Deepika Padukone receives flak on her insensitive Tik Tok Challenge. What role do we play in this as the audience?
Deepika Padukone recently issued a makeup challenge to a Tik Tok influencer to recreate three of her most cherished on-screen looks with makeup, namely, Om Shanti Om, Piku and Chhapaak. Twitter quickly blew up with Deepika being asked to feel shameful for her actions as being a victim of an acid attack is not a “look”, on the belief that someone who didn’t feel shame while doing something and subsequently posting it, will feel shame on being asked. Newspapers and media outlets instantly wrote their take and soon enough the video was trending.
Although Deepika is being severely called out for this debacle, and rightly so, what disappoints me is that she is the only one being called out.
Deepika was with someone who not only listened to her instruction of recreating her “look” for Chhapaak but also duly carried it out. There was someone recording them and was probably not the only person behind the scenes. Managers, agents, marketers, social media managers, scriptwriters, producers, and several others work in tandem to sell movie tickets. No-one found an issue. Why?
Do you really want me to believe that not a single person in Deepika’s entire team thought this was a bad idea or they knew what they were doing but just didn’t care or were too scared to be singled out or voice their opinion? Isn’t all this done for the audience? Did they think the audience would not find a problem? Or were they counting on it?
So what we’ve got is;
1. Didn’t find any issue?
2. Didn’t think it would matter?
3. Didn’t care?
4. Too scared to stand up for someone?
5. Create controversy?
Neither of those scenarios reflects well on the team that was so closely involved with telling the story of a hero who survived such a horrific attack, given a face and voiced by Deepika. The message of the movie itself is about calling for a ban on the sale of acid. One quick search on google on anything related to an acid attack ban in India, and the movie Chhapaak is nowhere seen. They made a movie and decided to promote it through social experiments and Tik Tok videos and left the actual addressing of the issue to maybe someone who watched the movie and felt inspired enough. The role of the movie maker and the team is to tell a story and rake in the box office. While those who toil away tirelessly every day to create real social change are severely unnoticed, sadly unsupported and nowhere close to being trending. That is far more disappointing.
Deepika is being asked to apologize because we live in an era, where any issue, from insensitive celebrities to oil spills, can be fixed with an apology. So we can finally forgive her and move on with our lives and not feel any guilt while watching the next Deepika Padukone movie. Well, she did apologize and the songs in this movie are looking rather good and I don’t want to be the one to cancel the movie plan showing disappointment in Deepika’s actions because what will my friends think of me!!!
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Originally published at https://www.fuzia.com.