That’s the main reason why everyone is on the lookout for making a fast buck out of celebs. Example— After a poor game Sachin Tendulkar banged his leg against a door, and what did the officials do? They did as expected— rather than replace the broken door, the officials decided to auction it! (Be careful, Sachin. Next time you break your knee, they may decide to auction it, rather than replace it…) Again, as expected, cricket fans queued up to exchange their lifetime earnings for a piece of broken furniture.

“How much is this strand of hair of Shah Rukh?” “Ten years of your income, Sir. But don’t worry Sir, you can pay by EMI.” In the celebrity-circuit this is business as usual.

In fact business is so good today that in the near future, you can easily picture a store with a board displaying: ‘Available only today— Biscuit wrapper used by Sachin Tendulkar, freshly cut toe-nails of Mallika Sherawat, one rupee coin tipped by Shahrukh Khan to waiter...’ and so on and so forth.

The issue here is not about the public appetite for Mallika Sherawat’s toe nails, but about the truly mind-boggling potential of celebrity memorabilia, which far goes beyond the gratification of a mindless whim.

Though it thrives on the possibility of an ordinary individual losing his sanity in a moment of madness, here’s why auctioning products used by celebs make for a perfectly sane business model: a) There’s no need to invest in any R&D. b) Anything used by a celebrity will make the grade. c) The product, almost by definition, need not be of any use. In fact, the more useless it is, the more value it will add to its re-sale value. d) You can price the product any which way you want— there’s no relation to price and cost. According to those who have made it big in the trade, the price is normally fixed by choosing a number in a lucky draw which by the way, contains one single five-digit number. e) The products require very little inventory capacity. f) You don’t need any qualification, training, resources, experience, or any brains, to succeed in this business.

All you need to have is— access to the dustbins of the rich and famous. That’s where you find these priceless things.

Come to think of it, the celebrity memorabilia industry also offers immense opportunities for the government to raise truly cheap money from the public. Perhaps we can have an exclusive Ministry of Celebrities at the Centre (Cabinet rank), which should start by calling for a census of the number of celebrities in the country. If you go by the number of people hogging cyberspace on the numerous TV channels, there may be one celebrity per minute, per channel which works out to 1,116,34,527 celebrities overall.

Now, suppose the ministry puts up each of these celebrity’s dustbins for sale every month, and each dustbin has say, an average of 100 ... er... ‘memorabilia’ per month. Suppose too, that these hundred items are sold at an average price of say, Rs 10,000 each. Which means the Ministry will be able to raise a sum of Rs 1,116,34,527 X 100 X 10,000 = Rs 11,16,34,52,70,00,000 every month!

Yes, our honourable celebrities will crib and demand their pound of flesh. But when the government is able to raise lakhs of crores with little effort, it will surely not mind making this tax deductable. Tell the Rich & Famous to ‘Give your dustbins and pay no taxes!’ and you can expect them to fall in line.

And if they still don’t fall in line, we can always count on Honourable Sri Abdul Kalam Sir to conceptualise a Mission Mode Programme on how to redeem the value of the throwaways in the Power dustbins, so that India emerges as a Superpower not in 2020, but by the time we complete the 2020th celebrity auction sale…