Gossip Guy

Gossip Girl,the show on Zee Café at 10,weeknights,is based on a blog that thrives on salacious details about how the rich and famous live in New Yorks Upper East Side.

Written by Leher Kala

August 26, 2010 02:24 AM IST

4 min read

Gossip Girl,the show on Zee Café at 10,weeknights,is based on a blog that thrives on salacious details about how the rich and famous live in New Yorks Upper East Side. Its about five years too late,but India also has a blog now,fashionscandal.com dedicated to dissecting socialites,their designer wardrobes,fashion weeks and sordid affairs in a shrill,patronising tone. Even though this sort of journalism fills me with horror,the random details on whos-hooking-up-with-whom are extremely entertaining and its not surprising that this blog is currently the talk of Delhi.

Fashionscandal.com has a tacky layout,the grammar is haywire,but its blazing with malicious headlines and many of the juicy tidbits happen to be true. I worry for the anonymous blogger who seems determined to flout all the unwritten rules in the Indian media: we journalists try not to write about peoples personal lives (Bollywood aside) and there is a vague code of ethics regarding privacy. The scathing attacks on peoples marriages,business ventures and sex lives could land him in a difficult spot. After all,this is a city where people kill each other over parking and a politicians son,less than a decade ago,got away with breaking his ex-wifes boyfriends legs.

Some of the posts are brutally realistic comments on the Delhi elite. The one on Bangkok babies,for example,on how many rich Indians fly to Bangkok,and with an IVF procedure that costs approximately Rs 6,50,000,ensure the birth of a male child. (Gender selection is legal in Thailand.) One would imagine this would be a huge secret strictly between the parents,never to be let out,but Ive been part of dinner party conversations where people are openly exchanging Bangkok baby stories. The tragedy is that in the very crowd flaunting Birkin bags,ten carat diamonds and a Harvard business school degree,theres sympathetic understanding on the need for a male child. A liberal viewpoint suggests that if we can use science to remove cancers,fix our noses and cellulite,why not to choose the sex of our child? The ethics of gender selection is a murky issue worldwide, while in India its completely illegal,and so be it. In the spate of kidnappings that have occurred recently in Delhi-Gurgaon-Noida,not a single girl has been abducted: the kidnappers assume parents might not pay as much.

The thing with the Internet is anyone can start a blog,write absolutely anything and by the time youve lodged a cyber complaint with the police and the link is taken off,its already been posted on Facebook and Twitter where 10,000 people have read it. I suspect this could be the future of this site pretty soon. This is not the first website in India devoted to pursuing Delhi and Mumbais high profile lot. Highheelconfidential.com and stylecandy.com do an admirable job with a focus on Bollywood wardrobes and gossip. Fashionscandal.com is just more fun because everything becomes a lot more scandalous with proper nouns. The future of society journalism in India is on the Net,where all you need is to be rich and wearing some designer labels to grab your 15 minutes of fame.

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