Sridevi: From botox to bathtub, how media made a mockery of actor’s death

When reports rubbished claims of a cardiac arrest and declared that her death was caused by drowning and that her body contained traces of alcohol, news channels were quick to suggest foul play.

Indian Media on Sridevi : Celebrity deaths are their own brand of pain and sadness. They serve as a reminder of not just our own mortality, but that of our youth – the faces that remain frozen in time, holding on to the last memories of the person you were when you first saw them. These deaths don’t carry just grief with them, though. They catalyse a generation into finding old prints of movies and HD rips of songs they hadn’t heard in years.

That’s what should happen. But that’s not what was allowed to happen. Sridevi’s untimely death at 54 left a generation that wasn’t ready for its icon to die reeling. It wasn’t her time – and no one was quite prepared with words of bereavement for a contemporary. Usually, these deaths come with enough intimation to insulate people from the shock they bring with them. Sridevi’s death came like a rude, uncomfortable reminder of how we haven’t tamed death with the finesse we think we have mastered. It was possibly a combination of this shock and relative, perceived proximity that lead to the vicious dissections of the superstar’s death.

“Her implants, weight loss and excess doses of Botox shots regularly could also be the cause of Cardiac arrest.” Piyali Ganguly’s Comments on Sri Devi’s sad demise.

It started with a viral Facebook post that started doing the rounds on WhatsApp as soon as Sridevi’s death by cardiac arrest was announced. Piyali Ganguly’s paternalistic, contemptuous declaration of Sridevi’s inability to deal with the pressures of staying relevant in the industry spread like wildfire. It accused Sridevi of being weaker than she ‘should’ have been, wondered why Boney Kapoor didn’t ‘stop’ his wife from getting too many cosmetic procedures and going on too many diets.

It ended with a blanket damnation of Sridevi’s failure as what was, according to Ganguly, the most important facet of her being. She was accused of being a bad mother for leaving behind such a tragic legacy for her daughters.

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Sridevi is dead, and so is the self-regulation promise of Indian media

Outrage is not enough; it has to be understood and dealt with, and to some extent, accepted as an inevitable part of a quarter-baked media in a half-baked democracy. 

Indian Media on Sridevi : It is time to face a simple truth after the outrage over Indian media coverage of the death of Bollywood’s first female superstar, Sridevi: that outrage is not enough; it has to be understood and dealt with, and to some extent, accepted as an inevitable part of a quarter-baked media in a half-baked democracy.

In case you have not watched the prurient TV channels that made a macabre masquerade out of a solemn event (I confess even I did not watch much), the news in brief, elaborately tracked on the Web is this: they conjectured that the death was more than unnatural, hinted towards crimes and/or misdismeanours, and created scenarios and digital constructions that included a wine glass near a bathtub, a reporter crouching inside a bathtub, and detailed forensic measurements that would have been better off in a fictional channel specialising in crime.

But there are those who are outraged by the outrage over the media coverage, which has resulted in predictable and understandable articles that deride the fall of balance, ethics and responsibility in journalism. It is necessary to look beyond this outrage, at least to focus on the belief of the channels and their viewers who think they were indeed doing the right thing in “investigating” the death by drowning in a bathtub in a Dubai hotel.

Typically, celebrity death stories have three angles that editors would like to highlight: one is the news of the death itself, second is the manner of the death, and the third would be on obituary references, which in the case of achievers like Sridevi are phenomenal. Ideally, the news of the death would be reported in solemn tones, obituary references in laudatory tones and the manner of death in proportion to the detail.

It is in the last that TV channels have triggered outrage, as they virtually abandoned the first two angles and used recent events like her dancing in a wedding the previous week and her cinematic persona to create a construction that smacks of what they call yellow journalism. We could call it “third degree” journalism, given the channels’ tendency to behave like power-drunk interrogators.

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