Over the weekend, actor Sara Ali Khan was spotted donating packets of food to the needy outside a temple in Mumbai’s Juhu. Caught in the act by the city’s intrepid paparazzi, the usually camera-confident Khan changed her tone: please don’t record, she said, firmly.
Khan’s request to the paparazzi has gone more viral than her act of donating food to the underprivileged. The incident has sparked a debate on whether celebrities have room to negotiate when they step outside their gilded homes.
The cameras, which she’s trying to control, have kept her in the news cycle for longer, and have kept her fans talking about her. This speaks to not just a celebrity’s relationship with the paparazzi, but also their relationship with both their fan base—and haters.
The paparazzi have opened a new front of interaction, where social media users can catch celebrities in the twilight zone between the public and private.
Khan’s was not just a random act of kindness that happened to be documented — this was an embarrassed actor demurring from the spotlight, trying to prevent an act of charity from becoming publicity. Or was it?
Khan’s fans have rushed to defend her right to privacy. Her critics have called her out for pulling a ‘PR stunt’. The paparazzi continue unbothered, adhering to the social contract that keeps them from revealing whether Khan’s team had tipped them off or not.
Now, headlines have all picked up on her response to the paparazzi, rather than just focusing on her donation. ‘Sara Ali Khan asks paparazzi to respect her privacy while distributing meals to the underprivileged’, says one. ‘Sara Ali Khan Distributes Food Packets In Juhu, Asks Paparazzi To Not Click Her Pics’ is another.
The biggest stars like Shah Rukh Khan and Deepika Padukone already know how to navigate their stardom and what comes with it. But those who are still figuring out where they fit in this constellation of stars have a love-hate relationship with the paparazzi.
Charity vs celebrity
On the internet, Khan is Bollywood’s ‘simple’ girl next door. She doesn’t care for designer clothes or expensive things. She mooches off others’ internet hotspots instead of buying international roaming. She doesn’t hesitate to appear at an airport with wet hair, dressed in plain Indian clothes. Khan was a breath of fresh air when she first drifted onto the scene because she was actively resisting the cookie-cutter mould of a new-age celebrity.
Here was someone who, despite being a nepo baby, also had a college degree from an Ivy League school.
She initially tried to be relatable, but over time, her public image — aided in part by the paparazzi, various interviews and talk shows, and her own self-expression on social media — has prompted different reactions.
Now, the question is this: Is she cool or cringe?
An actor whose public image and relationship with the media often get more attention than her films, Khan has come of age in the Instagram era of Bollywood.
There are unspoken rules about how celebrities should operate. If stardom was about mystique in the past, it’s about overexposure today, said Shobha De. How celebrities deploy the paparazzi defines how they come across — whether as cool, or cringe. Being over-documented is cringe, but if it happens organically it’s cool. Being open and honest with the paparazzi is cool, but being too open and honest is cringe.
Either way, Khan’s act of charity is made that much more significant because of her celebrity. But trying to underplay her fame to highlight her charity has had the opposite effect in Khan’s case—because she has worked so hard on crafting her image as a relatable girl-next-door.
Also read: Anurag Kashyap is done pleasing people—pay for his time or get lost
The privacy-paparazzi complex
Internet analysis aside, fans of Khan are upset that online discourse is dismissing her as cringe.
The actor was simply doing a good deed after praying at a temple on a Sunday morning in Mumbai. “I’m tired of asking you to stop,” she told the paparazzi — surely Khan doesn’t want to be documented so relentlessly.
This is enough proof for Khan’s fans that she hasn’t bought into the concept of manufacturing celebrity — which is exactly what the paparazzi help with.
However, it remains to be seen whether Khan’s fans would defend her right to privacy–should she choose to exercise it–as and when she exits the airport in kurta-pajamas and wet hair.
Views are personal.