supplements seem to presume that filling their pages day after day with the photographs of the same old famous bores is what creativity and human interest is all about.

I mean I would have far preferred it if DNA had interviewed Ash’s boxer, Sunshine, and asked her her opinion of life – without bothering to mention who her pearly toothed mistress happened to be. Most dogs are anyway much cuter than most movie stars.

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