GOSSIP: VICIOUS WORDS

By Rabia Ahmed | Dawn InpaperMagzine                                                                    18 September 2011                  

There are no absolutes, said Trotsky. Everything and every person posesses a flip side. Therefore even gossip, though it is likened to cannibalism in religion, must have something in its favour, and so what follows is an exercise in Devil’s Advocacy Oscar Wilde is known to have said that history is ‘nothing but gossip,’ since history speaks about the dead behind their backs, persons who by virtue of being six feet under are unable to defend themselves. Who knows whether Rasputin was a saint, a mystic, a healer, or a debauched religo-sexual pervert? How much of what we know about him today is Tsarist propaganda and how much the Boney M song? Certainly it is a ‘fact’ that he was the lover of the Russian Queen that sticks best and makes Russian history more interesting.
The older the history the harder it becomes to verify a historical ‘fact’. Who or what was Anarkali? Was she simply an unfortunate maid who caught a prince’s eye, or was she a threat to the Peacock Throne because she was to become the mother of the prince’s child? It is a historian’s job to unlace documented fact from conjecture, or maybe to lace the two together, and come up with a story, a skill much practised by your cousin’s aunt’s niece, your next door neighbour and your everyday neighbourhood gossip.
Persons with such skills make the best reporters for a certain kind of newspaper, a prime example being Rita Skeeter writing for the Daily Reporter in the magical world of Harry Potter. Rita’s stories although never factual were entirely based on fact which constitutes a major difference. These stories were avidly read by J.K. Rowling’s magical population, not least because they were far more interesting than other, more factual news. This brings us neatly to the exact reason why gossip, rightly or wrongly, is such an essential part of people’s lives: it is interesting.
It has been said that a person ought to live a life so exemplary that he would not be afraid of selling his family parrot to the town gossip. There are those however, for whom such a life would be a death knell, and selling that parrot becomes a matter of priority. Why do Hollywood actors do some of the things they do? Would Hugh Mungo Grant, son of a carpet salesman and a school teacher, have been where he is today without that much publicised affair with a lady in the front seat of a car parked in a street in Los Angeles?
Given that he used to play for a cricket team named ‘Captain Scott,’ has been playing basically the same role for the past two decades, and has described his life himself as being ‘so boring its embarrassing.’ This one incident was calculated to override all this ennui and provide enough fodder for months of newspaper articles and analyses, magazines and talk shows, furnishing Grant with much needed notoriety, and film contracts. There is only one thing worse than being talked about for some: it is not being talked about at all.
There is a lot of truth that shouldn’t be passed around, but were it not, admit it, most people would be bereft. Would our cricket team, past and present, be as interesting as it currently is without its scandals? Would politicians, singers, authors sell themselves as successfully as they do without that bit of salt to make them more palatable to a greedy public?
Bill Clinton without Monica Lewinsky, Michael Jackson without the baby and the balcony rail, Imelda Marcos without her shoe obsession… one could probably name a few personages within this country as well, just how much have they and the gossip they gave rise to enlivened your life, and how long would you remember them were it not for these so-called irrelevant, unsubstantiated details?
Gossip may have holes but then so do doughnuts. Newspapers would sell less without scandal, magazines would go out of business and Hillary Clinton may have had an easier life; as it is, she must wonder which was worse, Monica or Pakistan on her plate.
The world is definitely a livelier place because people talk about each other. ‘If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody,’ said Alice Roosevelt Longworth, ‘Come sit next to me.’
Gossip is the not the words that the wind howls as it blows, it is the whispers that it carries from place to place, that you strain to catch and try to hold until they get too burdensome in your arms and you pass them on.