Some time back, the brief marriage of socialite and reality TV star Kim Kardashian broke up amid speculations that it was all a publicity stunt. Publicity is big business today and those who are famous at times do not even need to do anything worthwhile to earn their fame. They are famous and just by that virtue, everything they do becomes news. And celebs who have nothing worthwhile to do often live by sound bytes and column inches and planted or artificially generated stories. And then there are celebrities who are so famous that they don’t want more attention and yet can’t escape it. Whether they like it or not, they must satiate the curiosity of millions.

To ask, if we needed to know so much about Aishwarya’s first born is like asking if we need one more mall or multiplex. Ofcourse, we did not need it but we wanted it, did we not?

The Bachchans tried to control the extent of information that went out in the media and yet there were blurred images of Aishwarya in casuals and silver slippers walking into the hospital, family in tow. And it is also clear that the Bachchans prefer to connect directly with fans than through the media and themselves tweeted about the arrival of Aishwarya and Abhishek’s baby girl.

It is hard to however to tame the fame monster and keep it out of personal business. What really sells today is a person’s ability to sell. The more you sell, the more successful you are. What you really are buying by selling a magazine cover, a TV show, the opening show of a film, an idea..is the mindspace of millions. Mindspace is what media, corporate, real and virtual wars are fought over. What every media moghul  wants to occupy really is the mindspace of the other and celebrities who occupy this space are seen everywhere. Today, while the birth of Aishwarya’s baby was a front page headline, the news of a nun activist’s murder by the Jharkhand mining mafia was a small, sidelined box.

The distribution of attention and energy in life and in media platforms shows us what our priorities are, what we are attending to, what is important to us and what isn’t.  What does not sell is not important so the murder of a lone female activist is not as important as the news of a female superstar’s baby girl.There is nothing wrong, I believe in celebrating the birth of a baby girl in a country where so many are killed. Rai herself has been victimised because of her gender and her beauty and her lasting stardom in a viciously sexist industry and by a media that has written negatively about her consistently and yet has’nt lost its fascination for her weight, her dress sense,  love life,  accent, marriage, pregnancy and the birth of her daughter. And the fact that she has survived the fame and calumny and has a life detached from it all to call her own is an achievement.

The fact that Brand Aishwarya still sells is why we are still reading updates about her labour and how she behaved during it. But it is sad that we have little or no space in our heads and in the media for stories about less saleable issues, achievers, women  survivors of gender politics, violent attacks, sexist belief systems. Can you imagine just how many stories have died a slow painful death because we did not want to engage with them over a prolonged period of time or not at all?

When will we see a sustained coverage, the kind we saw on the Bachchan baby, on the still suffering Bhopal gas victims, the riot victims of 1984, the mass graves in Kashmir, the slow but inexorable hopelessness of Manipur, the wonky gender ratios, the relentless plundering of natural resources, fractured infrastructure? Maybe, we are being foolish to club one kind of news with the other. Maybe they are two different curiosity sets but like unevenly proportioned wealth, there is inordinate attention paid to a certain kind of news and we remain by and large disinterested in the rest.

And what we invest attention in grows. We can’t blame an inconsequential celebrity like Kim Kardashian for making millions from her wedding or the Bachchans for being in the news always because we have invested our time and energy in following their highs and lows. If there is a surfeit of coverage about them, it is because we want it. It is because we read stories about them, follow their tweets, to know more and more about them. In life and in death, Princess Diana remains more famous than the causes she endorsed. In most instances, faces are more important than issues. Trivial controversies make money for those who are at their centre and those who package and sell them.

The world we read about is the world we have created through our choices. We cannot choose to read what we do and then ask why there is nothing else.  The world will go on, only to stop for the next story that trends on Twitter.  Maybe it will be Don 2. The next marketing gimmick by Aamir Khan. Or the name chosen for Baby B. The murdered nun in Jharkhand, however  will remain an unread story. Just another quiet footnote.

Reema Moudgil is the author of  Perfect Eight (http://www.flipkart.com/b/books/perfect-eight-reema-moudgil-book-9380032870?affid=unboxedwri )