What do celebrities endorsing a cause really bring?

Two years ago, when my debut novel Faraway Music was on the threshold of being sent to print, my publisher mentioned that I get a celebrity (preferably female, from Bollywood, since my book was centred around a woman protagonist) to "endorse" my novel, with a blurb on the cover. She insisted it would help "sell more copies" if the celebrity says what a great book this is with Facebook posts and tweets about why you should read it.

I was taken aback. Since one of the main reasons for me quitting lifestyle journalism was the superficiality of the so-called page 3 circuit - the constant pressure to include quotes from a well-known person in every story I wrote or edited. Get in someone we recognised to say what we wanted to hear. Not necessarily someone real who forced us to think beyond the average. The way a cause became worth fighting for if it bore the stamp of a certain social stratum that was, probably, the most distanced from it.

Ironically, I was told, "But you must be knowing a lot of people, Sree." Patronisingly. "Use your contacts," a voice I could barely relate to added, all the while emphasising how just one line from a Bollywood actress who probably never read a darn book in her life, may help validate my writing. Who I was. How they saw me.

It all angered me. Their demand. The way an industry that existed for literature bastardised its soul, daily, deliberately. The way I actually tried. How I rang friends - an anxious first time novelist. How I probably doubted my own abilities, falling cheaply for a ploy that now every industry employs and from which creative souls aren't spared either. The lowest common denominator of a populist, market economy, where everything comes at a price. Our conscience. Mostly.

The same impotent anger returning when I watched a video on women empowerment starring Deepika Padukone that, over the weekend, had been widely circulated - one that I was tagged in repeatedly. The video is a version of feminism that is convenient. Good looking. That we can all enjoy consuming sitting in plush, AC rooms in south Delhi or Mumbai, Kolkata, or Bangalore, patting our backs, on how much we were doing for women's issues. Womanhood treated symptomatically as a cause we can touch and treat. Instead of a complex, unforgiving condition that exists largely in silence and shame, in remote corners of this country we don't know even exist. A video that was viewed by more than 1.9 million users merely two days after it had been uploaded on YouTube.

I remembered our Kolkata house help, Mangaladi, who was thrashed by burning rods while she was seven months pregnant with her first child. Whose drunk, debauched husband raped her brutally, night, after night when she was only 16. A mother of five. The way she always smeared vermillion on her forehead. Her tears the only testament to the card fate had dealt her unwittingly. Or Neeti from Jaipur, a woman I had interviewed while researching my next book, whose husband and in-laws paraded her to a 60-plus godman who raped her from the rear, invading her virginity. Her innocence. Violating her marriage. Her soul. Her body. Her son, the only witness. Her biggest lie. A mother at 19?

Or a news report last year that shocked the entire nation in 2014. Village elders in Rajasthan ruling that an alleged rape victim must have her nose cut off - following a complaint from the man accused of raping her. According to the police, the woman belonged to the lowest "Dalit" caste, having come to them alleging that her husband's father was harassing her and that he'd subsequently raped her. Or when 13 men in Bengal's Birbhum district were detained for the public gang rape of a 20-year-old woman. This was, in fact, a punishment ordered by an unelected traditional village council for an "unauthorised" relationship with a married man from another community and the woman's subsequent failure to pay a Rs 27,000 fine. The complaint filed by the victim's family described how the council chief told villagers that because the woman could not pay the fine, they were free to "enjoy the girl and have fun."

Did these sisters have a "choice"? A say in their own lives, the way out of this misogynistic patriarchy? A legal and police system that was fair and protected their bodies, their marriages, their sanctity? A silence that was not branded as shameful? Did they ever feel empowered within their own families?

Were they ever selected to star in slick videos for leading fashion magazines consumed by a stratum of society that was protected by privileges and wealth, and could only relate to well-known celebrities, later sipping champagne with them, at page 3 parties? Were they invited to Women's Day award functions held at 5-stars? Their stories shared? Enough?

Will they ever win?

Celebrities today are an indispensable tool of our cultural milieu - a cosmetic appendage, whose commitment we rarely question. An expensive, hired mouthpiece that marketing gurus in fancy boardrooms with glass walls insist are necessary to bring about any sustainable change.

Get your campaign heard over the din. A message that now even our government seems to be swearing by.

So, there's Priyanka Chopra pouting as the national ambassador of the United Nations Children's Fund in India. Amitabh Bachchan vociferously campaigning for pulse polio awareness, with bahu Aishwarya Rai-Bachchan, slated to make her comeback in Bollywood. Vidya Balan, the face for the improvement of sanitation - a proposal made by Jairam Ramesh - after she had been invited by every women's group to discuss how to deal with body issues. 

Maybe, it's easier for us to believe in celebrities in a country that is obsessed with stardom and the immaculate perfection it constantly stereotypes. Like Aamir Khan being roped in by a non-political organisation to encourage citizens to vote before the elections. Aamir, the cleanest B-town activist who sat - his head lowered - next to a fasting Anna a few years ago. Whose films too, like PK wax eloquent on socio-religious messages. Perhaps because we don't recall the serious questions of integrity raised when the same actor's Narmada Bachao Andolan synchronised perfectly with the release of Rang De Basanti.

And yet, one can't help but raise a question on whether our celebrities tacitly avoid adopting causes that rebel against the existing establishment. Playing it safe by siding with the system instead of garnering awareness over a particular issue and taking a stand against anything. Using these so-called causes and charities to further their own reputations (sometimes damaged), these stars bag more movies - a well-orchestrated, personal PR campaign, some worthy media photo-ops and full page interviews in glossies - laughing all the way to the bank.

Take a look at Salman "Bhai", for instance, who gets away with not making an appearance at his myriad court hearings. Who has not yet been penalised for ramming his car into a bakery in suburban Bandra in the wee hours of September 28, 2002, killing one person and injuring four others who slept on the pavement outside the shop. According to the prosecution, the actor was driving under the influence of liquor at the relevant time - a charge Khan had denied. Until his faithful driver Ashok Singh, who has probably been donated a few crores, recently deposed before the court that he was in the driver's seat. Not Salman Khan.

Or the affable "Munnabhai" Sanjay Dutt, who seems to have got the Maharashtra state police's prison department in an embarrassing situation, having spent more than 118 days out of jail - either on parole or on furlough for his jail sentence of five years for the illegal possession of arms in connection with the 1993 Mumbai blasts. In a reply to an application filed under the Right to Information Act, the department revealed it has no actual record of prisoners, including Dutt, who have applied for furlough and have been granted leave in the past six years. This raised a stern question mark on the transparent functioning of the department.

Like Bangladeshi writer Tasleema Nasreen tweeted after watching an episode of Aamir Khan's overtly preachy Satyamev Jayate: "Feminists have been talking about female foeticide and its dangerous effects for decades. People have learned about it today from Star Plus (sic)."