Has toxic fandom morphed from fantastical to dangerous fanaticism for Anushka Sharma?

I don’t know about you but my heart goes out to Anushka Sharma. She gets mocked for having anxiety. She even gets trolled for drinking tea. The self-made actress has been setting boundaries for media and fans that are perpetually being invaded.

Anushka Sharma calls these infractions ‘violations’ and rightly so. Look around. These violations can border on dangerous. Salman Khan and Akshay Kumar have beefed up their security after receiving increasing death threats. Varun Dhawan’s fan threatened to kill his then partner Natasha. Fans jostled and shoved Kareena Kapoor Khan as she entered the airport. Where is the line? Where are the boundaries? Indian fans are intensely cinephilic but has their obsession with celebrities gone from fandom to creepdom?

Toxic fandom has to be the buzzword for India this year. From #BoycottBollywood to an over analysis of celebrities every movement and statement, have Indian fans lost it? Has their toxicity crossed all limits? Why is there so much vitriol regurgitated daily against celebrities? What is this manic obsession that makes them hate the very thing they clearly love? Does their escapism into the lives of the rich and famous reveal an underlying grudge against their own lives? Has their voyeurism shape-shifted into something dark? And has the otherisation of others by the public become a curse for celebs?

The Mumbai I grew up in saw stars everywhere. None of them had security or social media accounts. We’d see them when we went to a restaurant, we’d bump into them at parties, we’d clap for them at school functions, or we’d work out next to them at the gym. I remember Vinod Khanna ambling next to me almost every day at the tennis court in the then WIAA Club. Even though I never learnt tennis (I was, of course, too distracted by his handsomeness), I didn’t once strike up a conversation or ask him for a photo. I let him be. This was his time to unwind. We had so much respect for stars that though we sometimes gawked––especially if we were fans––we never hassled or threatened them. Hell, we barely had the courage to approach them! We preferred to admire them from afar, like in our screens.

Our fandom was fantastical not fanaticism. We didn’t treat celebs as commodities. We treated them as humans. Where has that respect to privacy vanished? A lot has changed. Earlier stardom used to come into our living room, now we are going into star’s living rooms. This has led to a false sense of entitlement over star’s lives. Fans feel they *must* have an opinion on everything that stars do: from what they eat, to what they wear, to who they date, to what they act in, to what brand they endorse. As we saw when Twitter was abuzz with Katrina Kaif’s alleged plastic surgery botch-ups when she came on Big Boss. Or when fans blasted Bhumi Pednekar for not wearing what they thought was appropriate Diwali attire. In the age of ennui, opinion translates to nasty judgement.

There’s the other perspective. That in a quest to become relatable, stars are oversharing. From their airport looks to their lounge wear to their child’s naamkaran to their father’s funeral, nothing is out of bounds for us to take a peek into. It has unwittingly led to people having parasocial relationships with celebs, a sense of overfamiliarity, which as we know breeds contempt. With this, the mystery of the star also goes away. Without mystery where’s the boundary? This in turn might have also quenched the thirst for fans to watch their stars in theatres. When they can watch them dance and act for free on Insta, why pay for it?

Then there’s the acute issue of where people’s common sense goes around famous people. Fans seek validation of their fandom from their favourite celeb by invading their private space and seeking instant gratification. They expect celebs to ‘deal with it’? If that’s denied to them, they lose their minds! The thinking is ‘we made you’ so ‘you owe us’, giving fans a raison d’être to behave in an irrational and unacceptable way.

This manic obsession with celebrities while deeply hating them underscores an unhinged community that’s also riddled with echo chambers.  Fans should check themselves. Are they co-opting opinions so they don’t have to form their own? Are they so sorely lacking in intelligence, patience and decency? I see people I love and admire every single day reacting to miasmic trending hashtags about a movie or actor, for their own patronage. They leach on to a popular thought-leader in their camp and form opinions without even checking facts. This confirmation bias of our nation is sickening to watch. Are we so busy striving for clickbait’s that we have no time for the truth? For humanity? We should all be willing to live with the consequences of having an independent opinion that owes itself only to the truth, only to humanity, and not to contrived agendas or toxic fandom, on either end of the spectrum.

The only way to handle toxic fandom is to slay it like the OG queen Anushka. Keep your voice strong, your head held high, your truth proud, and let your work drown out all the inveterate naysayers.

In an era where we fetishize opinions we don’t own, the weekly ‘Moderate Mahila Mandate’ presents unadulterated and non-partisan views on what’s happening to women in India today.

Meghna Pant is a multiple award-winning and bestselling author, screenwriter, columnist and speaker, whose latest novel BOYS DON’T CRY (Penguin Random House) will soon be seen on screen. 

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