On celebrity age-fudging

[Warning: very obsessive post, full of tiny details that won't mean much to anyone else. It derives from my unhealthy (and as far as I can tell, minority-of-one) obsession with people's years of birth. I get pissed off when public figures fudge their years of birth. It feels like they are thus denying not only their own personal histories but the personal histories of their families, friends, colleagues and contemporaries, and eventually perhaps in some small way altering the story of the world.

Yes, I DID say this was going to be an obsessive-compulsive rant.]

It's widely known that the ages of some film stars are as difficult to pin down as those of Pakistani cricketers (remember that alarming period when Inzamam refused to budge from the cold comforts of 29 for a full five years?). There's the old yarn about a much-married Hollywood diva from the silent era who kept sneakily removing years from her portfolio until one day her press agents discovered that she was now officially younger than her eldest son. Fortunately it didn't make much difference in this case since the son wasn't a public figure himself - and so the deception continued apace until the actress died of natural causes, still a few years older than her eldest grandchild.

[Note: I may have fabricated this yarn. But if so, I maintaiin there is poetic truth in it.]

Some years ago, while helping to compile articles for an encyclopedia of Indian cinema, I found that it was nearly impossible to get reliable information on the years of birth for some celebrities. The only cases where you could be reasonably sure were with dynasties such as the Kapoor khandan, or with star children (Sanjay Dutt, Saif Ali Khan) of parents who were already famous at the time of their birth. Also, performers who began their careers as child-actors. It's not that the information isn't available but that it changes with amazing frequency. Trawling the usual websites with actor profiles (IMDB, Wikipedia, Upperstall.com), it's entertaining to watch the number-fudging patterns that emerge over the months. Some observations:

- Age-tampering occurs far more often with performers who had ultra-glamorous images during their heyday. With actresses like Raakhee, Jaya Bhaduri and even Hema Malini, sticking to one date of birth was never a problem – in fact, growing old gracefully became a feather in their matronly hair-buns. But it's quite different for, say, Zeenat Aman and Parveen Babi, who had to be seen as being forever young. It's a matter of biographical record that both these ladies had a full formal education; at the very least, each of them finished college before she got anywhere near a movie camera. But if you look at some of the birth dates officially trotted out for them (Parveen's was widely reported as 1955 after her death last year) and then glance through their filmographies, you'd have to think they were 14 or 15 when they were shooting their first films. (Zeenie managed somehow to do a journalistic course after graduation, work for a while with Femina, and still make her movie debut while in her teens!)

- Typically, the alterations start to happen when a personality is about to encounter an undesirable milestone birthday. Shatrughan Sinha, for instance, has been on a desperate mission to avoid hitting the unmentionable S-I-X-T-Y for some time now; his official year of birth has changed from 1941 through 1945 and 1946, and is currently showing as 1948 on Wikipedia (though amusingly it still says "1945 births" in the Categories section at the bottom of the page). Again, a basic biographical check will indicate that 1941 is the most plausible YoB; Sinha post-graduated from the FTII in the mid-1960s before starting his career as a villain.
On the same lines, Sunny Deol has recently discovered the inherent problem with being born in October 1956: as October 2006 approaches you might meet people who know the fine art of subtraction and come to distasteful conclusions about you. Little wonder then that Deol's YoB has been magically pushed forward five years to 1961 on both the IMDB and Wikipedia databases (this happened within the last month). Perhaps with a view to maintaining cosmic order, his father Dharmendra's birth-year was briefly changed from 1935 to 1939 on Wikipedia – never mind that naram Dharam was merrily accepting congratulations for his 70th birthday last year.

- In Bollywood, actresses are not permitted to be even a couple of years older than the actors they have been successfully paired with (because that could only make them their bhabhis, and then how would romance come?). Madhuri Dixit and Juhi Chawla have both had hits with each of the three Khan heroes (who were all verifiably born in 1965), which could be one reason why both women have their official DoBs as late 1967. This is more than a little risible given that a) Juhi won the Miss India contest in early 1984 and b) Madhuri made her film debut with Abodh in 1983.

(Apropos of nothing, I remember a magazine quote from one of Ms Dixit's Class 12 teachers who expressed surprise that she became an actress at all, given how she used to wrinkle her nose at Hindi cinema. Quite a double life that, to be making such statements in front of classmates and then scooting off to a film set for dhak-dhak after school was out.)

The amusing thing about these charades is the selective amnesia required: the tampering of ages as if they exist in a vacuum and don't have any bearing on the past. All that matters is the here and now: this actor is only 35 today and that's all you're supposed to care about; you're not supposed to remember that he was dancing around trees and beating up goons 30 years ago. No one but poor obsessive-compulsive me seems to care.

And so a day might come when a quick mathematical calculation will reveal that Madhuri was just 10 when she did the "Ek Do Teen" song for Tezaab (thus turning all young men of that time into wannabe paedophiles and giving us more retrospective information than we need about societal trends of the 1980s). Eventually, if the deception is carried far enough, she may altogether cease to exist.

P.S. Wikipedia being what it is, some of the dates I've mentioned in this piece (the Deols', for instance) have already been re-revised. Don't bet on them staying that way.

Update: Praba Mahajan, a researcher associated with GRAFTII (graduates of FTII), writes in to tell me that Shatrughan Sinha graduated from the FTII in 1967 and that a college degree wasn't a prerequisite for joining the FTII. Which means that he could be 1946-born after all (though certainly no younger). Fair enough; the only reason I'm still slightly doubtful is that the Shotgun's YoB was 1941 for a long time on sites like IMDB and Wikipedia; and in my experience the earliest-mentioned YoB for an actor/actress is usually the correct one!

(Illustration: Anirban Bora for Business Standard)