Angry trolled man

Rishi Kapoor has always been acerbic with his tweets, making his no-nonsense stand against trolls known from the word go. Earlier this week, however, things took an appalling turn when the veteran actor went ballistic while confronting anyone who contradicted his opinion, even allegedly sending out expletive-laced direct messages to female followers.

It started with a fairly simple question where Rishi asked on Twitter what the common thread between him and Karan Johar was. To the regulation jokes and trolls he received, he allegedly sent out messages containing unparliamentary language to his female followers, and then blocking them unceremoniously. He even changed his bio to read “Don’t you dare try Trollers and Abusers! You will be abused and BLOCKED-your loss if you following me. Don’t like me, unfollow me. Signed-Terrorist of the family. (sic)”

The main grouse his followers now have with the Kapoor scion is that he’s retorted to non-abusive tweets with abuse, which is unbecoming of a public figure of his stature. In fact, Neetu Kapoor, Rishi’s wife, had even made her worry about what her husband would tweet about known, when she appeared on Kapil Sharma’s comedy show earlier this year. And while his son Ranbir may not really have a social media presence, he’s constantly questioned about his father’s transgressions online, and has to cut a much-embarrassed face.

VJ and social media personality Jose Covaco says that Rishi probably lost the plot online a while ago. “I think Rishi Kapoor is just like an uncle on social media who got poked at so much that he lashed out,” he says. “He was having fun with social media, posting on Twitter, and then he started losing his filter a little bit. His jokes got a bit crass and led to him being trolled. Maybe he should take a break from social media for a while. It will be better for him.”

Author Anuja Chauhan puts these spiralling cases of celebrities going rogue on social media down to the attention that come along with these instances. “There’s an inside voice and an outside voice, and you should use them as per circumstances. On Twitter, you have a huge sense of audience. You want to tweet something that will get the most retweets or comments, because that’s when you feel validated. This becomes addictive and you keep thinking of more inflammatory things to say simply to get a major reaction. I think that is a major reason from which all this trolling springs,” says the author.

Laughs Kiran Manral, author and Twitter user, “It was just nicer when the celebrities were not really accessible to us and there was an air of mystery around them. But now that they’re there in our faces, we see they’re as human as we are.”

At the end of the day, it’s all about knowing how the repercussions your behaviour could have, she says. “Celebrities are out there in the public space, and their image needs to be carefully cultivated. By just flying off the handle, they’re doing serious image damage. Their profession and earning hinges upon their image, people in the glamour world, businessmen or even someone like a Sehwag (who trolled Gurmehar Kaur). It would just be better for them to have their tweets and responses monitored by someone. For everything else, there’s the block button if you feel the abuses celebrities are receiving is getting out of hand.”