Common man’s hatred and/or jealousy for celebrities is something I have written about time and again. For every fan who foolishly worships celebrities as Gods, there are hundreds of haters whose life’s purpose is proving that celebrities are the culmination of all evil that there is in the universe. I have seen this hatred manifest in multiple forms, at multiple instances. But none of these compares to the idiocy I have seen lately in the dissection of Deepika Padukone’s pregnancy—the one that haters have chosen to call a farce.
Honestly, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry about it. Truth be told, when Deepika must have been hardly 2 months along, how some ‘netizens’ used their infrared vision to figure out there was a tiny baby bump under her saree and smoked out her pregnancy is still a mystery to me. But what followed was an outlash that I never imagined I would see. When she was around 5 or 6 months along and had only a tiny bump that was hardly visible under her baggy clothes, all hell broke loose—’She is not pregnant, she’s just pretending to be!’ Who came out with this priceless finding, I’ll never know. But whoever it was, it caught on like wildfire and soon the entire Internet was obsessed with Deepika Padukone’s ‘non-pregnancy,’ which in their words was nothing but a publicity stunt to hide the fact that they had a surrogate!
It made me think back to both my pregnancies when until the end of the second trimester, I was struggling to flaunt my teeny-weeny baby bump. I still remember how in the 8th month of my first pregnancy, a lady came to me and asked confidently, ‘3 months along, right?’ She wouldn’t believe that I was ready to go into labour any time in the next month or two. So, even if Deepika Padukone looked the same well into her third trimester as well, I would have no trouble believing HER about HER pregnancy. I mean, for whatever reason, why should anyone start a web debate about someone’s pregnancy in the first place?
Clueless men commenting on it authoritatively was bad enough—especially with the recent controversy twisting her words and questioning her character and loyalty towards her husband used as the context. But even worse were the comments from any senseless woman, who had ever had the experience of a pregnancy, deciding to jump in and weigh in on the situation. And they were unapologetically resorting to ‘facts’—a woman who is in her second trimester of pregnancy MUST have a pronounced baby bump; a pregnant woman WILL NEVER wear high heels the way she did; the way she walked, the way she sat, the way she got up was all not the way a really pregnant woman does. When she finally did start showing, the same people started with ‘She’s an actress. Of course, she can look pregnant with a fake baby bump under her dress.’ So now the problem is that she is showing! Great!
Some of these comments made me laugh, some made my blood boil, but mostly, all of them made me wonder why people are so damn confident in spitting out stupidity without worrying about how idiotic their comments would make them look. And then I saw the hordes of followers and supporters each of these commenters had, and I realised that in a world full of crazy people, the ones who aren’t stupid would be the ones looking crazy. I can’t say that I am totally shocked at this absolute entitlement to opinion that people have about someone else’s life and especially their choice of having kids. It is just a whole lot more blown out of proportion when it is a celebrity, who in the eyes of these jobless jerks, is ‘public property’ to be trash-talked about without any consequences.
Any time a celebrity has welcomed a baby through surrogacy, people, especially women, have made it a point to shame them relentlessly for not really being mothers. ‘After all, how can anyone be a mother without carrying a baby in her womb for 10 months, and preferably pushing it out of her and not taking the easy way out with a C-section???’ How do you argue with such foolproof logic? As for the pregnant celebrities, everything they do or don’t is dissected microscopically and criticized, with the conclusion inevitably being ‘She’s not fit to be a mother.’ So questioning someone’s real pregnancy and shaming her saying she is faking it is probably just an extension of the moronic levels of mom-shaming and celebrity-shaming that we have been seeing around us for years.
I can’t wait to see what other forms of shaming and conspiracy theories are brewing in the incubators of these dimwits’ brains. The way things are though, I’m sure that we won’t have to wait too long for the next one. For now, let’s just wish Mommy and baby Padukone a happy and healthy life, shall we?
Also published on Medium.
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