How to Dignify your dirty Laundry

While you would not want to wash your dirty linen in public, there are times when you have to, to save your dignity.

We all have it, and we all don’t really need it. But show me a person who has led a spotless life, and I will show you a saint. Anyway, the idea of this article is not to pontificate, but rather to understand how to accept the life you have led in such a way that no one is offended by it. Fortunately or unfortunately, celebrities are more in the news for how they mess up rather than for the good things they often do for charity.

 Fardeen Khan tackled his cocaine arrest rather honestly, and was quite disarming about it, to the extent that he even managed to milch much media sympathy for this poor overworked glamour boy, who needs his daily snort to party and perform. An earlier precedent in celebritydom of someone who had been in drugdom and back is Sanjay Dutt, who today speaks honestly of his descent into junkiedom and how he managed to come out of it. Madhur Bhandarkar, accused of rape by starlet wannabe Preeti Jain, managed to rise above the scandal by keeping mum about the accusations, and letting his work and his reputation in the industry speak for itself. Scandal lurks just about the polished veneer of celebritydom, as one remotely following the highs and lows of their favourite celebrity’s life would know.

 Dysfunctional behaviour is no longer considered the aberration, but instead is the norm. Abroad, checking into rehab clinic is almost routine for most stars. Winona Ryder gets arrested for shoplifting, Lil Kim get booked for assault, and Kate Moss gets snapped snorting cocaine and gets written about for indulging in orgies. How do these stars get away with this, and even end up winning the sympathies of their audiences? The most powerful television personality today is Oprah Winfrey. Many sins are laid at her door for running a kind of confessional to the stars. Over the years, she has given the wayward sinners of Hollywood a chance to redeem themselves in carefully controlled performances. They get to admit to failure, ask for sympathy and promise to do better, all of which Oprah encourages and supports with a warm smile. But it rings hollow and seems to have the effect of making fans ever more tolerant of bad behaviour. The message is that you can do what you want, as long as you eventually prostrate yourself at the alter of Oprah and ask for forgiveness.

A full confessional on prime time television might not always be available for us lesser mortals to dignify our misdemeanors, but what we do have at our disposal is the ability to honestly tell those whom we care about or those whom we have wronged by our behaviour, that we regret it, and would never repeat it. Says psychologist, Dr Seema Hingorani, “If an apology is not sincere, it defeats the purpose. The ability of human being to learn from his or her mistakes and to experience regret is an indication that the person genuinely cares about his or her misbehaviour and will make a positive effort not to repeat the behaviour.”