Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'Everyone is paranoid,' he confirmed. 'Even Amitabh Bhajan -
biggest star,
biggest
- he never has a party in his house, and he never
invites anyone back there even. He will go to some party given for
him, of course, but never,
never
, is he letting even the friends come
to his house.'
'Why?'
'Fear, man,
fear
.' He shuddered. 'I tell you, this is a dark town now.
Too much blood has been spilled. I am not lying.
To o
much blood.
The gangsters run everything now,
everything
.'
He proceeded to tell me which female stars were which gangsters'
molls and in one case which
male
star was which gangster's moll. It
did sound a bit worse than Los Angeles.
'Of course he's bloody right,' said Vinod Sharma, a guest at Rahul
Singh's party. 'The film business is almost as bad as politics these
days.'
Vinod was some sort of businessman who wrote investigative
journalism as a hobby, or maybe as a form of revenge, it wasn't clear.
He specialised in investigating politicians.
'Muckraking?' I inquired.
'
Muck
raking?' He exploded into laughter. 'If I were muckraking,
I'd never have written a word - there's far too much muck to rake
here
. I have to be more selective: find the lead, follow it, dig up the
documents, ferret out the witnesses, persuade the minions to spill
the beans, then
nail the rascals
!'
Nailing the rascals
was a phrase that gave him much deep
satisfaction, and he used it frequently. He had, Rahul informed me,
nailed some pretty big rascals in his time, too. He was an irresistibly
likeable man, and his independence made him the kind of valuable
nuisance every society needs. It did strike me, however, that if politics
really was as bad or worse as the film business allegedly was, Vinod
Sharma wouldn't have lived long enough to tell me about it.
I spent most of the evening talking to another of David Davidar's
authors, Gurcharan Das. His first novel,
A Fine Family
, had been
published by Penguin in 1990. I asked jokingly what dubious
profession Davidar had dragged him out of before he'd become a
