What’s De Point?

Shobhaa De’s latest potshots at Mahesh Bhatt and family are typical of her shoot-first-think-later line of reasoning.

It’s time we stop listening to Shobhaa De. Poor darling, she does not know what she’s saying. The facts of her own life are slowly slipping away from her. Last week, she tweeted, ‘What is wrong with Mahesh Bhatt and his family? Dysfunctional is too mild a word. Now son Rahul’s in a mess. Serious mess. All brawn no brain.’ She then posted a comment on her blog: ‘The Bhatts don’t exactly exemplify the average Indian family, and that’s what makes them unique’. Now, I contend that if Ms De was in control of her faculties, she would know that her family is as much the ‘average Indian family’ as Mahesh Bhatt’s. Bhatt is married twice and has two children from each marriage. Shobhaa De is married twice and has six children—two from her first marriage, two from her current husband’s first marriage and two from her current marriage. Not exactly your average Hum Do Hamare Do unit, is it?

For anyone who’s wondering what she was talking about, let me recap. De’s criticism of Bhatt stemmed from the fact that his son Rahul has been identified as a friend of David  Coleman Headley, the Lashkar-e-Toiba operative who was recently arrested in America. Between 2006 and 2008, Headley came to Mumbai several times and became friends with Rahul at a South Mumbai gym. To say the 25-year-old aspiring actor has no brains because he became friends with a man who turned out to be a terrorist is, well, nonsense. As though Rahul should have read his new friend’s aura and realised his true identity, which not even Indian and American intelligence agencies knew at the time.

De has a way of pumping out sentences based more on attitude than research. She has what editors like to describe as a certain ‘tone’. When she comments, she is more interested in sending a ‘tone’ across than an insight. Otherwise, she would perhaps have paused to ask whether there is such a thing as an ‘average Indian family’ or even a functional family. Let’s take the Gandhis, the family that rules India. Is it functional? Not if you count bitter saas-bahu squabbles (between Indira and Maneka), excommunication of  cousins, and the halo of death that surrounds it. Priyanka Gandhi’s outcast father-in-law died in a Delhi lodge.

Recently, De has been espousing the Marathi manoos cause in newspaper columns, hinting that there is perhaps a point to the xenophobia that Mumbai is witness to. Perhaps she has realised that Raj Thackeray’s family is her yardstick of a functional, average, decent, law-abiding family. Mahesh Bhatt and his son did the right thing by coming forward with the information they had on Headley. An ‘average’ celebrity would never do it.

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