Elina Nayak (BOMBAY TIMES; December 9, 2017)

What was meant to be a fun, casual interaction with her fans turned ugly for Adah Sharma, recently, when one of the men in the crowd thought it was totally okay to ask her to kiss him! ‘No’, she said, firmly. But the “middle-aged, married man” went on a rant, shamelessly, and no one stopped him.

Still incensed at the whole incident, a fuming Adah recalls, “It happened when I was in Mumbai, waiting to catch a flight to Goa. Before boarding my flight, a live interaction with my fans who had come from different cities was arranged. It was there that this 30-plus, married man asked me to kiss him publicly. His audacity to ask me to kiss him was shocking enough. But even after I said ‘NO’, he had the gall to ask me, ‘Why? You kissed in Commando 2 and also had a 1-hour-45-minute kiss in Heart Attack. I’m like your brother or father — what’s the big deal? I’m asking to kiss me on my cheeks’.” Explaining why she didn’t take him to task then and there, Adah adds, “I’m usually a very positive person and I stay away from controversy. So, I didn’t react or say much else at that time. I thought there were so many other amazing fans there, who had come all the way from so many cities just to meet me. By reacting or creating a scene there, I didn’t want to ruin their experience. But later, when my friends saw my outburst on Twitter and read about the incident online, everyone asked me why I didn’t slap the shameless guy.”

Adah chose to let it go then, she took to Twitter to express her outrage when the snubbed ‘fan’ got online to troll her for “insulting” him for asking her for a “harmless kiss”. Imagine that! Wait, there’s worse. He even managed to find some like-minded people who drummed up support for him and joined in trolling the actress, proving yet again that the internet and the anonymity it offers is just what this breed of ‘ugly Indians’ need to expose what they’re really hiding under their sanskari public image. “I did not want to continue to dwell on this ugly incident, thus kept quiet. But I had to speak up for myself when the guy started trolling me for denying him a ‘harmless kiss’. But my tweets about a ‘no being a no’ and a woman’s right to decide who she will kiss or not seem to have been lost on his ilk. Soon, many joined the troll and wrote disgusting stuff like, ‘Great @adah_sharma Did you tell the same to @purijagan when he narrated you the same scene in your debut film Heart Attack? Just asking!’ or ‘It’s just a kiss, what’s the big deal?’,” says Adah.

“Well, I want to tell all those people out there again that what I do, who I kiss is my choice. It’s a woman’s choice —whether she is an actor or not! And, when I kiss on screen it’s is a character I play, that’s not the real me, not the ‘Adah Sharma’. As an actor, it’s my job to portray characters; that doesn’t mean that’s what I am doing all the time in real life. Get a life! In my debut Bollywood film 1920, I was possessed and I killed people. So, does that mean I can come kill you in real life?” she lashes out.

Adah is quick to add that a few such loonies aside, she’s happy that she has some ‘real amazing fans’ and that makes her let go of such incidents. “I have a lot of lovely, young fans, like this school girl I know from Hyderabad. I want fans like her, and all those young men and women who look up to me, to know what happened; why I said what I said, and what they too should do when they come across such incidents,” she says.