Poster Perfect!

Every morning-well, almost every morning-I have the pleasure of traveling to work with Rani, Katrina, Kareena or Priyanka. Once in a while, I get male company too when I have Imran or Salman or John or even, Mithun as my co-passenger but it is the rendezvous with the girls that I look forward to. Their company animates me and inspires me to discover myriad of critical hypotheses to debate upon; when with them, I can very easily set aside my saturnine, brooding self and be almost as vivacious as these lovely ladies are. On the silver screen.
I cannot coerce myself here to reiterate the names above along with their owners’ surnames for the simple reason that there cannot be a human being on the face of this planet who offers flower festoons to the gods in temples, and also to local politicians at functions, who can claim to not recognize the people I am talking of by their first names.
These are the names which have beguiled me over and again to enter a theatre only to call myself a nincompoop, fret and eventually to daydream about Caesar salad or baked pasta. These are the names of matinee idols who sell a hundred goods, kindle passions, arouse awe, and inspire the auto-rickshaw drivers of Ahmedabad to ply with elan, their noble vehicles on the streets of the city on the banks of Sabarmati!
Yes, every time, I step into an auto-rickshaw, I eagerly-and now, instinctively- look to my left and my right to find out which film star is accompanying me on my ride; whose posters adorn the sides of the passenger seat? This is something peculiar to Ahmedabad autos-almost all of them have garishly bright hued pictures of Bollywood stars, mostly female stars, on their inner sides. Earlier I used to wonder aloud every time I stepped into an auto-rickshaw, but of course, only if I have company, as to what on earth made these silver screen sirens to agree to get photographed in such costumes which are bound make people suspicious of the refinement of their sartorial sense? Quite contrary to the chic, urbane attires, in which they are usually found draped in the pages of glossy magazines and on the broadcasts of television channels, in these posters they are invariably donning outfits which seem to be out of some pot-boiler that had grossed lakhs when released in the late 1980s but since then, has never been watched by anyone who did not sooner or later, suffer from a serious bout of indigestion. In one poster, Kareena Kapoor is wearing blood-red salwar kameez with refulgent golden embroidery and in another, Katrina Kaif is dressed in a turquoise lehnga-choli with wonderfully matching red-lipstick!
I found the answer to my question when once I came across a poster of Rani Mukherjee garbed in a scarlet wedding saree, and appropriately, gazing coyly at me. There was something odd about it, I thought. It took me a few seconds to notice the source of the oddity-the ghunghat which covered her mien, was a painted one! It left me with no option but to admit to myself that a misprision has been committed, a grave one, by me. What I had nearly attributed to the poor sartorial taste of actresses has probably been caused by the wonderous technology which enables morphing of photographs.
This discovery gave rise another reverie-why do auto-rickshaw drivers prefer to have their favourite ‘heroines’ dressed in so antediluvian a fashion?
Can relativism in fashion preferences, not be frowned down upon-if this is what the auto-drivers like, who can dismiss their taste as tawdry, publicly at least? More importantly, can these posters be considered part of popular art or do they represent a niche cultural preference ? Well, I shall endeavour to investigate these questions, even if in doing so, i expose myself to the risk of being asked, ‘Absolutely jobless, are you not?’