The price of fame

Whatever one may think of the unfortunate couple, they don't deserve what is happening to them

It’s not a lot of fun being famous — even if like me you are just the tiniest bit famous. Having a photo-byline can be a mixed blessing. On the one hand it has a vanity appeal but on the other it makes me in small part — public property. My face has a high recognition value courtesy of the moustache I have had since my teens, and with it appearing every week for the last decade it is perhaps unsurprising that I am greeted by complete strangers in the street or, as in one cringingly awful episode — on a long distance bus. Being stuck on a bus with forty-odd instant friends who feel they have a right to ask you whatever they like and seek your autograph on any piece of paper they may have in their possession — and yes that included bus tickets — is not an experience I choose to repeat.

Fame and its bedfellow infamy travel hand in hand, one never far from the other. Without fame there can be no infamy, and without marriage there can be no divorce. Growing up in England in the 1950s there was The Sunday Newspaper Ritual. There were three in our house. The very conservative Sunday Express that belonged to Father and the People and the News of the World that mostly belonged to Mother but were interchangeable once lunch was over.



Both of the latter were considered decidedly salacious and risque, concentrating as they did on the sex scandals of the day which usually involved Tory politicians — and divorces. Preferably of the messy and noisy variety that involved people in the upper echelons of society and minor royalty. Poor people getting divorced no matter how lurid the circumstances was never front page material. These personal tragedies were pored over by the Mater and Pater, commented on and dissected and judgment delivered. Judgment was very much a part of the Sunday Newspaper Ritual. No Sunday was complete without the metaphorical lynching of some poor soul. Actually I recall Grandmother as the principal executioner, she getting the papers last after Sunday teatime. (Grandfather was above all this, and never read the Sunday rags until late in his life when The Telegraph started to print a Sunday edition.)

So far as I can recall the ethics of all this never featured anywhere. Indeed ethics did not appear on my personal radar until my early teens thanks to a lively school debating society.



So why trouble you with this today? For no other reason than that newspapers in Pakistan and the electronic media that barely existed in my formative years, were frothing at the collective mouth in a manner heavily redolent of the scandal sheets of the 1950s over exactly the same material as half a century ago — divorce, and divorce in the household of one of the few pairings that in Pakistan could be described as a ‘celebrity couple’.

The news broke whilst I was in the Head Office in Karachi and wiped everything else off the screens dotted around the office. And they stayed wiped, at least as a lead story, for 24 hours. The fallout continues almost a week later, spawning a mini-industry online of material that is unprintable in hard copy but obviously avidly read to judge by the comments posted below some decidedly lurid pieces of doubtful provenance. The lives and loves and schisms of all concerned are being minutely dissected, taking in the extended family on both sides complete with family snaps and quotes from distant cousins and aunties eager for their 30 seconds of internet fame.



Whatever one may think of the unfortunate couple and I am a fan of neither, they do not deserve what is happening to them. They made a marital mistake, it happens, and Pakistan is knee-deep in the corpses of dead marriages that nobody has bothered to bury. They at least are able to walk away, a luxury that few far less famous people are afforded. Yet it is a walk they are obliged to take in public, and 60 years after my Grandmother was the judge, jury and executioner on Sunday afternoons, an entire nation stands ready, noose in hand.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 5^th, 2015.

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