Commentary/Pritish Nandy

This Was No Candle In The Wind

Let me start this column with two confessions.

One, I always found Diana Spencer a very attractive woman. She was clever, manipulative, outrageously good looking. Above all, she had attitude. Oodles of it. Two, I am not a great admirer of intrusive journalism. Though, in all honesty, I must also state upfront that I have never hesitated, as an editor, to carry out investigations simply because they intruded into the private lives of public people. Protecting powerful people was not my job. Exposing them was.

Now we come to Diana's death. It is undoubtedly the biggest media event of the nineties. Bosnia has taken a backseat. The passing away of Mother Teresa went unnoticed for the first few days. Even Nadeem, Bombay's current headline grabber, lost out to the English rose. No one got so much media hype after James Dean and Marilyn Monroe.

The assassins? Well, as far as the whole world is concerned, the assassins have already been identified. It is the media. The paparazzi who invaded her privacy with their snooping telescopic lenses. The tabloids who refused to let her get off the frontpage. The reporters who ruthlessly pursued her wherever she went. The publishers who made millions of dollars from her grief and her loneliness, that drove her into the arms of people no one would be dead seen with.

Co-conspirators to the crime are, of course, the royal family which (most people believe, even in Britain) treated her unjustly. It was a saas bahu confrontation, as they saw it. Charles was merely a bit player. So was her sauten the grotesque Camila Parker-Bowles. No one even mentions the fact that few husbands would have gone to Paris to bring back the mortal remains of a wife who was enjoying a dirty weekend in Paris with a rich Arab boyfriend.

But is it true? Was the paparazzi guilty of a crime that never took place? Can a small bunch of motorcyclists desperately trying to get a sexy shot of their quarry -- the gorgeous princess cuddling up to a boringly rich millionaire -- be accused of murder, simply because they were hunting down a photo opportunity that would normally elude the hired fat cats of Fleet Street?

It is no use saying: Who wants these dirty pictures? People do. There is enough evidence to prove this. And, let us all admit it, what happens in the bedrooms of the rich and the mighty always influence history and politics more than anything else. Take the case of the Kennedys and you will know what I mean. Take the case of the Bhuttos. If the paparazzi had actually clicked Asif Zardari with his secret mistress tucked away in London, Benazir would not have looked such a fool in Parliament, denying that they (the Bhuttos) had bought this fancy castle in Surrey for which priceless antiques were being smuggled out of Pakistan. She would have found out a long time back that Zardari was a cunning, greedy, unreliable political ally and not just a philandering husband. It would have spared her a lot of anguish and embarrassment. Who knows, she may not have lost the elections if she was armed with this information.

Fellini may have portrayed them as wastepaper in La Dolce Vita. But the paparazzi is important in our search for truth. Without them, the media cannot function. Without them, your newspapers will be full of ceremonial pictures of ribbon cutting dignitaries and smiling hoods masquerading as political leaders. Your movie magazines will carry only planted stories about who is having an affair with whom, timed precisely to benefit the box office fortunes of forthcoming films. Truth will take a backseat to commerce and influence. You will never get to know what is actually happening.

Without the paparazzi would you have known that Ted Kennedy's adulterous ways had driven his wife to alcoholism, that Claudia Schiffer and David Copperfield's fairy tale romance was just another publicity stunt for which they paid each other fancy annual fees, that most of the major Italian designers were playing footsie with the Mob, that Imran Khan had fathered a child out of wedlock even as he was spouting long sermons on spiritualism and morality. That the princess of Wales was sleazing in Paris with an Arab in tow -- after having run through a stable boy, a security guard, a polo player, a rugby captain, a Pakistani doctor and a single Sardar more known for his flashy ways than his entrepreneurial skills.

The paparazzi were only doing a job. In fact, they were risking their lives for this job. Chasing an armoured Mercedes with an armed bodyguard in front is not exactly the easiest way to make a living when all you are armed with is a beat-up motorcycle and a cheap Nikon. They could have been run over, shot, pushed off the road, killed easily. But they took this risk to capture a photo opportunity. All Dodi had to do was ask his drunken driver to speed down. He could have drawn back the curtains, smiled at them.

It would not have killed him. His relationship with the princess was already well publicised. Being photographed together is not exactly a sin in the land of the Spice Girls, where he and his buccaneer father had sought citizenship and social legitimacy.

Alternatively, he could have drawn his curtains tight, put out the lights and driven off. The paparazzi would have instantly figured that no photo opportunity existed. After trailing them for a while, they would have trailed off. There are very few motorcycles around that can cope with the quiet power of a Mercedes hellbent on outspeeding them. But Dodi and the princess, it appears, did exactly what all celebrities do. They teased the paparazzi, taunted them, encouraged them, gave them hope and then tried to speed off. This is not exactly the easiest thing in the world to do when your driver is drunk and high on fluoxetine and tiapride, as subsequent blood tests on Henri Paul have revealed.

This is the danger in not knowing how to cope with sudden fame and notoriety. Particularly when they come by association with a gorgeous woman who owns the headlines almost by birthright. Dodi succumbed to that danger and paid for it with his life -- and the life of the princess. If it was not him, it could have been one of the paparazzi. Or maybe all of them, given the state of his driver. It needs more than money and an armoured limousine to know how to cope with the media.

Once the bodyguard recovers, we will perhaps know what the truth was. We will hear the sequence of events. We will read different interpretations of what happened and why. But the princess is bathed in such white light today that we are unlikely to ever get an honest, truthful version. The media will, typically, self flagellate. The poor paparazzi will be widely abused and beaten up by whoever gets an opportunity-- for they are the softest target. Hollywood will scream and rant and use this opportunity to self promote its own interests. Movies will be made, offering new versions of the tragedy. New books will hit the stands. The Internet will be full of new sites.

And Elton John will earn $ 15 million for Diana's pet charities by merely re-recording an old song he once wrote for Marilyn Monroe, to show how every tragedy has this curious habit of repeating itself. No, I do not believe England will be lost without Diana's soul. I do not think the English rose will bloom beyond the next tragedy. I do not think that the stars will spell out her name. All I think will happen is that Dodi's father will ride the sympathy wave to get the citizenship he has long lusted for. Ever since he bought Harrods.

In the era of liberalisation, the greedy guys always win.

Tell us what you think of this column