Page 3 in India shares nothing with its ancestor from Sun except its location and regularity in the morning newspaper. The scantily clad girls on Page 3 aided the fortunes of Rupert Murdoch by turning Sun from a boring newspaper to a more easily digestible tabloid which appealed to the taste buds more democratically. What does this page bring to the table every morning for us?

Considering the timing of the appearance of page 3 in our lives, it seems to be another post liberalization phenomenon which has populated contemporary Indian life space. We clearly need this fix in our lives every morning much more than we need semi-nude girls. What liberalization has brought to our lives is ‘possibilities.’ A response is needed to our impossibly complicated individual lives which are now uncomfortably pregnant with possibilities. Even coffee drinking is pregnant – “A lot can happen over coffee.” This only means constantly negotiating decisions for which there are no precedents and only you are responsible for the fall out. Freedom, limitless growth and a future unfolding on 70 mm (till the slow down) has its price. A circuit-breaker is bound to trip up due to the overload on the individual. Where are the daffodils and what happened to the staring? Simple pleasures such as pointlessly standing at the window and watching a random slice of life floating by without awaiting your comment or action perhaps needs a contemporary avatar.

What is sorely needed is the luxury of nothingness. What we miss is the texture of candy floss when a large mouthful can be made to collapse into nothingness. That is perhaps what the good life consists of. Cream whipped into voluminous swirls, millions of frothy bubbles filling a bath – all connote visions of sinking into soft fluffiness which offers no resistance on being displaced. Page 3 perhaps presents to us a visual of life consisting of shimmering bubbles languorously floating around.

Pretty pictures of beautiful people on a nebulously happy occasion presented to us in visuals without too much text to offer resistance in the process of easy consumption. The pictures mostly consist of pretty people in a pretty outfit and the caption at the bottom highlights nothing more than the color of the dress. ‘Moody blues’, ‘flaming red’, ‘chic in yellow’ kind of captions in a way gently guide us back into an uncomplicated world where nothing more than the basic feature needs to be read into. In fact the pictures day afterday offer a comforting sameness as they don’t attempt to reference the specific occasion in any way. day offer a comforting sameness as they don’t attempt to reference the specific occasion in any way. The occasion could be a wedding, a launch or a fashion event but that does not ever become the focus of the page. In fact there is never a focus; just many little sparkly stars who dot the firmament. Page 3 manages to invert the figure and ground relationship quite successfully. The ground becomes the picture relieving us from the task of focusing and creating meaning.