Before blogs had walked the red carpet in the growl and gossip corridors of Bollywood, we knew them as the virtual cousins of our favourite personal diary almost. Then Bollywood happened, and from Sudhir Mishra to Bipasha Basu, the industry discovered the smart publicity inroads that came with blogs. But till a few days ago, it would be Anurag Kashyap caustically defending his flights of cinematic fantasy or Basu typing in practiced quotes, who would be found frequenting the blogging portals.

And then we had Amir Khan, Amitabh Bachchan and now, Ram Gopal Varma word washing every bit of the reviews Sarkar Raj had invited. There seems to a change of tact too. There are no continuous and flowery accounts of a single movie. Amir Khan, in an entry titled ‘Serves Me Right !!!’ writes, ‘Only silver lining is I’ll get to see Kiran in another hour. When she heard she jumped on the flight and is on her way here.’ You could mistake it for your best friend’s boyfriend’s blog even! However, Debraj Dutta, a final-year hotel management student and a Bollywood junkie feels that the blogs bring the celebs no more closer than they are. “I have read a couple of Amir’s blog entries. They are nice but mostly diplomatic,” says Dutta.

Ushati Das, a postgraduate student at IISC Bangalore, who was an avid blogger during her college days, finds the celeb blogs not in keeping with the spirit of blogging. Das finds them too disciplined, too safe to speak for a person—his choices, whims, opinions. “The celebs are mostly fence-sitters. There’s no strong opinion about anything in their blogs,” says Das.

Krishanu Nandy, who completed his engineering from Jadavpur University, however, finds nothing surprising in the fact. “It is but expected that celebs tread a safer route when it comes to blogging. They are public figures still, and their opinions are subject to criticism from unlikely and undesirable corners,” says Nandy. Nandy’s opinion is reiterated by the following extract from Amitabh Bachchan’s blog entry at BigAdda about an article he was asked to write about the Mumbai rains.

‘But..We have the means to shift the belongings to a higher floor in the mansion. We have the means to clean the carpet and repair the furniture...We survive. The poor die.

And you want me to complain and comment on my condition!!

I have no complaints. I will live within this.

I will suffer the loss, but not the suffering of others.

Five families of my staff lost their homes on the ‘nala’. I brought them in. They now have a roof in my house. I will feed them till I can find a suitable accommodation for them. But what of the others? Where do they go?

I have no complaints.’

I fear the politicisation of my comments to the authorities. I am a labelled ‘outsider’. I dare not have a voice in a land within my own land!

Sudeshna Mitra, an IT professional, feels that despite a change in blogging idiom, the bottomline remains publicity. But what explains that severe attack at film critics in Ram Gopal Varma’s blog which doesn’t hesitate before taking personal digs at the critics? Mitra answers, “He lashes out at people who are recognised faces in their own rights. It’s like a battle of stars, which has nothing do with either fans or the hundreds of film-lovers like us.”

“It’s just publicity getting smarter,” says Nirmalya Majumder, a copywriter and producer with a radio station.