Faux modesty of celebrities

NEW DELHI: People whose media consumption is limited to traditional channels might be surprised to learn that the most memed Indian personality at the moment is not Narendra Modi but Sudha Murthy, the philanthropist, author and wife of Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy. Social media platforms are bristling with memes poking fun at Mrs Murthy’s unassuming nature. Two public statements by her last week triggered the onslaught. One was a sound-bite to TV cameras as she went to vote in the Karnataka election. “I’m not worried about all that,” she said breezily to a question on communalism.

And then, in an appearance on a TV show, she narrated a self-deprecatory anecdote. In the immigration queue at Heathrow, she was addressed as ‘behenji’ by fellow Indians and the desk staff thought she was kidding when she gave her home address as 10 Downing Street.

Over the years, a rich body of work has accreted to testify to Murthy’s humility while being an achiever in her own right and wife to a much-admired billionaire. There’s one about how excited she was to see London and Paris in the movie Sangam back in the 60s, and there’s that thing about her grandfather advising her never to consume anything addictive and so she decided to shun tea. The old media relishes such sweet stories. The entire TV chat show ecosystem is fabricated to elicit heart-warming narratives from the rich and famous to regale audiences who welcome such diversions from their own tedious lives. Many famous personalities have moulted into modest personas to feed this supply chain.

There’s no telling how many Mumbai pavement benches have been hallowed by being slept upon by film stars in their formative years. The charm is that everyone is served in this ecosystem: the host, the guest, the audience and the advertiser of hosiery products that haunts these shows.

The new media is an altogether different beast. A value inversion occurs there. What appears humble to the housewife watching the TV show seems cringy to the keyboard warrior. What is unassuming on Oprah becomes pretentious on Twitter. To the KBC participant from Gorakhpur, the arcs over Amitabh Bachchan cast a divine light, but the anonymous redditor just has to carp about the man going on about his poet father.

Social media is a pit of vipers and a sniper’s nest: It seethes with acidic insults as the troll enjoys a wide licence of language, and at the same time affords a vantage point from which to take a potshot. The celeb is a sitting duck from up there, easy to pick out and unable to reply.

The fuel that powers this phenomenon is social envy, or schadenfreude. People diss the famous as an act of revenge for being more successful than them, and returning to rub it in with their faux modesty. The failed writer, the unknown journalist, the unrequited intellectual — all peck at the one successful peer who comes back to the coop for a fleeting moment of ordinariness.

Celebrities in India are unaware of this inversion, and continue to pander to the humility sentiment. And long may they remain unaware, for they have earned the right to be humble braggarts, and even to embroider the tale a bit. Who can grudge if Sudha Murthy chuckles at her own chutzpah in writing to JRD Tata, complaining about the hiring practices of Telco? Why gripe about the ordinary fantasies of famous people? They are just trying to provide us a little relief from our tawdry lives.