More PR Than Pain!

Celebs ' Insta captions are dripping with sympathy all of a sudden. Immediately after Salman Khan’s support, the timeline is flooded with celebs clutching their hearts for students bleeding under CJP. Funny how the grief only trends after Salman Khan posts first and then the chorus joins in. Perfectly timed and worded like a PR brief! One by one they are lining up, declaring their pain, their exam times.

But janta’s seen this before also. The outrage is looking very scheduled. Real heartbreak didn't have to wait for potshots to go viral first and then you join like a herd. This time, definitely, the Netizens aren’t buying this.

l Kareena took to Instagram to voice what she could no longer keep to herself. She admitted she’d been sitting with the issue for days, but the weight of so many young voices demanding to be heard finally made silence impossible. It’s like same sentiment, same carefully vague lines about hope and justice. She also warned that the whole promise of education collapses the moment children begin to doubt it!

l Even though Sara Ali Khan comes from a lineage with scholars, actors and cricketing royalty, her note on the CJP protests landed with a thud. She stood with the students driving the youth-led CJP protests sparked by the alleged NEET-UG paper leak but the expectation was nuance, not a caption that read like it was lifted from a template. She applauded their bravery for speaking up and refusing to stay quiet. While throwing her support behind them, she also expressed confidence that the government would step in and ensure justice is done.

l Then there’s Ananya Panday’s take on the CJP storm and somehow it turned into a monologue about “being a proud Gen-Z.” She cheered on young people for refusing to stay silent. She framed today’s students as a generation done with nodding along to the way things have always been but it wasn’t supposed to be about her own relatability.

l Varun Dhawan stressed that young people have every democratic right to assemble peacefully and hold the system accountable. He called on authorities to respond with openness and made it clear that the heart of the movement must stay centered on the students and their voices. What poured out felt like fake sympathy.

Celebrities’ brand value at stake

The larger question now is whether this erosion of trust could translate into a tangible dent in celebrity brand equity — affecting everything from endorsements to audience loyalty.

Former journalist and now executive coach and founder of Brevis Consulting, Shivraj Parshad, says, “I’ve been on both sides of this. Twenty-five years ago I was the one chasing people for a comment on camera. Now I sit in rooms where brands choose their faces. So, first thing — nobody is losing an endorsement over this week. Contracts are signed, budgets are locked. No brand is reopening a deal in July because someone didn’t post.”

But he adds that something more consequential is unfolding beneath the surface. “There are people with genuine reasons to stay quiet, and being bullied into a statement isn’t courage either. But my agreement is irrelevant. That’s the audience’s rule now, and brands don’t get to argue with their audience. And the judging has already started. Not by critics — by their own fans. A fan page with 70,000 followers shut itself down this week because the actor it was built around hadn’t said anything. That’s not a troll army. That’s your own base walking out.”

That shift, he suggests, is where the real risk lies. “Brand value isn’t lost overnight, but it erodes quietly. The noise will fade, but the perception sticks. Two years from now someone in a marketing meeting will say, ‘He feels a bit distant from young India,’ and won’t be able to tell you where that came from. This is where it came from. When relatability weakens, so does influence — and that eventually shows up in endorsements, openings and long-term recall.”