Behind Shah Rukh Khan’s ‘hakla’ meme: The Streisand effect and a PR crisis

But what happened next wasn’t fuelled by nostalgia alone. Reports suggest that SRK’s team quickly moved to scrub the meme from his comments. The attempt backfired, only to make it spread faster.

It’s a textbook case of the Streisand effect. When American artist Barbra Streisand tried to stop the publication of photographs of her Malibu mansion, her attempt at suppression ended up drawing far more attention to the relatively obscure images. And this was back in 2005. Nearly two decades later, with the Internet added to the equation, the effect has only magnified.

The origins of SRK’s stammer

As amusing as it is to see this ‘hakla-ness’ (stammer) resurface, it is also interesting to note that the quirk was not a mistake, but a deliberate acting choice, as shared by King Khan himself in the docuseries The Romantics. Alongside producer and filmmaker Aditya Chopra, whose father helmed Darr, SRK revealed that he decided to add the stammer to make his character Rahul Mehra’s obsession feel unsettlingly real. Inspired by a classmate with a stammer, SRK chose to focus it only on the name “Kiran,” saying, “We made him aware of the woman he loves most with the stammer.”

This tiny nuance went on to become a classic staple in SRK mimicries for the years to come. Its recent memefication, too, followed a predictable script: creators who spotted a template, casual users who wanted to look ‘dank’ for their friends, and audiences who bond over shared jokes. Clinical psychologist Gunjan Ryder calls this social function “glue”. She explained, “By circulating memes, people form instant bonds over gossip, shared laughter, or criticism, creating higher interest value.”

It’s as if your annoying sibling has decided to tease you, simply to get a rise. And netizens, today, have taken the sibling rivalry to the Internet, doing anything to provoke their parasocial sibling.

The Streisand effect

When SRK’s team tried to block the image from appearing in his comment section, the original was replaced by a string of dots, which then spread across platforms.

Clinical psychologist Pulkit Sharma explained that this incident taps into basic human tendencies like gossip, where secrecy fuels speculation. “Whenever we see something hidden or deviant, it automatically draws focus. People either idolise it or strongly disapprove, and both reactions pull it further from reality,” he said. He added that the harder the celebrities work to conceal an image or fact, the more it arouses suspicion.

It’s the same logic that plays out in childhood: your urge to eat the candy increases when the jar is hidden on the top shelf. Because now it’s no longer just a craving, but a curiosity. When a celebrity strictly gatekeeps a cosmetic surgery or erases a clumsy promo clip, it fuels the audience to laugh harder, share faster, and make more memes.

Celebrities have long understood this. Back in 1999, for instance, actress Kajol reportedly gave journalists a fake address for her wedding. She knew that a direct “don’t come” would only fuel greater determination to uncover the real venue.

Or take, for instance, a half clip from Half Girlfriend’s promotional video (dated at least eight years back), which has gone viral in recent times. It shows Arjun Kapoor giving a “badmosh” stare, paired with a Haryanvi banger. Kapoor’s team chose to disable comments, and the viral stare ended up gaining more traction.

Perhaps it would have been interesting to see his team double down on this trend because, unlike SRK, who has publicly spoken against mimicries of his stammering, Kapoor could have actually taken it as an opportunity to grow his brand. Imagine how funny it would have been to see him recreating the meme, standing right there with a mic, looking straight into our eyes, and giving that stare.

A PR class

Pushplata, an Assistant Professor for Media Studies at the Central University of Jammu, explained this through the “Agenda-Setting” theory, which shows how the media directs public attention. “While such memes may be intended to tarnish reputations, they ultimately keep celebrities at the center of the conversation. So Public Relations (PR) teams may try to erase such content, but they also know that visibility, whether positive or negative, is essential for relevance. And hence, suppression comes much later, only after the memes have already amplified visibility,” she said.

On one hand, it humanises celebrities, drawing sympathy from loyal supporters. On the other hand, it reduces them to caricatures. Either way, she notes, memes amplify symbolic presence because in today’s age, “time is currency and attention itself becomes the commodity.”

There are, of course, larger conversations that need to be had — the foremost being that of ethics. Celebrities may be public figures, but they are not public property. They are under no obligation to share their beauty routines, reveal whether those abs were crafted in the gym or generated through VFX, or confirm if they are dating a certain model. Sharma warned, “Such relentless scrutiny pushes people into performative existence; forever second-guessing how they will be read, how their actions will be interpreted and hence, trapping them into projecting a carefully managed, often artificial self.”

And perhaps there’s a takeaway for the celebs as well — the more they push something under the carpet, the more tempted their audiences will be to lift that carpet, because on the Internet, the only way you can stop people from laughing at you is to laugh with them.

And this pretty much sums up how a q-q-q-quirky choice, meant to humanise a character, years later, ended up becoming a meme.

The writer is a freelance writer, and recent graduate of Lady Shri Ram College for Women