Dear Celebs, Your Job Is To “Entertain” Fans at Airports and Restaurants Too!

After all, everything you are today is because of them and only them.

Kareena Kapoor Khan and Shah Rukh Khan getting clicked at the airport.

(Image: The Quint)

I’m not sure why, but it seems like celebrities these days don’t know how to behave with their fans anymore. I get that you’ve gone out for a personal day, but if you run into a swarm of fans who incessantly push you to take photos with them, is it that tough to just oblige? 

After all, being a fan and loving you means that the fans can do anything to you while clicking pictures, right? Even if it means violating your personal space to get one selfie. Just consider it as their token of love, ya!

Exhibit A: This recent clip of Shah Rukh Khan returning from the Mumbai Airport where the Pathaan actor can be seen pushing a fan's hand away, after he shoves his phone in front of Khan's face without his consent.

In 2022, a fan also tried to hold SRK's hand while he was at the airport. So sweet, right? Don’t we all just love random strangers who come up to us and hold our hands?

So you can understand my confusion when SRK shrugged his hand off like that! It’s just so rude towards his fans. The fact that SRK expected to have an ounce of personal space while he was with his son at the airport just shows how he’s so full of himself!

In the past, a video of Kareena Kapoor Khan being heckled by fans and paps at the airport also went viral. But unlike SRK, Kareena deals with the fans very calmly.

Some of them get so close to her that as a woman, I was worried for her. But not Kareena. She calmly let them take selfies at her personal risk and went ahead to do her work.

Kareena shows how a celebrity should behave in public: be docile and polite no matter what, because these fans are the reason you are a star today.

It is JUST their love that has helped you rise to such heights. Not clicking selfies with them, avoid being touched by them, and not obeying their wishes every waking second of your life will be nothing short of ungrateful.

It doesn’t matter that these are the same people who, after being rejected for a selfie, will go home to abuse you and slut shame you in DMs and comments. Honestly, you brought this on yourself.

Look at Akshay Kumar, another example of how NOT to behave with fans. Akshay Kumar was just leaving after a nice dinner with his wife. The fan just went, “Let’s make this personal moment about me and how I want to click a photo with a star!”

The point here is that we, as an audience are quick to boycott these stars for expressing their opinions, criticizing them for their clothes, film choices, and every single thing they do. We treat them like they are some mythical figures that need to uphold unrealistic standards of beauty and behaving in public. And when they don’t live up to these standards, we unleash hell on them.

On the other hand, we think we are entitled to cross every limit when interacting with them just because we are “fans”. We cross some very basic limits of decent human behaviour when we interact with celebrities, and that needs to change. When we meet them in person, we need to respect their privacy and treat them like any other person we see in a public place. Unless we do this, criticizing them for being rude to fans when in reality, they are acting out of self-defense is nothing short of hypocritical. 

(This piece is from The Quint's archives)