Celebrities’ right to lead private life

Two cricketers have been suspended for making public their private sexual escapades in a popular TV talk show. A recent biopic on a famous star showed the hero quite triumphantly declaring his score of extramarital flings, and the audience lapped it up. I believe this movie is even going for award competitions too. Why this hypocrisy and double standards? In this era of complete openness and ‘regressive’ prudishness, the attachment of private life to professional careers is laughable.

As long as one is not a preacher or a priest, it is immaterial what a cricketer does off field and whether he wants to talk about it publicly. That is his choice for whatever reasons he thinks plausible - money, fame, popularity, so on. It should not come in the way of his cricketing career. It is a problem with the masses who want to make heroes out of them.

They are the fools who instead of following or learning from their cricket, either idolise or condemn based on their private behaviour. Some would go to the extent of justifying their private lives based on these ‘public’ characters. The youth should understand that the celebrities on the silver screens or sports or business are no ‘heroes’ but very ordinary people possessing all the basic human qualities. One should look to idolise and get inspired by real heroes and not by a few with more than ordinary physical and intellectual abilities.

Being a hero is an all-round package and a very few are actually qualified to be called so. They may not even be in the public domain. We do not understand this separation of the public and the private life (not crossing criminality); and hence, it is rather strange to ban the two players. Their private behaviour is to be condemned no doubt, but it has no bearing on their selections in the team.

- Dr Pingali Gopal, Excise Colony, Warangal