There’s something different about online cruelty because it is not treated as cruelty. It is disguised as light-hearted trolling and memes, strictly for entertainment purposes. And Arjun Kapoor has been a victim of this culture for months now, if not years. Every post, whether it’s a brand endorsement, movie promotion or a personal photo, has been met with relentless and unnecessary abuse. His comment section is like a digital gladiator arena, where the one delivering the cruellest blow wins. This week, however, that rhythm was broken. Arjun Kapoor shared a deeply emotional post reflecting on grief, on the enduring absence of his mother, and on the weight life has carried of late. Almost immediately, the public discourse shifted. His comment section was suddenly flooded with empathy and love. While this may look like progress, it is not. The truth is, we do not care about Arjun Kapoor, and we do not truly care about mental health either. We care about the performance of caring.

Only grief makes trolling uncool

We’ve been here before. Remember Sushant Singh Rajput? After he died, everyone suddenly cared about mental health in Bollywood and the pressure of the industry. The same platforms that hosted the abuse became shrines to kindness. But the hypocrisy is breathtaking. We share posts about mental health awareness. We talk about ‘checking on your strong friends.’ We mark World Mental Health Day. Yet none of this translates into how we actually behave online. We don’t care about mental health. We care about not looking like the bad guys when something terrible happens.

This fake kindness is worse than honest cruelty. At least cruelty is upfront about what it is. However, this is participation in someone’s slow destruction, followed by a scramble to look compassionate when things get serious. It’s cowardice dressed up as concern.

Why does someone need to explicitly say ‘I’m struggling’ before we stop being awful to them? Why can’t we just not be cruel in the first place? If you can’t manage kindness, how about simple indifference? Why is saying nothing so difficult?

Maybe Arjun Kapoor isn’t a great actor; maybe he got opportunities because of family connections. And maybe his films are terrible. So what? Does any of that justify months of sustained abuse? Does it mean he has to publicly bare his pain before we grant him basic human decency?

Why do we justify cruelty?

One of the most common justifications for celebrity trolling is the belief that famous people are insulated from harm. They are wealthy, successful and surrounded by admirers. Surely a few cruel comments cannot affect them. But mental health does not operate on a scale of privilege.

Repeated humiliation, especially when it is public and relentless, erodes confidence. Being turned into a running joke chips away at self-worth. Reading thousands of strangers dismiss your value has an impact, regardless of your bank balance. Yet society continues to treat emotional resilience as part of a celebrity’s job description.

Backing away from trolling someone when they spell out pain isn’t being kind. Real mental health advocacy would mean not creating the conditions that harm people in the first place. We can’t be treating cruelty as entertainment and then pretend to be shocked when the consequences start to surface. What we’re doing now isn’t advocacy. It’s damage control and guilt management. 

If mental health actually mattered to us, we’d change our behaviour before the crisis, not after. We’d stop treating public figures like they’re not real people, and we’d have shown Arjun Kapoor kindness long before his emotional post. We need to ask ourselves why we think our entertainment is worth someone else’s suffering.

Kindness shouldn’t require a cry for help. Empathy shouldn’t need warning signs. Decency shouldn’t be a crisis response. If we can’t manage that and need someone to be visibly broken before we stop breaking them, then we need to stop pretending we care about mental health at all.

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