Instant popularity

All you need to do is say something absolutely obnoxious about someone famous on your blog, or start comparing north indians and south indians on an e-news paper (paper, it seems!), sing a song with "luvvu luvvu" words in them, or make some movies about invisible people and put it up on YouTube. The next thing you know, you are world famous! Back in the day, it was not all this easy!! You had to be either the president, or the prime minister, a movie star or a cricketer to be seen on the TV. You had to, at the very least, be a 10 year old kid gone missing for more than a week or so to make a brief appearance on the TV screen. Ah those pre-internet, pre-FaceBook, pre-Twitter, pre-YouTube days!

But then there was a time when there was no TV. Yes, kids! Believe me when I say that there were no TVs even in the cities. Back then, India had to win the world cup for cricket to be heard on radios! You had to be the likes of Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosale, Kishor Kumar no less, to be heard on radios. In the dark ages, when even radios didn't exist, (seems like a whole 1000 years ago), you had to be actually a freedom fighter etc, and give your life for the country so as to get a brief mention in an annual magazine. Writing a whole lit survey during your stay in prison made you famous in close circles through mouth publicity, and nothing much came out of it other than the survey.

Ages before this, people invented a whole continent and received the kind of publicity I would receive for writing this whole lot of nonsense right here! (Yes, I mean around one and half people acknowledged the efforts and about half a person sent in a congratulatory remark.) And imagine the plight of a generation before that! They had to actually invent religions and write classic fiction about 1000 odd people in order to gain the kind of publicity Poonam Pandey or Paris Hilton received. Man, life was hard!!

Anyhow, with every damn action of every-god damn-body making news today, it is not too far fetched that the following news will make waves in the near future --

Ms XYZ has received the least known person in the entire world award. She has stayed out of public eye for more than 10 weeks after her birth. She is also the youngest to have managed this.

-- and of course, a few seconds after this, the award will be taken away from Ms XYZ. Poor her!