Bollywood Celebrities’ Virtue Signalling and the Hypocrisy Problem
Celebrities in India have discovered a convenient shortcut to relevance. When the scripts slow down and the spotlight dims, they reach for moral philosophy. The latest exhibit is actor Radhika Apte, who recently expressed discomfort with violence in cinema and linked it to her inability to bring a child into today’s world. On the surface, it sounds thoughtful. On closer inspection, it sounds hollow.
This is not a debate about motherhood. No one owes society an explanation for personal reproductive choices. The problem begins when a personal anxiety is repackaged as a cultural sermon, especially when it comes from someone whose own career has been built on the very content now being criticised.
Radhika Apte is not an accidental bystander in India’s violent cinema ecosystem. She is one of its most recognisable faces. Her most visible and celebrated roles have revolved around crime, murder, psychological brutality, serial killers, dystopian state violence, and morally bleak storytelling. These projects were not anomalies. They were career-defining. They earned critical acclaim, OTT dominance, and cultural relevance.
So when she now speaks as if violence in cinema is a disturbing external force that makes the world unfit for children, the contradiction is glaring. This violence was not forced upon her. It was chosen, performed, marketed, and monetised. It paid well. It built credibility. It sustained relevance.
There is a difference between reflection and revisionism. Reflection begins with ownership. Revisionism pretends the past does not exist. What we are seeing here is not an artist publicly reckoning with her own participation in violent narratives. It is an artist distancing herself from the consequences of those narratives without acknowledging her role in creating them.
This is where the charge of virtue signalling becomes unavoidable.
If the statement had been framed honestly, it would have sounded very different. It would have said, I have been part of violent cinema, I benefited from it, and I am now conflicted about that. That would have invited a serious conversation about artistic responsibility, market demand, and personal evolution. Instead, we got a vague lament about the state of the world, safely detached from personal accountability.
The timing matters too. Moral commentary has become the new performance art for celebrities. Opinions now substitute output. Interviews replace scripts. Controversy replaces craft. Whether intentional or not, such statements reliably generate headlines, debates, and renewed relevance. That is not an accident. It is a pattern.
Audiences are not reacting with anger. They are reacting with fatigue. Fatigue with selective morality. Fatigue with lectures from people insulated by privilege. Fatigue with being told that cinema is too violent by those who helped make it so.
India is a country where millions raise children amid inflation, unemployment, crime, and real violence, not curated dystopias on streaming platforms. For them, cinema is escape, not existential despair. To frame fictional violence as a civilisational threat, while ignoring real-world struggles, is not depth. It is detachment.
No one is asking actors to be saints. But the moment someone chooses to preach, their record becomes fair ground for scrutiny. Moral authority is not claimed by interviews. It is earned through consistency.
If celebrities want to evolve, they should say so honestly. If they regret past choices, they should own them. If they simply want to stay relevant, they should at least spare the audience the sermon.
Because hypocrisy wrapped in philosophy is still hypocrisy. And audiences, increasingly, can tell the difference.
