Ever since this season’s Koffee with Karan episode featuring Deepika Padukone and Ranveer Singh aired, my social media feed has been crowded with trolls, memes and even very serious posts slut-shaming her. While it irked me big time, as does any post or comment that abuses celebrities simply because they are celebrities, I chose not to write about it. (Do not come to me with arguments like how all celebrities are entitled jerks who don’t know the meaning of struggles or morals.) The reason is that I have written time and again about the kind of unreasonable hatred that people show towards celebrities (yeah, the exact opposite of those who worship celebrities as Gods) and spew their hatred in the form of highly toxic and unpardonable posts and comments that can make even the most mentally stable person want to jump off a building. But today I came across a by-now viral video of a group of students from a college fest at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) that left me appalled. And I knew that I would be restless and agitated until I write this.

The said performance was a portrayal of Deepika Padukone’s dating life – inclusive of relationships she had been open about and others, which in all probability, have been the creation of some very imaginative minds of our rotten paparazzi clan. These jerks literally had a ramp show that showed a student dressed as Deepika’s avatar from the movie Bajirao Mastani, and while projecting on a big-ass screen her actual pictures with every single guy she has ever been linked with, having some other students dressed as each of these men doing a mini-performance, before taking their places beside the onstage ‘Deepika.’ Could it have gotten any worse? Oh yes! The merry hooting and howling and standing ovation given to this mind-numbing act by their braindead collegemates, including… yes of course, girls!

I couldn’t believe the sheer audacity of a group of twenty-year-olds to think that it was absolutely fine for them to use a real person’s pictures and her relationships/rumours of relationships as fodder for a stage performance. I mean, I’m sure it all started with her latest appearance on the talk show and the ‘fun chats’ about that among a group of students. But whoever came up with the idea of making her and the men who might or might not have been part of her life as the central theme of a stage show??? And what godforsaken college has a teaching staff and a head of the institution that doesn’t demand this shit-show be stopped immediately, instead of having it go on for its entirety? Well, I guess that in itself is an answer to why these idiots thought it was okay to do this. To think that there was not a single staff member there to see what atrocity their students were showcasing as part of a talent fest (?) and to ensure that such tomfoolery didn’t take place in a programme that was associated with the university – unbelievable!

To begin with, I can’t even understand what the self-righteous assholes on social media are crying about. They call this woman a morally corrupt person. Simply because she stated that when she met her now-husband, they were both out of serious relationships and were not yet comfortable with the idea of getting into something serious, and that she went on dates with some men, but realised he was the person she wanted to be with and committed herself fully to him. And all of a sudden, the whole Indian social media exploded with how this ‘loose woman’ practically ‘tried out’ multiple men and chose one that she had kept as a ‘backup.’ Half of the people who are calling her a whore are those who must have spoken to or met multiple people they matched with on matrimonial sites at the same time, made a shortlist based on multiple parameters and finally made a choice of whom to marry – all in a span of a few weeks or months. (No offense to the system of arranged marriage or those who got married that way.) But to use more or less the very same process against someone only because it is outside the arranged marriage system, and to call them immoral – now that is the heights of hypocrisy! Or else, these people have a very twisted idea of what ‘seeing someone’ means.

At the end of the day, all of this, including the BHU assholery, boils down to this – people believe that celebrities are supposed to take anything that’s thrown their way only because they chose to be famous, and that we have the right to say whatever the fuck we want to about them, no matter how bad. And then we call them entitled. Wow! A very simple example of this attitude is the recent deepfake video controversy involving Rashmika Mandanna. For every person who condemned the video and spoke of the dangers of the deepfake trend, there were tens and hundreds who commented, ‘She has no shame in showing all this directly in movies. Why is she complaining now?’ In short, anyone can make any vulgar video and morph a celebrity’s face into it, and it is all fine because, ‘You asked for it when you chose the path to fame.’

As far as the BHU incident is concerned, I truly hope Deepika Padukone sues these idiots and the college management who let this happen, only so that for once, someone learns that there are consequences to actions. And no, it’s not a consequence to her choice of dating whoever the hell she wanted that I am talking about, just in case you are going to bring that up as a lame-ass argument. But in a country where open death and rape threats are ignored as ‘just trolls that would no doubt come your way if you are famous’ and the only course of action given to the victim is ‘deactivate or delete your account if you do not wish to see this,’ I wouldn’t be surprised if nothing came out of suing these jerks. And maybe since she knows it, she might not even bother to waste her time and energy on these lowlifes. Sad indeed!

Also published on Medium.