Streeped in honesty

Meryl Streep floored the audience at the recent Golden Globe awards ceremony with her incredible speech on Sunday night. The woman of the night in her articulate manner, took on Donald Trump and his extreme political campaign, which struck a chord with almost everybody, except Trump, of course. However, it is not the first time a leading Hollywood actor has picked an award show as a platform to talk about larger issues. In the past, Viola Davis, Jesse Williams and Andy Samberg spoke about the wage gap and also acknowledged the vast gender and race disparities present in cinema, which makes us wonder why we have never seen it happen in Bollywood.

Sonam Kapoor, who has been vocal in the past about injustices, replied to a twitter user about the same matter. “We are vilified, trolled and badgered for having a voice and mind. Spoken my mind on several occasions and have had my words taken out of context or sensationalised, sometimes even with background music,” she replied. When Aamir Khan made a comment about how the nation is intolerant, it didn’t go down well with the masses and the actor received immense criticism for the same.   

Celebrities who speak their mind seem to receive more or less the same response — hate comments and attacks on their personal space. “Meryl’s speech was very inspiring. It is true that very few Indian celebrities choose to speak up for what they believe in because when they do, it either gets sensationalised or they are attacked and are trolled online for voicing their opinions. But, I think most of it has to do with the box office collections which tend to get affected by what celebrities comment on. At one event, Shah Rukh Khan said he couldn’t comment on a matter as his producers had told him that his views might affect the box office collections. In our country, intolerance is at it’s highest form. That’s why even the biggest influencers refrain from  voicing opinions,” says  filmmaker and director, Indrajit Lankesh.