On Sunday 25th February 2018, early morning Bollywood got a great shock over the news of superstar Sridevi passing away allegedly due to a heart attack.
The entire country went into a frenzy over the sadness and heartbreak caused by the news, but one particular post by someone called Piyali Ganguly, really caught the attention of thousands making it go viral.
The Facebook post was shared and forwarded on WhatsApp so many times, that in just one day, even I got the same message on at least 3 different groups:
Apart from Ganguli commenting on Sridevi’s untimely death, even noted social activist Madhu Purnima Kishwar felt to add her 2 cents into the mix of why this happened by tweeting this:
Untimely death of supremely talented actor #Sridevi is saddens me. Wonder if it had anything to do with her crash diets plus various invasive treatments for size zero figure & regaining youthful looks
— MadhuPurnima Kishwar (@madhukishwar) February 25, 2018
What really disturbed me was how quickly people started to blame the woman itself and how she succumbed to societal pressures instead of respecting the grieving family and at least waiting an appropriate time before commenting on how or why she died.
Let me take a look at the problems within Ms. Ganguly’s post herself:
“While we are all mourning the untimely demise of Sridevi, it is important to remember why this may have happened to her. Society demanded that she stay slimmer/look younger than a 40 year old and hence, the continuous surgeries.
Piyali Ganguly from our research runs a boutique in the US that sells exclusive designer wear and has dressed other Bollywood stars like Priyanka Chopra, Anushka Sharma, and Deepika Padukone.
So you could say that she might have a little bit of inside knowledge of the ugly side of Bollywood and the kind of pressure that is put on female actors to appear beautiful in all manners.
When i met her about 5 years ago, she was beautiful but a sad version of that self that we loved so much in a movie like Chandni. What a lot of pressure to keep her weight down, to make sure that her face had no wrinkle lines….continuous clinic visits in Southern California.
However, that still does not just justify her making such assumptions based on one meeting. Although we don’t know if they had any more meetings after that but even then, making such judgements and apparently leaking out private details about a person who has just died is pure unethical.
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“As a friend of mine wrote this morning…do we need a #metoo movement in fashion,#notsize0? Milan has already implemented this but these patriarchical implants were in her head.
Adding in the reference to such a popular and much-needed movement in order to gain traction and seem intelligent about your point does not look good here.
The husband, who claimed to love her so much should have intervened. Did he love the way she looked as his arm candy more than he loved her? She herself did not trust herself in her own beauty — she was a clothes horse for whoever would care to dress her.
The language is something that is really disturbing here especially since at one hand Ganguly is talking about patriarchal implants and then in the very next sentence is taking away the agency of Sridevi over her body by asking why her husband did not intervene.
Are we not living in a time when wives don’t need permission from their husband on what to do with their own body?
It was her decision and even if Boney Kapoor was against it, he couldn’t really do much about it if the actress wanted to do it.
The second thing is how insulting it is to an allegedly loving relationship where Ganguly is automatically assuming that Kapoor just wanted an arm candy.
Not only that but, the OP (original poster) is also apparently stating it as a fact that Sridevi did not love her natural beauty and is disrespecting a dead person by calling them a ‘clothes horse’.
“What i conclude is such a lack of love for oneself that one’s own lips don’t suffice, one’s own face is not good enough, one’s flesh and blood have to be sucked out of her so that she can wear the best of couture.
‘Terrible legacy’, ‘such lack of love’, and more such phrases are just sad and disappointing to read especially since this was posted after she passed away.
That is the sadness of a life that could have been lived so much better not just for her but for her daughters. What a terrible legacy”.
To think that people are so quick to jump to judgements and start showing superior complex sympathy, meaning you obviously hold yourself above the person you are pitying, all without any facts or justification to back it is a ‘terrible legacy’ of such people.
I am not denying that there is an intense pressure on actresses to keep the perfect figure, always appear beautiful and thin and that this mentality needs to change.
But the very least that the OP could have done is, waited a little bit of time so that the grieving process was over and then call out her death in a more genuinely empathetic manner instead of the sham that we see in this post.
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: IB Times, Free Press Journal, Deccan Chronicle
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