Actress Pooja Hegde is winning fans' hearts for her moves in 'Kanimaa', the new song from Karthik Subbaraj's upcoming Suriya-starrer Retro. The track, composed by Santhosh Narayanan, and featuring him alongside Suriya, is slowly going viral for its festive vibe.
Meanwhile, Hegde has, in a conversation with Filmfare, talked about how difficult it was to deal with negative PR strategies targeted at humiliating her. Sharing that she is "really bad" at PR, Pooja found the tactics, especially from meme pages, shocking. "I was like, why are they constantly talking negatively about me? It looked targeted. People are spending a lot of money on pulling down other people," she said.
This troubling online behaviour also bothered her parents, and she reassured them and tried to cope with it by taking it as a "compliment because if someone feels the need to pull you down, it means you are above them." However, it became too overwhelming for her after a point. "I found out that people were spending lakhs just to troll me".
To find out its origin, she requested her team to contact popular meme pages, only to reach the bizarre realisation that in order to get it stopped, she'd be required to pay a certain amount. "They said, 'This is how much they are paying us. If you’d like to stop it or troll them back, this is the amount.' To me, it was just bizarre. People believe such things but don’t know why I’m being trolled or what the reason behind it is. Sometimes, I see a horrendous comment, go to the profile, and find no display picture or posts. These are just paid bots."
Recently, in an interview, Nora Fatehi spoke about attempts to demean her through internet trolls paid for by her competitors. She mentioned how some individuals make memes to compare her dance moves to those in a new song featuring another dancer/actress, with captions negatively mentioning the former's skills.
Last seen in Deva opposite Shahid Kapoor, Pooja will be seen next in the aforementioned Retro, for which she has dubbed in Tamil. She is also part of the Varun Dhawan-starrer Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai, directed by David Dhawan. She is also making an appearance in Lokesh Kanagaraj's Rajnikanth-starrer Coolie.
