Recently a small box in an entertainment supplement of a leading newspaper, claimed that actress Rani Mukherjee would be honoured with the Dada Saheb Phalke Award.
Rani reportedly said, “I’m happy that people have loved my film (No One Killed Jessica) and my work. I have always let my work do the talking and I guess I have proved to my critics that I’m not over. It’s a great feeling to be back winning awards.The past three years had been challenging because I didn’t have box office success behind me. People forget the body of work, and the amount of blood and sweat that you put in for years and write you off, so I’m very happy to get this prestigious award.”
Many people did a double take when they read the news, considering that some of the recipients of the award in the past have been the likes of Devika Rani, Satyajit Ray, Shyam Benegal and Lata Mangeshkar. Many other websites on the net carried the same news with a standard text that could have come from a PR kit. A few however carried the news with a slight difference. That she was “possibly” in the queue to get the Dada Saheb Phalke Academy Award. The important difference being that this award is not instituted by the government but by a body of cine associations engaged “in the service of Father of Indian Cinema.”
There was also a possibility that Priyanka Chopra would get an award from the academy for Saat Khoon Maaf and Anushka Sharma and Ranveer Singh for their roles in Band Baaja Baraat. So how come Ms Mukherjee got top billing in a national newspaper for an award she had not even got? Was it just lazy journalism or aggressive PR machinery in the overdrive to project her above her peers?
Almost every week, we read about things that Ms Mukherjee has not yet done. The film she wants to direct. The assistant directors who want to work with her. An item song she will shoot. She was also on the cover of every lifestyle magazine imaginable some time back, talking about the absence of box office success in the past few years and her joy at the success of No one Killed Jessica. Not a word ofcourse about the fact that the movie also starred Vidya Balan who has been winning best actress awards for two years in a row.
There was also her refusal to talk about her relationship with a production house scion but also subtle hints that there was infact something that needed privacy and denial. For the time being.
Before that, the actress who conducted herself with remarkable restraint at the height of her success, was seen sucking Vidya Balan’s thumb at Koffee with Karan, indulging in juvenile behaviour when the hamper was won by Ms Balan and falling prostrate before Madhuri Dixit in a dance show. Even though No one Killed Jessica was supposedly a serious film revolving around the inexplicable murder of a young girl, Balan who played a grieving sister and Rani, a truth-driven journalist were seen kissing for effect at a song promotion.
Success or the lack of it can be a mind bender and whether the actress and her publicists are making sure that she remains in the public eye or if entertainment journalism is no longer about facts but image projection is anyone’s guess. So there is a Mallika Sherawat who without a single big film in the past few years tweets pictures with Barack Obama and Hollywood royalty to make up for her absence from public memory.
There is the recently single Bipasha Basu posting images with her co-star Josh Hartnett and then saying she will stay non-committal about what she shares with him even though Hartnett has been dating a model called Sophia Lie.
Sandip Soparrkar, dancer and choreographer was recently in news for first claiming that he had been invited to the wedding reception of Prince Williams and Kate Middleton and then saying he could not go because he had injured his knee. The official wedding spokesperson from London ofcourse denied that Sandip was invited at all.
He has in the past dropped names like Britney Spears, Madonna, Katy Perry, Russel Brand too and got away with it. Unconfirmed reports about the big amounts actors are supposedly getting to endorse big brands or who they are replacing in plum endorsement deals or the magnanimous acts of charity they are doing also frequently appear. Should we wonder where this ‘news’ originates from? Or if it is strategically leaked before the release of big films or during a lull when a star is not getting any attention?And we who don’t know any better are willing vessels of this bunkum. 
It is not that actors cannot survive without PR. Case in point being Ajay Devgan who was the most commercially successful actor last year. Or Irrfan Khan who is quietly doing plum international projects. Or Rajnikant whose cult grows by the second even without his own contribution to it in the media.
Or Kajol who cheekily retorted when two red carpet anchors at the Star Screen Awards told her that they liked her, “I can’t return the compliment because I don’t know who you are.” But such examples are few and far between. We ofcourse know now that even serious news channels have a stake in corridors of power and some magazines and channels present most news from point of views convenient to them.
But if there is comfort somewhere, it is in this.The legacy of truth, be it in politics or creative arts cannot be artificially created. It is the body of work that matters in the end and not lies, no matter how beautiful they may be. Fame is a hungry goddess that promises everything but has to be fed constantly till there is nothing left. And those who play the media for short-term gains end up being played by it in the long run.