Page 3

Indian movies are best to be read like bathroom books (you know those ridiculous Archie comics and squeaky whiny Love Stories etc that you can finish in an hour and not remember one minute later. Perennial value) but Page 3 was different. In the last year Lahore has started publications of magazines called GT and Sunday Times where a good half of the magazine is devoted to pictures of socialites and them doing-the-thang-they do over the weekend. Munch, Ali and I have a competition of who knows the most people in the magazines and the one who knows the most loses. But Ali is the centennial loser because his picture came in GT. So Page 3 was a sort of look into the dynamics of socialites (a title which had achieved occupation status on Zoom because I saw on some street talk show, a woman’s name followed by the explanatory label of “Socialite”) and how journalism is falling prey to focusing on the lifestyle of these as “news” and “entertainment”.

In the movie, there is an Indian police director, who hours away from a communal blast in his jurisdiction is drinking the night away as he does almost every alternative night. The character up for vicarious living with is Madhavi a sweet woman, who has moved to the city just to write and as the movie plays out around her and people she knows (friends just seems too strong a word to give them); her actress friend who won’t be given a role until she sleeps with the director, her boyfriend who has sex with her gay friend because the latter can get him a big ad, the families that fall apart, justice that can be just handed out through illegal operations such as “encounters” (the subcontinental practice of shooting a criminal and claiming he was resisting custody. Usually done a) either to kill someone who is meddling on higher up orders or b) done by the police to ensure that the criminal is not bailed out by a rich influential backer to roam the streets again) etc.

Disturbing and what’s more disturbing was how I could feel at some level that because I had partied at times with the same crowd, I didn’t see them as deviant. No shock-value; it’s like when pictures of starving children are flashed at you again and again, you stop noticing, or flip the channel or worse still, look at the needy around and feel “well at least they’re not as bad as those in Ethiopia”. It doesn’t make you feel grateful for what you have but perhaps makes you more remote from forms of suffering that are not unexpected.