Fame vs anonymity

An up-and-coming movie actor told one of our reporters he had received an official invitation but hadn't gone to watch the IPL matches for fear of being mobbed.

He's acted in a dozen films, and it is possible a handful of Kannada film buffs would have recognised him, but it was a bit presumptuous of him to believe he would be hounded by the fashionable crowd that treads into the VIP enclosure of the cricket stadium. His "fear" sounded like wishful thinking. Or PR.

Anonymity, and the ignominy of not being invited to a glitzy event, is something the actor dreaded. It later turned out the IPL had sent no invitations to the Kannada movie industry. An embarrassed Charu Sharma, who handles Royal Challengers Bangalore's media relations, told our reporter that mistake would be corrected, and invitations sent out to the Kannada stars. As we all know, the league is banking heavily on support from the celluloid world.

"The gulf between the information we proclaim and the information we know to be true is often vast," write Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner, in their witty book Freakonomics. They paraphrase it with journalistic ease: "…we say one thing and do another." Our movie star actually wanted attention, but he told us he needed anonymity!

Freakonomics talks entertainingly about what the academic would call behavioural economics, and provides well-argued, statistics-supported answers to questions such as "Why do drug dealers live with their mothers?" and "How can your name affect how well you do in life?" Its take on anonymity and fame, like everything else in the book, is dazzlingly insightful.

Yesterday, our senior reporter Savie Karnel brought in another story about a girl who had come down from Assam to work in Bangalore, and how her boyfriend had harassed her and broken her spirit. He regularly took her money, thrashed her, stalked her, and drilled into her she couldn't do a thing as he knew the cops. The girl believed she had no hope since she was an anonymous "outsider" while her boyfriend was a Bangalorean.

Migrants from villages and small towns believe big cities liberate them from settings where everyone knows everyone, and worse, everyone knows what everyone is doing. But then, in situations like the girl's, the same anonymity turns into a huge handicap.

To understand the need for nuanced degrees of anonymity and familiarity, you must read the fascinating study on dating websites that Levitt and Dubner talk about. They estimate that in a year, some 40 million Americans "swap intimate truths about themselves with complete strangers." The study, conducted by two economists and a psychologist, found, among other things, that 28 per cent of the women claimed they were blonde. Since that number exceeded the national average of blondes, Levitt and Dubner conclude it indicates "a lot of dyeing, or lying, or both."

The study also found that not posting a photo was a sure way of failing on a dating site. "A low-income, poorly educated, unhappily employed, not very attractive, slightly overweight, and balding man who posts his photo stands a better chance of gleaning some e-mails than a man who says he makes $200,000, and is deadly handsome, and doesn't post a photo," the book observes.

I cannot claim any personal knowledge of impersonation and subterfuge, but I can tell you what happened when I started writing under a girl pseudonym some years ago. I had hit upon the attractive name of O Priya, inspired by an Ilaiyaraja song, and held forth on many music-related matters in the magazine section of the daily I then worked for.

As luck would have it, a Bengali gentleman started calling up the office asking to meet O Priya. My colleagues fobbed him off a couple of times, but he was persistent, and they threw up their hands and put him on to me. It turned out his intentions were completely honourable: he wanted O Priya to write about his wife, who had just opened a music school in Bangalore. I wrote about the school, and he was appeased, but my article appeared without a byline. And to my indescribable relief, he gave up the idea of meeting the gorgeous Ms O Priya!

29 April 2008