This is a fact well known that Karan Johar is the undisputed king of quips, taunts, and endless sass. All this while, we have seen Karan being his unfiltered self and never giving two hoots about what others will think before voicing his opinions, even the most controversial ones. However, something has changed in the past year. The filmmaker who has always enjoyed his share of the limelight has been avoiding the paparazzi like a plague and keeping all his views to himself. In fact, he kept it surprisingly toned down even during his stint as the Bigg Boss OTT host earlier this year. It was just for the initial week that he played his part as the host and then went mum for the rest of the season. Surely, he is not being his usual self lately and one can’t help but wonder– what is wrong with Karan Johar?
Well, looks like the internet has finally managed to get through Karan and break him. As a matter of fact, he has always been incessantly trolled on social media. However, things significantly worsened last year after the untimely death of Sushant Singh Rajput and the resurrection of the nepotism debate. It looked like everyone wanted to point fingers at Karan for almost everything wrong in the Indian film industry…and the world. Eventually, all the cyberbullying got to him and he reacted by unfollowing almost all industry people on Twitter. Karan went into hibernation mode for months at end. We really thought that Karan will be back to being his older self soon enough. However, it has been over a year since then and that does not seem to be happening anytime soon.
The filmmaker has finally spoken about all that has transpired in the past year and how it has changed him as a person. While speaking about his upcoming comedy act for One Mic Stand: Season 2, Karan shared how he has been censoring himself of late. “While I have massive bubbles in my head about so many things, I can’t articulate it. There are so many things I want to say in my set-piece (on the show) but I feel very restricted and not for any other reason but because I believe I will offend someone somewhere and I really don’t want to because I am done with offending people. I just want to focus on just making my movie without any drama around me. I really feel the need to curb and curtail a lot of what I’m wanting to say. That is the only thing that actually saddens me more than anything else because I believe I can take a joke on myself but I know a lot of others can’t,” he said.
He further explained that this is why he has chosen to mostly talk about himself and no one else in his comic piece. “So I’m going to talk about I, me, myself (on the show). It’s a little bit of a megalomaniac set piece. Of course, I say this because I’m actually poking a lot of fun at myself, it’s like a self roast, I think, because I’m so worried about talking about anything else. It’s fine, it’s okay because we are going through an anxiety-ridden time in the world because of the pandemic and I don’t want to add to any more noise than there already is. So I’m saying the safest person is, ‘Let me offend myself.’ Because I’m not filing an FIR on myself,” Karan added.
Last year, Karan had also exited the Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (MAMI) board due to the effect that ‘online lynching’ was having on his mental health. It was around the same time that Koffee With Karan went off-air as an after-effect of the nepotism debate and the ensuing controversy. Well, it is really heartbreaking to witness how the internet has managed to hamper Karan’s spirit. No one…literally, no one deserves to feel this way. Here’s hoping that the filmmaker moves past this dark phase and gets back to being his old, witty self again!
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