ah, THAT old ugliness...

The ongoing "controversy" surrounding Amitabh Bachchan and the Congress casts a new light on the point made by far too many that celebrities need to stay away from politics; when the stakes are this high and the profile this visible, one is likely to be politicized no matter what one does -- figures as diverse as SRK, Amitabh, and Sachin have become embroiled in manufactured controversies over the last few years -- so rather than try and maintain the naive (and perhaps disingenuous) fiction that one is simply apolitical (as virtually all celebrities do when facing flak from this or that political outfit), one should face the reality of one's position, so that any political interventions are measured and deliberate, not haphazard and reactive, and despite one as it were.

[Aside: the lack of introspection displayed by the ordinarily effective Manish Tewari is amusing: everything he says about Bachchan vis-a-vis the 2002 Gujarat pogroms can also be applied to himself vis-a-vis the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms; to paraphrase Tewari himself, he "would be stripped of his ... job the moment he uttered a word against" the Congress' "record during the anti-[Sikh] violence of [1984]." Not to mention that, given this particular round of the Congress-Bachchan war was kicked off when a Maharashtra minister from the Congress' own ally, the Nationalist Congress Party, invited Bachchan for the inauguration of the Bandra-Worli Sealink's second phase, Tewari needs to do some soul-searching on the impossibility of "construct[ing] walls between" politicos "and the communal violence and choose to see them separately; he must tell us what his views ... are." But that might be too much to ask of the spokesperson of a political party.]