When you go to Mariah Smith’s Twitter profile to have a closer look at the writer who is dominating social media trends today, you come across a pinned tweet. It says, “i’m so f*****g nice to everybody, and everyone is so vile to me.” Then you take a closer look at her display picture. A radiant face. Of a black woman. Who tweets from ‘her heart’ and is geographically located in New York. A black woman in 2018 New York.
So when you THEN go back and re-read the article that has left social media reeling today, ‘Is Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas’ Love For Real?’, you are forced to wonder, ‘Is THIS for real?’ That a black woman living and tweeting from Trump-era New York can come up with and put in words such racist, lookist, ageist and over all else – a downright vile and personal attack on Priyanka Chopra.
Priyanka Chopra is a ‘global scam artist’, Smith says in her column. She offers nothing to back her claim. Nada. She says how Nick Jonas needs to get on the horse that he rode to his wedding and ‘gallop away as fast as you can’.
India to the West, even in 2018, is probably the land of snake-charmers and elephants. And horses that we ride to weddings. But Mariah, whose ancestors went to the US from Africa, has been cut a more raw deal than even Indians probably. None of us is unaware of the atrocities that blacks in America have had to face, and are still facing. Smith writing an article so evidently laced with bitterness and hatred for an immigrant, arriviste Priyanka Chopra, is therefore, like an animal rights activist getting trampled over by a cow (confession: that’s a line from a Hollywood film, Confessions of A Shopaholic. Because an Indian equivalent would of course be lost on Smith). The cows that, to people like Mariah, we Indians worship. Because hey, Priyanka Chopra is brown who made it big in America by ‘scamming’ Hollywood. So she cannot have a ‘normal’ wedding, cannot fall in love with a man 10 years younger to her, and obviously cannot give her husband a HAPPY relationship.
“Nicholas Jonas married into a fraudulent relationship against his will this past Saturday, December the 1st, and I’ll tell you why I think so.” Mariah Smith begins her tirade with this and goes on to speculate in painstaking detail why *she* thinks this is a ‘fraudulent relationship’. She is not a disgruntled fan who is writing on the woman who stole the man of her dreams. This is a columnist writing for New York Magazine’s The Cut about a global superstar. A woman who made it big in a country known for its more-than-gracious attitude to Indians, in an industry that gave us the glorious Hrundi V Bakshi. Priyanka Chopra will tell you so.