The Indrani Mukerjea case and our inner Madhur Bhandarkar

There's nothing we in the media like more than channelling our inner Madhur Bhandarkar. Everyone of us has presumably been Konkona Sen Sharma in his 2005 film, Page 3, sipping on our wine glass (partially disguised by a white napkin if in Delhi) looking goggle eyed at the beautiful Botoxed faces of women and the perfectly coiffed heads of their husbands, as they swish about in parties where politics meets Bollywood, old money meets nouveau riche. In the '90s, yes before much of contemporary India was of legal drinking age, these Page 3 parties were a big thing. You air kissed people, knowing they were looking over your shoulder at a more important person to corral. The conversation was gossipy, tinged with details of who was doing what or who was doing who. Bhandarkar captured all that quite well in his worm's eye view of Mumbai high society, forever creating a genre for himself, and a benchmark for us.

Now whenever anyone trots out the argument - after every case of Indrani Mukerjea, Sunanda Pushkar, Aarushi Talwar - that all rich people are sick, it reminds me of Bhandarkar, who has since gone on to do similar "exposes" of politics, the fashion world (where the lowest point of Priyanka Chopra's existence was when she woke up in bed with a black man, slow claps for such enlightened attitudes please), and the corporate world. All the films have been distinguished by their distaste for rich people, usually shown as paedophiles or drug addicts or gay people or plain misogynists, and sometimes all at once.

And urban India likes nothing better than to think murders related to money and sex happen only to people with big houses and bigger cars. It allows us to believe the Noida policeman when he says that a young girl was found in a compromising position with the domestic help because the dentist parents were busy leading a hectic social life. It allows to be convinced that a politician did terrible things to his society wife because she "knew too much". And it pushes us to be convinced that a top flight media executive murdered her own daughter who was not her sister because that's what rich people do.

The fact is that as a society we are all going through a flux. Social climbing is a sport not restricted to ambitious young women in a hurry to escape previous lovers and prior children. Sexual violence is a disease not restricted to poor migrants who hijack a bus and rape a young working girl. The poor can also murder their children and the rich can also rape. We'd love to be Madhur Bhandarkar and blame all our ills on "high society" but the fault, dear people, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings - not Page 3 types.