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Journalism of Courage
A lot has already been said and written about Indian cricketer Smriti Mandhana. Until last week, the conversation was all about the Women in Blue winning their first-ever World Cup. It’s not that Mandhana wasn’t “famous” before — RCB fans will tell you as much — but recent events have cornered her into the toxic culture that comes with stardom.
Fans, in this case aptly termed parasocial parasites, are out to dissect details of her personal life. Her wedding with fiancé Palash Muchhal has been postponed. Her father, and then Muchhal himself, were hospitalised. Both have been discharged, but the family has yet to comment on the wedding announcement. It is this very silence that has fuelled intense speculation on social media.
And that very well may be the case, but is it really anyone’s business?
Time and again, we are forced to look into celebrity culture, devised by our own fantasies and curiosities. The Cambridge Dictionary’s Word of the Year, ‘parasocial’, describes it best. It’s when fans are convinced they know the star intimately. It’s an illusory one-sided relationship, and social media has turbocharged this dynamic. Athletes and entertainers share glimpses of their lives, and audiences mistake these curated moments for actual intimacy, believing they have earned the right to know everything.
Scholars have spoken about how stars are made out of a “shared fantasy” between individuals, industry, and the audience. American author Joshua Gamson, who has written several books critiquing celebrity culture, writes that it is a “commodity system” and a “participatory culture”. The commodity is used to grab attention, and the audience participates by turning them into either role models or objects of envy. Mandhana has been both.
As a woman cricketer, she joins a cohort of women athletes inspiring a generation of young girls to break out of gender moulds. Reflecting on the World Cup win, Mandhana has previously admitted, “We always believed that we had a greater responsibility — not just to win, but to continue growing women’s cricket.” But that pedestal comes with a few chinks. Popular discourse on X and Reddit has pitted Mandhana against her own team member, skipper Harmanpreet Kaur. And as with any rivalry, be it Virat Kohli vs Rohit Sharma or Selena Gomez vs Hailey Bieber, fans have a tendency to converge into camps, indulging in trolling, slander and meme-fication.
For women in public life, the scrutiny is distinctly gendered. Feminist scholar Karla Mantilla’s concept of “gendertrolling” captures how online harassment of women differs from general trolling. She writes that gendertrolling weaponises gender-based insults designed to humiliate women, vile language and a component of threat: rape threats, death threats or doxxing. When the women’s team had a rough patch during the World Cup, facing three consecutive losses, loads of criticism, steeped in misogyny, came their way. The trolls asked them “to stay in the kitchen”, questioned pay parity with men, and even made personal attacks.
Celebrities also face a different kind of attention. Gamson writes that people see them as “fodder for connecting socially” by “gossiping with impunity about the behaviour and relationships”. Today, this community is built through social media likes and engagement, turning gossip into an internet pastime. Sub-reddits are dedicated to blind items and gossip columns. X has entire threads of users proposing their theories, while Instagram is filled with ‘reaction’ reels.
What fuels gossip even more is not the eminence of stars, but their ordinariness. Their vulnerabilities confirm they are human after all, susceptible to the same messiness as the rest of us. This is why speculation about relationship troubles generates more engagement than match statistics.
Mandhana has fallen into this internet sinkhole. Amid the swirling rumours, one thing is clear: she deserves grace.
And not because of her historic centuries across all cricket formats, her captaincy of the national T20 team, or her leadership in RCB’s first WPL title. The question isn’t whether Mandhana has earned privacy through her achievements, but what kind of audience we want to be.
Often in our consumption, we forget that behind the glamour are real people experiencing real pain, amplified by millions of strangers with opinions. Bollywood actor Rhea Chakraborty’s career stalled after relentless media trials. Deepika Padukone has faced trolling for demanding work-life balance. Rekha and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan had their private struggles dissected for public entertainment. The pattern repeats because we let it.
We can’t control what celebrities choose to share or how media outlets operate. But we can refuse to participate. That means not engaging with speculation threads, not sharing unverified screenshots, and not treating someone’s personal crisis as entertainment. It means recognising that the absence of information isn’t an invitation to fill the void with theories.
And this is not about moral superiority. It’s about acknowledging that our engagement directly fuels an industry that profits from this kind of voyeurism. The machinery thrives because we feed it. All we have to do is not click.
