I WENT VIRAL, AND THEN...

Four women on how life changed after unexpectedly becoming internet sensations

What is it like to be famous without warning? To wake up and find hundreds, or thousands, of friend requests clogging your timeline, and read stories about yourself online?

Aranya Johar, 18, never dreamed she would go viral, when she wrote the spoken-word poem ‘A Brown Girl’s Guide to Gender’ in March. She still can’t get used to being recognised on the street.

“I was excited when the video got its first 100 hits,” says the Mumbai college student, laughing. “I never expected to have to pose for selfies with strangers while eating paani puri on the roadside.”

Not all the reactions are positive. When Kashmiri student Saima Mir, 22, was caught in a Shah Rukh Khan selfie taken on her Pune campus, her timeline turned into a battleground for India-Pakistan rivalry. “My family began to worry about my safety,” Mir says.

When event manager Amisha Bhardwaj danced to Sia’s ‘Cheap Thrills’ in shorts on her wedding day, some commenters said her husband should have died rather than marry her. “My husband, Pranav, praised my confidence. His attitude helped me ignore the negative comments,” she says.

For fashion designer Merenla Imsong, fame became another box she was forced into. She became the north-eastern girl who made fun of north Indian prejudice.

Fame brings another responsibility, handling parents unused to trolls. Johar had to sit with her mum and read the other comments on her video. “We discovered that people were appreciating her poem and correcting the people with negative comments. That calmed us down.”