Twitterati slam Priyanka Chopra

Priyanka Chopra might be going places with her career, but her cover photo on the latest Conde Nast Traveller issue has irked the Twitterati.

On the cover, the actor is wearing a white t-shirt, which has four words, arranged one below the other in the following order: Refugee, immigrant, outsider, traveller. The first three words are struck through, drawing significant amount of wrath from users who thought the message was politically inappropriate.

PC’s fans and detractors took a polarised viewpoint, analysing what could the photo possibly mean. A tweet posted by one Savita Pawnday read, With 65 million ppl displaced, highest no. since WWII, to pretend as if it’s a choice [sic].

Another caustic remark came from one Hanna. She tweeted, r u kidding me PC?! What with this shirt! Insensitive to all ppl suffer around from refugees..etc. [sic]

But her fans quickly came in to her rescue. A user called Nitu wrote, Priyanka’s shirt means in an ideal world there would be no refugees, immigrants or outsiders. We’d all be travellers, global citizens.

However, outside of Twitter-land, celebrities commented on the controversy. Photographer Nrupen Madhvani is convinced that the cover photo was meant to create a controversy. He says, “Why does something someone who is an A-lister and making India proud need to garner such publicity? It is demeaning to flaunt this kind of elitism at a time when there is an ongoing refugee crisis. This seems like a project meant to get some attention, which is a shame because she was on the right track all this while.”

But similar to the Twitterland, opinions in the outside world are also varied. Fashion designer, Archana Kochhar says, “I think we are all travellers in life. So conceptually she isn’t wrong.” Keeping her loyalty towards the Quantico actor, she further adds, “Priyanka wouldn’t intentionally be insensitive to the plight of any group. I don’t think it was intended to be a move or she wasn’t trying to make any point.”

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