Remembering MJ — one year on...

It is just over a year now that the world on this side of the Atlantic woke up to the chilling news. I still remember those disturbing pictures on CNN. I had just got out of bed and was having a shave. As my gaze alternated between my stubble-ridden chin and the TV screen, my heart missed a beat or two. Still pictures of attempts to revive Michael Jackson, in the ambulance that drove him to the hospital, will remain etched in my memory forever. As news trickled in and his death was confirmed, my mind raced back in time…

I was still a teenager when a young singer shot into fame. He was young and innocent, and still black. Money and fame had not tainted him yet. He was still known as one of the 'Jackson 5', when not many music lovers outside America knew him. But, that state of bliss was soon to be over, never to return. He won award after award and his chartbusting music broke every record there was to break. Fame and money became his constant companions and the world of music was at his feet. He became the presiding deity in the pantheon of demi-gods of pop music. Life was never the same again.

Michael shocked the world by the way he died, just as he had shocked the world by the way he lived. His obsession with cosmetic surgery and skin bleaching agents, his addiction to prescription drugs, his controversial marriage and the manner in which he chose to have his children, all of it kept the paparazzi busy. Add to that child molestation charges and allegations of paedophilia and paederasty, and his life was the stuff of a best-selling novel. Reviled as much as he was adored, the beleaguered celebrity withdrew into a shell. And, that was the beginning of the end.

He became increasingly paranoid of the outside world and converted his own home into a fortress. He surrounded himself by paid henchmen who gradually took complete control of his life. As he sank into depression and began to suffer from myriad forms of psychosomatic illnesses, he turned to prescription drugs, an overdose of which finally cut short his life. A deadly cocktail of anti-depressants, pain-killers and anti-anxiety medication proved too much for his frail and much-abused body to handle. The writing was on the wall. What happened had to happen. It was just a matter of time.

What pains me and many others is the hypocrisy of the world. When the man was alive they wouldn’t leave him alone and give him his space. He was harassed and hounded, reviled and persecuted. Once in the wake of the child molestation allegations, some investigating police officials who raided his mansion humiliated him by going so far as taking pictures of his private parts! The media carried on a vilification campaign against him. Imagine the mental state of a lonely celebrity under such extenuating circumstances. The deadly drugs that killed him eventually, only drove the final nail into his coffin.

The moment he died, though, he regained his crown of King of Pop. He was hailed as a legend. All his faults and foibles were whitewashed by crocodile tears shed by a fawning media. Now that he had become “late”, automatically, he seemed to have become “great”. MJ was not the first celebrity to have been treated this way, and will probably not be the last. Does it have to be this way? Must we kill people for their sins, and then elevate them to the status of demi-gods to wash away our own?