Its Easter weekend here & I took time off … Been reading my favorite “The Age of Innocence” by Edith Wharton & just watched the Scorsese masterpiece movie-version for the 1000th time. The movie is genius! Has Bollywood a.k.a the mother of all copycats ever considered deriving their inspiration from this Pulitzer Prize winning novel? Edith Wharton’s novels are so melodramatic it’s almost impossible not to make a Hindi movie out of them. I mean, we do have our Indian version, Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri who could pen the script… But maybe we need to produce an Indian equivalent of Martin Scorsese first? LOL!

She calls a spade a spade, Shobha De is the queen of Bollywood hilarity. The Mumbai Times carries her column Shobha’s People and the lady had me in splits … She made a very interesting point about the Hrithik Roshan and that Spanish Goddess Mizz Barbara Mori drama. This is by the way great publicity for the upcoming Kites. Anyways, digging into his controversial rumored affair (front page news; we cannot expect anything less from Times of India, TOI, can we?) Shobha makes fun of how poor Hrithik had to rush back home - and leave Barbara pining for more – to gallantly rescue his marriage.

Here’s an excerpt from her article (which TOI claims to have no bearing on in very fine print) … “Hrithik Roshan deserves an international award for originality! Wow! What an excuse — white ants. Termites! What’s next? Cockroaches and lizards? Whether or not his marriage is on the rocks, let’s hand it to him for coming up with an amazing explanation as to why his wife and kids had moved out — but not exactly moved on. Explained the couple, “Our flat needed treatment for white ants.” So urgent was this treatment that nobody bothered to inform the man of the house, who happened to be overseas and was forced to rush back from a foreign location to deal with the emergency — the ants. The crisis was so critical that he and his worried wife spent the entire night talking about it. By the next morning, the problem had been amicably resolved (the ants must have co-operated), for the couple to issue a joint statement and claim they were enjoying a ‘picnic’ with the kids and inlaws. The ants were clearly not invited to this happy event. As always, they also had a ‘good laugh’ over the nasty rumours and found them ‘most funny’ ( zero originality here). The family is very much together, and blissfully happy. So there!” –Shobha De, Mumbai Times, April 13, 2009.

My Translation: When you have a pissed off wife sitting in India, Mexico doesn’t look all that tempting, does it !!! After all the wifey’s probably got the nation’s best divorce attorneys on speed dial and then there is the Bollywood press waiting to jump on you before you sneeze “Mi casa su casa”….

Certainly we don’t live in the age of innocence any more. Au contraire, we call upon our cousins Miss. Naivety and Mr. Denial. Well, atleast Priety Zinta did! She blogged insanely yesterday denying her break up & how she is still with Ness and not hitting on Vikram Chatwal.

Shobha makes a good point – Don’t sell us an excuse we won’t buy! Since the media will make some hoopla about it, watch your tracks or at the very least cover them up. Hrithik, watch and learn. There comes a time in every celeb’s life when they order the drink called Marriage-On-The-Rocks but only few who get away ala David Bekham. Will Hritik be so lucky? I guess we’ll find out only after “Kites” hits the theaters … But something tells me that if the great authoress Edith Wharton were alive, maybe she’d have called this ‘The Age of Dissonance’ and definitely would have told Hrithik to bet the house …& the white ants in it!

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PS: An episode of Gossip Girl was inspired by the Edith’s novel and re-titled ‘The Age of Dissonance’ focusing on old-school infidelity which goes beyond romantic relationships and surrounds us in platonic ones too.