The brave new Bollywood of Deepika, Big B, Ranveer where stars talk about their frailties

If you grew up in the ’90s, you probably remember the public service ad in which Shabana Azmi holds a child suffering from AIDS and gently chides the audience by saying, “AIDS chhoone se nahin phelta”. Another abiding memory is of Aishwarya Rai blinking slowly and successfully hypnotising us into donating our eyes. When celebrities get behind public issues amidst the din of cola, mobile phone, talcum powder and hair oil endorsements, it’s a reminder of the good their clout can achieve. Almost every major Bollywood star has consistently supported a health initiative for public good, from polio to malnutrition. [caption id=“attachment_2186135” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Courtesy: Ranveer Singh’s Twitter account and NDTV video of Deepika Padukone’s interview with Barkha Dutt.[/caption] Recently the long tradition of Bollywood celebrity philanthropy got dramatically more personal when Deepika Padukone came out with her battle against depression. In an in-depth interview to NDTV’s Barkha Dutt, Padukone along with her mother, counsellor and psychiatrist spoke in detail about the misconceptions surrounding mental illness and overcoming depression. In a country where 36% of the population is reportedly depressed, Padukone’s decision to talk about the subject and set up a mental health care foundation is bound to start some conversation about an illness that is usually swept under the carpet or worse, dismissed. Padukone is not the only Bollywood superstar to have opened up about an ailment. Amitabh Bachchan, the ambassador for the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai’s tuberculosis campaign, disclosed last month in a column for The Times of India that in 2000, while shooting for Kaun Banega Crorepati, he was diagnosed with TB. In India, TB has long been a disease riddled with stigma and like Padukone, Bachchan’s willingness to talk about his treatment could go a long way in combating the lack of awareness and social isolation that has dogged the disease. Most recently, Ranveer Singh gave us almost a live commentary of a surgery through his Twitter account.  

Singh was recently injured during the shooting of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Bajirao Mastani and while this information would traditionally be either suppressed or downplayed, Singh confirmed those reports, using Twitter. He used the hashtag #sh*thappens, underscoring the idea that an injury is not the end of the world even if it is serious enough to need surgery. Earlier, Sonam Kapoor was equally candid about being struck with swine flu. Look West and Hollywood has a tradition of making such confessions. Angelina Jolie has written in great detail about her decision to have a pre-emptive double mastectomy in 2013 and opting to have her ovaries removed in March this year. Jolie has the BRCA1 gene which gives her an estimated 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer. Michael J Fox has Parkinson’s Disease. Hugh Jackman is getting treatment for skin cancer. They all talk about all of this, without any coyness. In Bollywood, we’re not used to the kind of candour that Padukone in particular has offered anyone who cares to listen to her. In the Indian film industry, for a star to speak about a medical problem is a huge and welcome break from pattern. Traditionally, stars have been held up as fantasy figures who live a fairy tale existence. They’re meant to be aspirational figures and aspirational figures don’t succumb to things like a serious mental or physical illness. Infallibility — physical and emotional — is a huge part of the movie machinery and being an actor means putting up an impenetrable but polite, photogenic facade. Their training is to handle media and fans with robotic enthusiasm, work out for hours a day, forego carbs, pump supplements and steroids, get hair transplants and go under the knife to look flawless in unforgiving HD. The media plays safe by a double standard: it will carry lengthy expositions into a star’s diet, including how many egg whites he or she has per day, but will not subject a star to any scrutiny that hints at the medical. It’s a delicate web that is woven between the star, the media and the audiences. The film industry is stuffed with high functioning addicts, alcoholics and anorexics. Everyone knows this, but at the same time, there’s a curious acceptance of the platitudes that many actors spout to the press about “having a high metabolism”, “being a foodie”, “fainting from exhaustion” and “having a drink now and then”. A lot of us notice the deception in these statements, rumours go viral, but there seems to be an unspoken understanding between everyone that the facade won’t be damaged. The media (and fans) are obsequiously complicit in this attitude of ‘raaz ko raaz hi rehne do’ attitude when it comes to people in positions of power and influence. While suffering from depression or TB is certainly not the same as having an addiction, that actors like Padukone and Bachchan are making these admissions does acknowledge the wall that stands between a star’s private life and their outer persona. Here they stand, telling us all that when we thought they were looking perfect and living the good life, they were actually weathering terrible crises — and the public, the paparazzi, the rumour mills had no idea. Of course, not all secrets are equal. Which actor is sleeping with whom and who has better legs or tits or butt or hair is all par for the course in scrutiny. But some taboos are alive and kicking and extend to anyone in the public sphere. Illness is one of them. Culturally, we consider it a sign of weakness because we tend to focus upon contracting the disease, rather than battling it. And so, while America looks for survivor narratives in stories of those who have fallen ill and see strength in battling a disease, we remain fixated upon the idea that a disease is a sign of weakness in the host. The most significant example of how we view a medical problem as something to be hushed up is the fact that we still do not know from any official source what necessitated Congress leader Sonia Gandhi’s stint at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre in 2011. Why can’t that information be made public? Is the knowledge that Mrs Gandhi is mortal and was possibly ill really so earth shattering? Even if it does set of a thousand mutinies, I find it very hard to believe that it will not serve the greater public interest to know some specifics. For people like Jolie, Padukone and Bachchan — actors who one expects to be the sum total of their looks and the dialogues they’re given to read out — using their appearance, personality and talent to talk about something that is considered ‘private’ is not easy. But their decision to do so forces us to humanise them. It shifts the conversation around them to something more consequential than the designer they wore or what name their granddaughter will be given. In 2014, BBC reported that Jolie’s decision to talk about her treatment had led to a 250% increase in referrals for genetic counselling and DNA tests for breast cancer mutations in UK. That is how powerful a celebrity can be when they chose to medically ‘come out’. Of course, it’s never a bad idea to take a dose of scepticism when watching a celebrity in action, but even the most hardened of cynics will accept that a famous actor presenting themselves as someone who succumbed against illness but rallied around to fight, is a seductive, winning image.