Editors Take: Why The Internets Cruel Aesthetic Jury Cant Dim Aishwarya Rai Bachchans Real Worth

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As conversations around Aishwarya Rai Bachchan continue to dominate social media, Filmfare’s Editor-in-Chief Jitesh Pillaai reflects on the icon’s enduring legacy, the unfair scrutiny around ageing and body-shaming, and why there’s still so much more the global star has to offer beyond the red carpet.

In Jitesh Pillaai’s words: 

I recently saw Aishwarya Rai Bachchan at yet another public function and yet another red carpet, and it broke my heart. She looked gorgeous and owned the red carpet like a queen. Such a beautiful woman dishing out the most trite and banal clichés one after another.

But trolling her for physical attributes is unfair and cruel. Social media needs to really grow up. Why are people doing this? Just because someone has aged? What are you guys thinking or not thinking? Who has given people so much sanction to be jurors? How dare you call someone obese or shame someone? Where are we going with all this?

Before I go further, I must give you the background to this. Aishwarya and I pretty much started our careers together. I was the fanboy gushing reporter lapping up her beauty as much as I did her fun quotes. We did some good interviews together, and dare I say it, I did some of her best interviews. I was very impressed with her debut film and her oeuvre with Mani Ratnam. 
She was on the wishlist of every director from Yash Chopra to Rajkumar Santoshi in the ’90s. She followed it up with some good work in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s films.

I remember all the girls in Bollywood going into a tizz when she signed her first film at 50 lakhs. Immediately, all the leading actresses’ fees shot up to 80 lakhs. They have Aishwarya to thank for that. She smartly negotiated contracts and played the game like a pro. She could be exhausting, but she was worth it. Plus, films like Iruvar (1997), Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999), Devdas (2002), Guru (2007), Ponniyin Selvan: I (2022) and Ponniyin Selvan: II (2023)

gave her that cinematic heft. Besides being a top-paid professional, she was very well respected.

She single-handedly put Cannes into the minds of every Indian cinema lover, and she lights up everything she touches. Before she walked those steps in 2002 for Devdas, the Cannes Film Festival was an abstract, distant European concept to the average Indian moviegoer. Aishwarya changed the very lexicon of global stardom for India, turning the French Riviera into an annual national event and serving on the international jury by 2003. She became a cultural ambassador who bridged the gap between our cinema and the global stage.

Editor's Take

Her recent performances in Mani Ratnam’s magnum opus Ponniyin Selvan: I and Ponniyin Selvan: II are showcase proof of this enduring power. Playing the complex, dual avatar of Nandini and Mandakini Devi, she completely anchors the emotional weight of that sprawling epic. In an ensemble cast full of heavyweights, it is her calculating silences, her range, and the sheer trauma in her eyes that steal the show. 

It is a masterclass performance that reminds us that when she is unlocked by an auteur who genuinely understands her metier, she still burns brighter than anyone else in the frame.

Editor's Take
So what happened? Perhaps she became a prisoner of her beauty and self-involvement. Given her astute business sense, her habit of second-guessing people, her sharpness, and her agency, she could have done so much more. Sure, she espouses charitable causes, has a carefully cultivated public image, and will never falter. But she could have done so much more. Instead, all we see of her is at fancy red carpets or some award function where she’s being honoured, saying the most banal things for fear of being misrepresented or misquoted, as she usually is by social media.
She’s had her fair share of detractors. Make no mistake, she has had critics in spades. I think it’s unfair how much she’s been body-shamed, or the most egregious comments on her age and weight. Women go through many physical and emotional changes, and it’s sad that social media documents the most trite things about her physical attributes or her clothes. Surely she’s more than all that.

But could these have been avoided if Ash, with her power and agency, had been more authentic, working and proving her metier like Lady Diana did with landmines, children stricken with cancer, and HIV patients? 

Or the exemplary and consistent work of leading ladies like “Hanoi” Jane Fonda, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Julia Roberts, who are high-profile women who went beyond their beauty and created enduring images of substance?

Perhaps Aishwarya is shackled by her own ideas of posterity and how to project herself in the media. That’s her thing, really. Each one chooses to make their bed and lie on it. There’s so much Aishwarya has to offer: good films, good roles, and more importantly, using her influence and power to do something of lasting potential.

My only contention is that there’s a world beyond red carpets, flashbulbs, and Madame Tussauds. There’s a real world calling out there, and that is now. She will always be a queen and rule hearts and the red carpet. It is time to step up her A-game.

Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: filmfare.com

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