*Bollywood actress, minor sports mogul and sometime human-rights campaigner Preity Zinta has discovered Twitter.
*This woman is so searingly intelligent that she is currently in Harvard taking a business-school course in mergers, acquisitions and negotiations. Why an actress would want to suffer in this odd way is a little beyond me – presumably it has something to do with the fortunes of her cricket team. Because she owns one.
*The other thing I don't get about Preity Zinta is that she somehow thinks that Bollywood-beat gossip writers should be factual reporters. Anyone who's ever glanced at a Bollywood publication knows that this idea is like pushing a rope uphill. Nothing about Bollywood is factual. The ticket receipts, the attendance records, the financing system, the crores of rupees paid to #1 actresses, they're all completely opaque and/or invented out of whole cloth.
*Furthermore, the business about which glitzy actress is having an affair with whatever guy – they were seen getting out of a limo together, they were spotted sharing a malted ghee milkshake at Pop's Chocolate Shop – no sane human being would take that tittle-tattle seriously for a nanosecond. It's all hokum. Anybody who knows anything about Bollywood knows it's all about feudal family arrangements. It's about the starkly necessary business of multigenerational filmi clans having star children. The swoony romance stuff is all there to sell tickets to rubes somewhere in deepest darkest Andhra Pradesh.
*Preity Zinta, who is not a star-child from a filmi clan but a former psychology-major who can actually act, dance, and probably even sing (Bollywood song tracks are dubbed, so there's no telling), has been in the film business for ten long years. She's a huge professional success. And yet she doesn't seem to comprehend her situation at all – in her world, there's an imaginary Bollywood press corps where they write respectful, factual articles about her charity work. How would that even be possible?
*There's something endearing about it. Her endless feuds with the jackals of the press corps have a kind of Gandhian unworldliness. It's like she plans to wear them into submission through the process of dripping her integrity on them. It's sort of amazing.
*Then Preity Zinta discovered Twitter. Of course there was a fake Preity Zinta on Twitter who had 140,000 followers, convincing the gullible that he was Preity through the simple stunt of quoting things she said in tabloid interviews. So Preity fell on this malefactor like an anvil, and she had him beaten off the premises of Twitter with a broomstick, but now she's got her own Twitter outlet. She is visibly trying to figure it out. Judging by her typos, she's got a Blackberry.
*Mostly she blows kisses at her fans, but she also factually describes the daily life of Preity Zinta. That part is super weird. It's phantasmal. Preity's 140-character diary is much more odd and entertaining than the imaginary sequin-spangled life that people imagine entertainers lead. No, it's all about the life of an ethically rigid, burningly ambitious, relentlessly upbeat, obviously lonely Type A Indian overachiever who lives out of her suitcase and sleeps maybe six hours a night. Preity's Twitter stream is a confessional orgy. I don't think Preity's best friends in Bollywood have ever been this close to Preity.
*Various pandits have been blogging from Bollywood for some time now – Amitabh Bachchan's blog is very dignified and interesting, it's mostly about ethics and philosophy – but Twitter has opened Bollywood up like a zipper. There's Karan Johar, Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Priyanka Chopra, Mallika Sherawat (in Los Angeles, no less), but nobody in the booming Bollywood Twitter scene beats Preity.
*I'm quite the fan of media-convergence, but I've never seen a phenomenon like this. Following Preity Zinta's Twitter stream is like having Preity crash on your couch. You want to pat her on the head and feed her a buttered chapatti. It's beyond any fan-star relationship. It's some new form of global sociality.
*Take it away, Miss Zinta:
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Ok no more silly tweets :-) have a big Merger and Acquisition assignment tomorrow so i have to prepare now .... need to focus on positives.
@vahishta He wrote the completely FABRICATED and FALSE story about me and somebody called Vikram Chatwal and till now i have to deny it. :-(
@puredesiness he does not need to see me to write rubbish ! Thats my point.... thats what yellow journalism is all about !
Sorry guys i am getting carried away !The power of the pen can make you lose perspective and write any thing you feel like ! ((((
