The flashbulbs don’t care about your grief. They’re indifferent to the smell of incense or the quiet dignity of a prayer hall in Juhu. To the sensors on a Sony A7R V, a funeral is just another high-contrast environment with excellent potential for engagement metrics.
The prayer meet for Anand Sagar, the man who helped steer the vessel of television royalty as part of the Ramanand Sagar dynasty, wasn't just a memorial. It was a content goldmine. In the current attention economy, death is a legacy feature, and the arrival of Hema Malini and Jaya Bachchan is the high-bandwidth update everyone was waiting for.
We’ve reached a point where mourning has been optimized. It’s no longer about the quiet reflection on a career that spanned the mythological highs of the 80s and the 2000s. It’s about the frame. It’s about how many megapixels we can throw at a legend’s sorrow before it starts to look like a press junket.
Hema Malini walked in first. The "Dream Girl" label is an old firmware version at this point, but it still runs smoothly. She navigated the sea of outstretched iPhones with the practiced ease of someone who’s been living in a goldfish bowl since the 70s. There’s a specific trade-off here, a friction that most people ignore: the cost of a public life is the total surrender of your private exits. You don't get to say goodbye to a colleague without a dozen 4K lenses tracking the moisture in your eyes.
Then came Jaya Bachchan. If the Bollywood ecosystem is a buggy piece of software, Jaya is the ultimate crash report. She’s the only one who still seems to realize how grotesque this all is. Every time a paparazzo shoves a lens into her personal space, she reacts with a visceral, analog anger that no PR training can smooth over. It’s the last bit of human friction in an industry that’s become entirely too frictionless. She isn't just paying respects to Anand Sagar; she's waging a one-woman war against the commodification of a prayer meet.
Anand Sagar himself belonged to a different era of tech. He was part of the machinery that brought Ramayan to the small screen, a feat that, at the time, relied on physical sets and the kind of slow-burn production that today’s "creator economy" would find agonizing. His death marks another shuttering of the old studio system, replaced by the frenetic, vertical-video reality of the present.
The paparazzi outside weren't talking about Sagar’s contribution to the Indian television lexicon. They were checking their battery packs. They were arguing over which angle of Jaya’s arrival would pull the most comments on a "Bolly-Buzz" Instagram page. There’s a literal price tag on this behavior—exclusive footage of a mourning A-lister can fetch a premium from the digital tabloids, provided the lighting is right and the grief looks sufficiently cinematic.
It’s a strange trade-off. We claim to honor the dead, but we’re really just feeding the algorithm. We’ve turned the finality of a prayer meet into a rolling news cycle, complete with sponsor tags and "Link in Bio" calls to action. The Sagars gave India a sense of the divine through the cathode-ray tube, but today, that divinity is just another thumbnail to be swiped past in the hunt for something more scandalous.
The prayer hall offered a temporary sanctuary, but the moment those doors opened, the simulation resumed. Hema Malini’s grace and Jaya Bachchan’s defiance are just data points now. We’ve managed to digitize the soul of the industry, and in doing so, we’ve lost the ability to let anyone go in peace.
As the cars pulled away and the crowd dispersed to upload their clips, one thing became clear: in the age of the omnipresent lens, there is no such thing as a private goodbye. There is only the footage we haven't edited yet.
Does the "Dream Girl" still dream of a world where she can attend a funeral without being a trending topic, or has the hardware been running this way for so long that the glitch has become the system?