When Writers Get Death Threats – Flipkart Blog 2015
It was a Sunday afternoon. My family and I were on our way back from a lovely wedding ceremony, with our stomachs full of delicious South Indian food, when my phone buzzed. At first I thought it was some kind of joke when I read it, but then I read it again and again. I had just been threatened with my life on Twitter by an angry follower.
She was upset after the news of the departure of Shiv’s character from Balika Vadhu was announced. She said my family would mourn my death if we went ahead and “killed” Shiv- the perfect husband, father, and son to his family.
As a writer, I’m often proud of the powerful emotions that are evoked in my viewers. Social media gave me the power to know instantly, what my audience thought about my work, and there has been a lot of love, a little bit of anger, but never this.
It took me back to the time we had actually created this character in the story. He was supposed to be the ideal man for Anandi, the protagonist who had come out of the most traumatic phase in her life. As the audience loved him and Anandi more and more, we kept giving them more screen time too. But when we had to write him out of the story, the public gave us as much hate as they had earlier, love.
Sadly, even though we gave them nearly 7 years of a very credible story, the audience does not trust that we wouldn’t do anything to upset them, unless we had no choice. More often than not, writers are the soft target, and this was not the first time. We are the bunch that faces the stick for a whole lot of other factors like production and date co-ordination issues, complex shoot schedules, location unavailability, and sometimes even the actors’ lack of team spirit, yet we have to stoically stay silent, for the sake of team spirit.
So that afternoon, while my outraged family argued over what form of retaliation we could resort to, (in the end we just let it be), I was just overwhelmed by how much people emotionally invest into television. Reading through thousands of tweets made me feel happy at times, sad at others, but it was that Sunday that for the first time I realized that it could be a genuinely scary experience too.