Deepika Padukone's social media
and the state of the celebrity in India
Deepika Padukone is a bonafide superstar - perhaps the last of its kind (totally unsubstantiated but emphatic opinion). But her performance of 'celebrity' is strange.
Celebrities want to appear relatable, like common folk. Like they just happen to have become famous, but continue to live like us. They do so through twitter replies, flirty conversations with their SOs on Instagram and interviews about their middle class habits.
[As an aside, no word has been as misused as ‘middle-class’. I literally can not think of the last time I saw someone use the word correctly]
To be honest, this veneer is fading. Not only do we see through it, we seem to have come to detest it. I reckon we were never completely taken in by the charade, but stunts like the infamous 'Imagine' video don't help.
In the midst of this, Deepika Padukone has maintained a cold, perfunctory and obviously orchestrated social media presence. This has been noted before - the captions in third persons Et al.
But recently, it seems that there are professional video shoots, VFx artists working on her Instagram stories. But this distant approach to her performance of 'celebrity' seems, ironically, refreshingly honest.
At least, it is more honest than ‘spontaneous comebacks to trolls’, and the subsequent plants in online publications about said ‘hilarious comebacks’.
Honestly, I would not mind these, if not for the fact that these are the only kind of stories I see on my ‘personalised’ google news feed.
Image: Georges Biard, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons