Where Should Public And Media Draw A Line And Let Celebs Live Their Lives?

Celebrity couple Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor have been in the news since they tied the knot in April 2022. The duo have been dating for a while and right after their marriage, they announced Bhatt's pregnancy and now in November she gave birth to their daughter. Instead of congratulating the couple, people are busy calculating the month of conceiving this child. On the other hand, the arrival of the mother-daughter from the hospital to home was hounded by paparazzi's clinging onto the cars with cameras to get one shot of them. Having a public life is not easy but don't they deserve to be treated like real-life human beings?

Discussion on premarital sex has been done at length by people and has been going on for ages in spite of people considering it sinful. Indian parents hold on to their culture and ethics very high and mostly get blindsided by reality. Sex education is almost nonexistent here as any dialogue about sex is considered against the rules of the Indian culture and heritage. Even after knowing that people have sex with to without marriage, the whole community irrespective of age shames couples who decide to have a child out of wedlock or get pregnant before getting married.

At the same time, the same people are equally invested in the lives of these people to see how they handle everything and if they are celebrities, the interest reaches the peak. This can be called nothing but hypocrisy. People are obsessed with the lives of famous folks and can go to any stretch to know the details of their lives for plain entertainment. Often forgetting that the people on the side might have a shiny life full of privilege are also human beings living pretty real lives.

Ranbir And Alia Media Scrutiny

Both the actors Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt have been in the public eye for several years and their relationships have been a matter of huge interest for their fans. Both belong to established families in the industry and grew up watching closely the blessings and perils of this career choice. So their own relationship, marriage, pregnancy and now a child would all be a matter of conjecture and they knew that pretty well. But the level of disgrace the public has shown is unbearable. It is 2022, can we please openly accept that people have sex without getting married? And no one will die if a close-up shot of a celebrity is not shown when they are going through a vulnerable time in their lives.

When Alia Bhatt announced that she is pregnant soon after her marriage, people started speculating that she might be pregnant before marriage and that the ceremony was a cover-up for it. Then as the pregnancy progressed, and finally she gave birth people started calculating which exact month was the baby conceived and how it did not add up to the date of their marriage. A tweet went viral as the person tried solving this math problem which they assigned to themself. Another user rightly asks, "What’s confusing you? And what has marriage got to do biology?".

People also criticized the skewed reporting of certain news channels as they published misogynistic headlines to portray Bhatt and her life choices as something extraordinary. The problem with treating this as a big deal in the media is that normalising sex education becomes even more difficult and people dealing with a situation similar to this in their life could find it impossible to explain their family. Having a dialogue about safe sex is one thing but sensationalizing it can be detrimental. We as a society are living in a risky state where women are not given the choice to decide reproductive rights for themselves in many countries. So concepts of sex and unplanned pregnancy cannot be a matter of media controversy anymore.

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Paparazzi Hounded Ranbir And Alia's Car For Photos

On November 10, when Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor were bringing their baby back from the hospital to their home, in their own car, a group of paparazzi almost jumped onto the car by placing their phone cameras on the glass windows and many other cameras with flashes zooming in to get that one shot of the people inside. The photos of Bhatt look like she is exhausted like any mother would be after a few days of delivery and Kapoor holding the baby by covering the face almost trying to protect it from the lenses of the news-mongers.

A year back Shehnaaz Gill became a victim of such frenzy behaviour by the paparazzi when Sidharth Shukla passed away. Gill could be seen in an extremely vulnerable state but there was no mercy as she was hounded for some sensationalized photos and videos.

Where is the line to be drawn between having an interest and being obsessed with the lives of celebrities? When will people stop scrutinizing every decision made by celebrities? Just let them be in the spotlight as and when they want to.

Views expressed are author's own.