Imagine you are sitting comfortably in your work chair, doing whatever you do best, and suddenly you see a random stranger sprinting toward you as if their life depended on it. Would you greet them with a hug, or instinctively maintain a safe distance to assess the situation before reacting?
While most of us have the luxury of pausing to decide how to respond, Sonu Nigam had neither the time nor the patience when a fan jumped the barricades to personally greet him on stage during his recent concert in Kolhapur.
What may look like a wholesome “true fan” moment to some also exposes a deeply uncomfortable reality: the growing security threat artistes face during live performances.
And this fear is not irrational. A casual stroll through the internet today paints a disturbing picture of how quickly fan culture can spiral into misconduct. The latest addition to the list is Zayn Malik, at whose London concert concertgoers hurled water bottles at him out of frustration over a delayed appearance. While Zayn escaped unharmed, the same cannot be said for Riley Green, who was injured after a fan hurled a mobile phone at him mid-performance during his concert in Melbourne.
And these are far from isolated incidents. Singer James, best known in India for Bheegi Bheegi from Gangster, was attacked with bricks during a concert in Bangladesh last December. American singer Halsey was groped by a fan while she performed near the barricades. Akon was harassed in Bengaluru when fans attempted to pull down his pants mid-performance. Billie Eilish, while high-fiving fans, was suddenly grabbed and yanked to the ground by a concertgoer. The list keeps growing, and so does the entitlement.
Somewhere along the way, fandom stopped admiring artistes from a distance and started believing it was entitled to physical access to them. Social media has only accelerated this illusion that crossing personal boundaries is just another form of expressing affection.
But admiration does not cancel consent. A performer standing on stage is still a human being doing their job. And perhaps that is the strangest part of all this: behaviour that would instantly be recognised as threatening or invasive in any other setting somehow gets romanticised when it happens to celebrities. Because if a stranger suddenly ran toward you at your workplace, nobody would call it fandom. You would call it what it is — a breach.
So when you doomscroll through your social media next time and you see a prominent musical figure such as Sonu Nigam using a caption that reads — Kyon pitne vaale kaam karte ho audience? — just take a second to think what you would have done if you were in his stead.
