2015年12月08日 15:41
Navya Naveli Nanda, the granddaughter of Bollywood screen legend Amitabh Bachchan, is the latest victim of body shaming.
In an essay posted by her mother on DNA, Shweta Bachchan Nanda condemns the bullies who attack Navya.
The young girl studying in the UK, who has just turned 18, is made to feel bad for being too skinny.
Shweta writes: “My immediate reaction was one of utter rage!
“You bring your kids up with such love and care, not a day goes by when you don’t tell them or remind them in different ways just how wonderful they are.
“And then, someone callously brings it all crashing down and their only authority is that they are your child’s peer and their word will, for a while, mean more to them than manna from heaven.
“It is the worst kind of bullying, simply because it leaves the most lasting impact!!”
The 41-year-old mother seems to really understand what her teenage daughter is going through, as Shweta herself was once a victim, too.
She recalls her terrible experience in school where she was nicknamed ‘Big Bird’, after causing a small accident during Chemistry class:
“Dressed in all yellow, I knocked over a test tube with something vile and frothy in it, and managed to burn a little hole in my partner’s folder.
“He was naturally livid and told me to ‘stop flapping about like Big Bird’.”
Even though this happened at a time when our lives were not monitored by social media, Shweta felt incredibly shameful of such name-calling and her awkward appearance.
Describing a younger self, she writes: “Painfully thin, gawky, with limbs that were growing faster than I knew what to do with… and then there was acne. It’s a miracle I ever left the house.”
This is all the more reason it breaks her heart to hear Navya, who reportedly studies at Sevenoaks School in Kent, cry over the phone about the incident.
Navya has recently received singing praises for her beautiful appearance at Parisian Le Bal des Débutantes, where she dons a Dior couture gown.
The highly exclusive event is known for selecting attendees based on their looks. Shweta echoes:
“She is everything I would have loved to look like at age 18. Beautiful long hair, delicate nose, long lashes and elegant artistic hands… a perfect collection of atoms, but more importantly, she has a heart that is equally soft and brave.”
Body shaming has been taken to new heights with the boom of social networking sites and the increasing focus on body image.
Celebrities could be attributed for kicking off the trend, but even they are not immune to being judged and criticised by the online community.
British songstress Adele has always been a popular subject of discussion when it comes to body image. Clearly, neither commercial nor critical success can protect one from malicious attacks about the way they look.
The record-smashing singer tells Australia’s 60 Minutes: “I’ve always been asked questions about my body and my weight and my size and my style and stuff like that.
“And I totally understand. It’s a little bit annoying that men don’t get asked that question as much.
“But other than that it seemed to astound people that I was plus size and being successful, that was how I felt.”
Reality TV star, Kim Kardashian, becomes a target when she was pregnant with her second child, who was born on December 5, 2015.
Speaking to C Magazine, she says: “Before I was always smiling, and so into being out and about.
“After I had the baby, I was like, these are the same people that made fun of me, and posted the stories that were so awful, calling me fat for something I couldn’t control.
“I don’t want to smile for them. Even if I was more confident, I just didn’t feel like being that girl who was going to be smiling for every photo. It changed my mood; it changed who I was.”
Instagram, where the obsession over physical appearances has exploded in the past few years, had to apologise in 2014 for removing a photo of plus-size musician and vlogger, Meghan Tonjes.
If the apology has achieved anything, it is fuelling the surge of unretouched photos from social media users and the likes of well-known US comedian Amy Schumer, who poses naked on the cover of Entertainment Weekly and for the 2016 Pirelli calendar.
Mindy Kaling, Taylor Swift, Kelly Clarkson and Sam Smith have also joined the parade of self-empowerment in the hopes of setting positive examples for young people.
As Navya officially enters adulthood, her mother can only take joy in thinking: “Welcome to the world baby girl, learn to roll with the punches, it is the first lesson of adulthood.”