Some Indians are very proud of Priyanka Chopra as India’s most successful export into Hollywood, her role as UNICEF ambassador and other reasons. However, many others seem to be lying in wait to see if and when she trips up and are happy to troll her for any transgressions – imagined and other wise: she wore a dress to meet the PM, she didn’t wear a sari to the royal wedding of Meghan Makel and Prince Harry, that she spoke out about sexism in Bollywood and now the plot line of a Quantico episode.
In an episode of the hit international series Quantico, Chopra’s character foils a terror plot days before an Indo-Pak summit in New York. The plot is supposed to have been hatched by Indian nationalists in a bid to try and blame it all on Pakistan. People have been up in arms against Priyanka for ‘defaming the country’, ‘selling out’ so on and so forth.
On twitter, commentators have been calling for a boycott of everything related to Priyanka Chopra: from her movies to the products she endorses.
She apologised and said that she is a proud Indian; something that would never change. The tweeple were in no mood to either forgive or forget.
A vast number of the tweeple expressed the view that Chopra had displayed disgracefully ungrateful behaviour; defaming the very people who propelled her to superstardom.
There were many who defended her of course. As an actor in a show, she has neither written the script nor directed the show. The fact that she was being blamed for the whole imbroglio seemed unreasonable to many.
Some were mollified by the apology, others were not. Yet others wondered whether filmmakers in India and abroad would also now apologise for the routinely reductive depictions of Muslims and the framing of Islamic militants as villains in so many plots in films and TV shows. “Super. We’ll be here waiting for an apology from Homeland, 24, Tyrant, Rambo, Zero Dark Thirty, American Sniper, Munich…” said another tweet.
Many commentators pointed out that Priyanka Chopra typically wears her love for India on her sleeve and does the country proud as its representative. They also pointed out that her humanitarian work and her role as UNICEF ambassador outweighed any offence she may have caused by being in a show with a certain story line.
Bollywood personality Pooja Bhatt also came out in support by pointing out that when Chopra makes her mark, we Indians claim her as our own, but then threaten her when it suits us.
While many of the tweeple felt that PC ought to have displayed more moral responsibility and that she should not have accepted to do work that was embarrassing, others expressed a different view. According to this commentator, (clearly a PC fan) the threats, abuse and boycotts by Indian nationalists against artistes are more embarrassing because they display a regressive mindset among Indians.
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