Sushant Singh Rajput, social media and ‘righteous’ indignation
Sushant Singh Rajput’s death, as with any young life snuffed out, was a tragedy. But I’m not going to pretend I was one of his diehard fans. In fact, the Dhoni biopic was probably the only one of his movies I’ve watched. It was enough, however, to let me know just how gifted an actor he was.
“He may not be a dead ringer for Dhoni, but he had so many of the mannerisms down pat,” I wrote after I’d seen the movie nearly four years ago. “And the on-field scenes were as realistic as any I’ve seen in a sports-themed movie.
“After guiding Will Smith through the making of Ali, Angelo Dundee, who trained The Greatest, said that the actor could have become a leading fighter if he had come under his wing early enough. Watching Rajput, you got the same feeling.”
In the hours and days since his passing, thousands — from Bollywood celebs to the men and women on the street — have been stressing on the need to ‘be kind’ and ‘to listen’, with mental-health hashtags the flavour of the season. The irony jumps out at you. These messages and entreaties are being made on social media, which outdoes packs of wild dogs and schools of piranhas when it comes to tearing people apart.
Rajput may not have been targeted for vicious criticism, but after his death, there has been plenty for those who allegedly didn’t pay their respects in the accepted fashion, or those whose behaviour is tangentially being held responsible for what he did. How such public shaming squares with the messages to be kind is anyone’s guess.
Back in 2008, in the aftermath of the Sydney Test and what came to be known as Monkeygate, the late Peter Roebuck made his first foray into readers’ comments on articles. For one so talented, Roebuck’s emails were often a mess. Having started using the laptop less than a decade earlier, he still thought a lot faster than he typed, and most messages would have letters, words and punctuation missing.
“My god thse debates on blogs after the articles! I have just read them for the first tome. Pretty wel argued most of them i must admit!” said one mail I got. In the days that followed, he expanded on his new-found enthusiasm for feedback. But by the time the Australian cricket team arrived in India in September that year, his attitude had changed markedly.
When I asked him how the journeys ‘below the line’ were going, he told me they had stopped. “Too vicious,” he told me. “So much of the criticism is so personal, like they’re attacking me and not what I write.”
This was in the days before Twitter, Facebook and Instagram became ubiquitous and the moral arbiters of modern society, but trolls and pure venom were already evident on most platforms. In the years since, it’s only got exponentially worse.
If there was ever to be a social-media Hall of Shame, then Woody Allen would probably be one of the main exhibits. Though never convicted or even charged with anything, Allen has spent the best part of the last three decades with whispers of ‘paedophile’ trailing in his wake. In Apropos of Nothing, he writes: “Well-meaning citizens, brimming with moral indignation, were only too happy to nobly take a stand on an issue they had absolutely no knowledge of. For all these crusaders knew, I could be a victim on a par with Alfred Dreyfus or a serial killer. They wouldn’t know the difference.”
Let’s pause and reflect for a second on how India’s freedom struggle would have been viewed if we had social-media prisms back then. Mahatma Gandhi would have been “a fascist, racist and sexual predator”, as over 5000 people have claimed in a petition to take down his statue in Leicester. Jawaharlal Nehru would have been a ‘westernised degenerate and libtard’. Subhas Chandra Bose would have been labelled a ‘Nazi-loving, right-wing loon’, and Lokmanya Tilak would probably have been dismissed as a ‘bhakt’. As for Bhagat Singh, he was just a ‘commie’.
A year after Twitter came into being, I met one of my favourite sportsmen at a pub in the English midlands. He had spoken about his career and life away from sport with impressive candour, and we exchanged a few words before the event wrapped up. A few years after retirement, as he battled depression and what would later be diagnosed as borderline personality disorder, he became caught up in a [consensual] sexual activity not considered kosher by wider society.
When the tabloids caught wind of what was going on, he made both front and back pages. A few years on from having hit rock bottom, he told me what it was that stung the most. ‘It’s like I’ve been branded,” he told me. “Like what I did while a complete mess is my identity. All the goals I scored and caps I won have taken a back seat to that.”
More than a decade and a half after the incident, much of the online abuse he gets as a thoughtful yet outspoken pundit centres on what happened those many moons ago. There are racist and other slurs as well, but it’s the man’s nadir that’s gleefully seized upon to inflict maximum humiliation. We must be kind, after all.
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the taking-the-knee controversy that has dogged the National Football League (NFL) for nearly four years, Drew Brees — the New Orleans Saints’ legendary quarterback — copped plentiful online abuse for airing his views. “I will never agree with anybody disrespecting the flag of the United States of America or our country,’’ Brees told Yahoo Finance. “What you do by standing there and showing respect to the flag with your hand over your heart is it shows unity.”
After his own black teammates and others had taken issue with those comments, Brees said sorry. “I would like to apologize to my friends, teammates, the City of New Orleans, the black community, NFL community and anyone I hurt with my comments,” he said. “In speaking with some of you, it breaks my heart to know the pain I have caused. In an attempt to talk about respect, unity, and solidarity centered around the American flag and the national anthem, I made comments that were insensitive and completely missed the mark on the issues we are facing right now as a country.”
That was the cue for those on the other side of the aisle to rain down condemnation and abuse. Brees, mind you, isn’t one of those ivory-tower athletes. Though his roots are in Texas, he has done great things off the field in New Orleans, contributing huge cheques after Hurricane Katrina and other disasters.
That’s apart from the Super Bowl ring, 547 touchdowns and 163 wins for a franchise that was mostly a joke until he arrived in the city. But thanks to social media and the culture of instant judgment, there may now be a big asterisk over his legacy. In a world where genocidal maniacs are voted into power and unethical corporations rob millions blind, it’s enough to make you wonder just how ‘righteous’ our indignation is.