In Anticipation of 'Race 3', I Trolled Salman Khan Fans

Fandom is a strange place. Desi fandom, and more specifically celebrity fandom, is a delirious ride. How else does one explain the popularity that Salman Khan enjoys, despite the allegations of domestic violence, vehicular manslaughter, anti-Dalit remarks, and his recent conviction over poaching a black buck.

Khan's fans have more reason to rejoice today. His addition to the Race series in Race 3 or Salman Khan's Race if we're being honest (which is already being touted as one of the most financially successful Bollywood films of all time even before its release).

And Twitter is no exception. In an effort to understand what exactly lies at the core of such one-sided love, we decided to dip our toes into the Khan fan Twitterverse. It is wild! Among accounts posting their favourite pictures of Bhai, or ranking his best roles, there’s the occasional user professing undying love, such as this woman (if the profile picture is anything to go by), who tweets audio recordings of her love and explains how being married wouldn’t be an obstacle for either of them.

And then there’s this user, who has been tweeting at Bhai for over 200 days, marking his tweets a la Amitabh Bachchan, expressing his desire to meet Khan. He has also tweeted pictures of his unremarkable lunch, tagging his hero.

To truly understand the limits of of Bhai fandom, I occasionally trolled them (though my heart really wasn’t in it) over three months. Urban Dictionary states that, “The most essential part of trolling is convincing your victim that [you] truly believe in what you are saying, no matter how outrageous.” And so I logged onto twitter to convince a random bunch of people that I believed, the fourth most followed Indian on Twitter wasn’t particularly great.

How does one enter a space where a simple pixelated picture of Khan gets more engagement than anything in my life? To ensure that this enterprise was (mostly) wholesome, my editors and I decided that there would be no profanity, no ad-hominem attacks against Khan or users and I had to restrain myself to only using facts. This was perhaps the hardest part as each of these clubs had thousands of followers, whose zeal was simply something else.

How do Khan fans make their peace with the popularity and box office takings of that other Khan, Shah Rukh? Not well it turns out, SRGay is a popular pejorative hurled about online.

After homophobia, classicism wasn’t far behind. One user noted that I didn’t own an iPhone, which is fairly odd given the “man of the people” persona Khan has gone on to build.

Salman Khan Fan Clubs seem to only post photoshoots of Bhai, with little or no mention about the controversies that seem to dog him—such as the Bombay Municipal Corporation blacklisting his NGO, Being Human for not setting up concessional dialysis units for over a year after being allotted the project, or his rape jokes.

Trolling isn’t trolling if it's just cold hard facts and so I began posting Khan specific memes, including one comparing him to an iPhone (clearly that tweet stung). Someone responded equating Khan to the iPhone actually proved his dominance, which…well played sir. Well played.

I realised that my trolling was as effective Salman’s performance in Prem Ratan Dhan Payo.

I got my first block for innocuously complimenting Khan’s ability to keep powering through adversity, whether a footpath or a black buck.

By this time, I was really in my cups—few people were responding, and my friends were wondering what the fuck I was doing with my life.

It was then, when I saw a chance to turn it around.

A user posted screenshots of Google image searches, that showed that the response to a search for “King of Bollywood” as Shah Rukh Khan, but the response to the “Real King of Bollywood”, as Salman Khan. I tried to crash this jubilation train by pointing that a search for Khan under the News tab brought us ‘Salman Khan is screwing over Arijit Singh’ stories. I sat back and awaited my rightful validation.

Instead, I saw insults against me, my mom, and even a hashtag: #tattiarora (shitarora).

It hurt. Quite a bit. In fact, it might’ve broken me.

My mother wanted to disown me, my girlfriend wanted to dump me, and my dog stopped wagging his tail when I came home from work. My editor called a dummy for not knowing how to troll. Even my younger sister jettisoned me as her primary role model, shifting quickly to Srishti Dixit of Buzzfeed. I can’t even fault her for that choice. FML.

It was all getting to me. Maybe I was wrong, maybe Khan really is worth our worship.

All this changed when, on news of Sridevi’s death, a user tweeted that hopeful Salman would be next, and all hell broke loose. I dived in with the most infuriating response to online arguments, “Waise it’s her opinion only”. Someone said thousands depend on Khan and his death would leave them wrecked.

It took nearly a hundred tweets, a barrage of abuses and several blocks for us to realise, there is little reasoning with Khan’s fans. The aim of the exercise was never to excoriate Khan’s fans but simply understand why they stan for him as hard as they do.

Follow Parthshri Arora on Twitter.