No more tolerating insults

Silence is golden but women, especially actresses, are increasingly denouncing the option to remain silent and preferring to go vocal when faced with the menace of their fake photos and videos being circulated on messaging platforms and social networks. Actresses like Ansiba Hassan, Asha Sarath, Jyothi Krishna, Kavya Madhavan, Rosin Jolly and Shalu Kurian have been at the receiving end of morphed images, vulgar comments and sexual innuendos. The good news is the actresses are not willing to take this lying down; they strongly react to this on their social pages or lodge a complaint with the cyber cell.  

Sreeya Ramesh, who has acted in films like Ennum Eppozhum and Vettah, found herself caught in one such situation. Here it was not a morphed or vulgar photo that made the rounds, but a perfectly innocent-looking picture of her standing along with her elderly producer that was wrongly captioned.

The vulgar comments started with the wrong identity of the person with mischief-mongers claiming it to be politician Jose Thettayil of the infamous video clip and likening Sreeya to Saritha S. Nair. The feisty actress says, “I was shooting for the Mohanlal- Priyadarshan film Oppam when I got to know that a photo of mine was being circulated. I became worried because as actresses we stay in a number of hotels. I lost my concentration during the shoot and asked for the circulated picture. To my disbelief, it was a perfectly innocent picture of me standing with my producer but with very vulgar captions. I informed my husband and Mohanlal, who is also my relative, and he asked me to wait.”

It was only when her friends in Dubai and Bahrain started calling her that Sreeya realised the gravity of the situation and decided to lodge a complaint with the cyber cell. The mental turmoil the producer and Sreeya faced was immense and she did not want to keep mum. The cyber cell traced the person who uploaded the photo as Subin Suresh and Sreeya narrates the rest, “When I asked him the reason behind spreading my photo, which he himself had taken, he claimed that it was for fun. But when he understood the gravity of his misdemeanour, he cried and pleaded that he had a family and a young son. He asked for forgiveness which I gave after the cyber cell issued a warning!”

Explaining her actions, she says, “When people say a photo is doing the rounds, you immediately think of a vulgar or nude photo and I did not want the audience getting any impression on those lines. People even commented that I orchestrated the whole thing for publicity. I was also doing this as a lesson to all the men who think they can get away with insulting a woman’s dignity.