MUMBAI: Trolling has been a side effect of being part of showbiz since decades now. Actress Somy Ali, who was an integral part of the industry in the 90s, says that she remembers being trolled for losing weight once.

“It needs to stop, but it won't. That's the world we live in where if we are overweight we are undesirable and if we are too thin we are deemed to be suffering from an eating disorder. I recall in the mid 90's, I had lost a tremendous amount of weight because of an ailment and suddenly I saw tabloids writing about my being addicted to drugs. I mean it was horrendous; first to be unwell which led to my loss of appetite and on top of that to read that I am on drugs, depressed and alone because of some relationship going sour,” she says.

She says that now, these trolls inundate celebrities’ social media pages with their hate comments. “When I was a teenager, it was all about tabloids. Nowadays, our world is all about social media and the trolls which I was so sick of that I had to shut off my comment section. And I was verbally abused by these losers for taking a stand for myself and for the truth which was my truth and there was no way for these people to have an iota of knowledge about what I was saying. Yet, they kept on and on with that I want publicity and I am doing this to get attention and a whole bunch of uneducated rubbish. I couldn't take it anymore so I made sure I would never read my DMs and my comments,” she says.

Ask her if she feels trolling will ever stop, and she says, “It will never stop for the simple reason that all of us tend to be cruel to one another. Either, we do it on purpose or it happens inadvertently, but no one is a saint. What I mean is that I know I definitely must have done and said things that hurt others unknowingly or due to being pressured by someone with the power to act in that manner. But trolls do not have one thing that normal humans have, and that is the ability to empathise. If they could even for a second put themselves in Ayesha's shoes or anyone else's, perhaps they would give it a second thought before vomiting their cruelty onto people they do not even know.”

Ask her how she copes with this, and she says, “At first, I would take it to heart and get very upset, but then I used all my intellect and education as a crutch to rationalise how pathetic these people must be and how awful their lives must have been that they have to be so vile on social media towards people they'd only wish to in the same room with. So, I began feeling sorry for them, not the other way around. That's where it all ended. I commend many famous people who choose not to be a part of this slippery slope we call social media, but unfortunately due to the work I do I have to keep people abreast of certain crimes and the statistics of those crimes. And, sometimes I want to post pictures that I like of myself from a photoshoot because it makes me feel good. I don't care whether others hate it or love it. I am at an age in my life where I have trained myself to keep toxicity away from me and not let horrible people get to me.”