Internet Fan Clubs: Star Struck

The woman with the Twitter handle @yehmehfil, namely Mayaa is a mother of four, a single parent and a graduate in forensic psychology residing in Bradford, UK, but none of this defines her life at the moment. Right now, there is only the ecstasy of meeting her favourite superstar in Bulgaria from where she has just returned. It was 18 years ago that she first fell in love with Shah Rukh Khan, even as he fell in love with a girl called Maya in Dil To Pagal Hai. Today, her voice quivers as she waxes dreamy about that one moment when Shah Rukh shook her hand in a Bulgarian hotel lobby, a few kilometres away from the set of a film he is working on, Dilwale.

In between quivers of voice as she shares the experience, she expresses gratitude for a third party, SRKUniverse, an online fan club that made it possible. “My real name is Saqiah Salim. I call myself Mayaa on Twitter as Dil To Pagal Hai is my favourite film. I will never forget that Sunday when the owner of SRKUniverse, Muhammad bhai, sent me a message saying that I would need a visa to go to Bulgaria, where SRK was shooting. It was 18 years of dreams coming true,” she says.

It’s a moment that could well be a plot for Shah Rukh Khan’s next romantic drama. They could call it ‘My Name is Fan’ with a tagline that goes, ‘Fan meets superstar after years of waiting, thanks to social media!’ A bit corny, but which Shah Rukh movie isn’t? Mayaa is just one of India’s many dream-come-true stories that virtual fan clubs have given us.

There was time one heard of an Amitabh Bachchan or Rajesh Khanna fan travelling thousands of kilometres just to get a glimpse of his or her cine idol. Today, thanks to social media, the lines between superstars and their obsessed admirers have blurred. Fans today hypnotise themselves with minute by minute online updates on their stars and they are also part of a virtual world that stars are willing to entertain. The twitter handle @SRKUniverse, the biggest among many fan clubs for the actor, has over 323,000 followers, while @TeamSalmanKhan has more than 200,000. Hrithik Roshan, Ranbir Kapoor, Akshay Kumar, Ranveer Singh, Deepika Padukone, Priyanka Chopra— each has at least five to ten social media fan clubs with thousands of followers who seem to keep multiplying, updating everything they do by the minute.

Muhammad, who runs SRKUniverse from the Maldives, is undoubtedly the biggest administrator of a fan club dedicated to an Indian star. He has 30 officially approved branches of the club, some in countries as unlikely as China, Germany, Australia, Iraq and Peru. Muhammad says it is pure passion for cinema that drives him. “I was born into a poor family of fishermen in an island of Maldives and now I reside in the capital city, Male. I’ve had to struggle a lot to get where I am right now, and the only relief for me when I used to work in resorts was Shah Rukh’s films. I read about his life; he inspired me a lot. I have learnt the art of working hard and managing time, and I have become successful because of him. Even till three years back, there were no cinema halls in Maldives, so I used to fly to India or Sri Lanka just to watch his movies,” says Muhammad.

Today, his clubs do their utmost to get fans face-time with SRK. They fly fans down to different countries where Shah Rukh shoots, create posters and T-shirts, organise events on the star’s birthday and host parties when his films do well. Muhammad claims to have spent over $300,000 to keep SRKUniverse up and running. “I have spent all my life’s savings on this, but I don’t regret it,” he says.

Since the single-point agenda of a fan club is the star, many come with their own virtues and vices. Salman Khan fans act as a 24/7 firewall around the actor, for example, standing up for every move the actor makes. A recent tweet criticising Salman’s statement on Yakub Memon received 75 responses in his defence within 30 minutes, telling the tweeter, among other things, ‘Go back to Pakistan’ and ‘Our Bhaijaan is the best, you suck!’

Ranbir Kapoor’s online fans provide him with feedback on his films even before they release. “The years following 2005 was a very depressing time for the movie industry in Bollywood. I didn’t enjoy any other actor’s work and it felt like RK (Ranbir Kapoor) would bring something new to the table. The website officially went online on 24 July 2006, which was more than a year before Ranbir made his actual debut. We started off with 200 followers and now have 2,500,000,” says Pari K, who operates the club from the UK with co-founder Aditi K.

Mamta, a software architech from California, runs a fan club @hrithikrules for Hrithik Roshan with her partner in Dubai. “My daughter, Tamanna, was a bigger Hrithik fan than me. She was 10-years-old when Hrithik became her idol in 2000, which is when I decided I wanted to create a clean dedicated club for Hrithik that even a 10-year-old can be part of,” she says. The fan club is on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr and a Spanish blog. They are also affiliated with other Russian, German, Arabic, Italian, French and Hindi fan clubs dedicated to the actor. “This place is not only a democratic ground to discuss Hrithik and his films, but also serves as a second home to many of us,” says Mamta. Her commitment paid off when Hrithik invited her for dinner a few months ago.

For NRIs, the online world becomes the best connect to their screen idols, but many social media clubs are run by people in small towns with limited access to actors or the internet. Engineering student Rushikesh Vyas owns the Deepika Padukone FC page on Facebook. It has 395,000 followers, the largest for a Bollywood actress. “When I started this page two years back, it was just for fun. I’d run away from school to watch Deepika’s films, and one day when I had little to do, I started this page. Today I spend a minimum of 12-hours on Facebook promoting Deepika’s work, ads, films, her posters, etcetera. I don’t know if I will ever meet her, but this is enough for me,” he says.

Fan clubs often make the relationship one of mutual give and take—the more accessible a star is , the greater the opportunity of online promotion. These fan clubs are also a great space of free-advertising for stars. Says the manager of one the country’s biggest stars who doesn’t want to be named: “When an actor is spoken about 24/7 online and his work promoted, of course his mileage as a brand goes up. Actors these days hold promotional events just for the fan clubs simply because of the numbers. If an actor can reach out to about 1,000 people in a mall for a film launch, he can get the message across to a million people online at a time, with bare minimum investment.”

Depending on his or her star value, an actor gets paid anything from Rs 4 lakh to Rs 10 lakh for a few hours of online presence. “Recently, Shah Rukh tied up with a new Facebook app that required him to upload little video clips online through the day so fans get a sense of a day-in- SRK’s-life. He is paid a lot of money for this, the fans are happy and all that’s needed is a click of a button,” says the manager.

While Ranbir Kapoor has chosen to stay away from social media, earlier this year Ranbir Kapoor FC tied up with a brand that he endorses for a six-hour social media campaign which linked his fans to him on Twitter, Facebook and Vine. He makes himself available for those few hours, and it does not just increase business for brand Ranbir, but also generates revenue for the club to fund its activities.

Fans who have strong social media skills are now being approached by advertisers so their pages can be used to promote various brands. Rushikesh, who is already making around Rs 30,000 per month through his Facebook page, says, “Websites and other brands want to advertise on my page because it has such a massive following. Depending on the number of ‘likes’, I get paid a certain amount. I have also invested in other pages dedicated to Deepika so I can merge them all and increase the fan following.” A page on an online fan club can charge anything between Rs 30,000 and Rs 3 lakh depending on how popular it is. Says a self-confessed social media addict who wants to stay anonymous, “Fans who run hugely popular online FCs (fan clubs) purchase pages dedicated to the competitors of that particular star so they can control the clubs and their star’s popularity remains the foremost.”

The clubs are meeting places for people from various professional backgrounds across the world. They have also become a source of job opportunities and funds for charity. “We have done many charity events through the huge forum we have created, and the sheer manpower has given us the chance to talk about various issues to a lot of people. We trended on Twitter for Arian, a small boy who suffers from Hunter’s syndrome and needed huge relief from pharmaceutical companies. Various media companies supported the cause and now the costs of Arian’s treatment has been subsidised and he’s getting better. We have also financially helped victims of recent tragedies in Uttarakhand, Nepal, Palestine and Kashmir and will continue to help them,” says Muhammad.

Mamta sees her fan club as an opportunity of growth for many out there. She says, “We love crowdsourcing, co-creating, and have consistently taken on board fans who work on our graphics designs (banners and creations for the website and media platforms). We provide our creators and writers with a platform to seek feedback to learn and better themselves. The fans also act as reporters: locating articles, videos and photos and reporting while attending public events when Hrithik is present in their city.”

Actor Ranveer Singh recently discovered a few Ranveer-Deepika FCs online. He finds no reason for stars to feel their privacy invaded by such websites because they would never say anything insulting. “Times are changing and so are the nature of fans and fan clubs. There are people out there who dedicate hours to upload news items, pictures, songs of mine and Deepika’s together. It’s a really sweet gesture,” he says.

Actors however, also feel the heat when their fans end up in a war of words with fans online. “Salman and Shah Rukh fans are always fighting. But even that in a way is publicity that’s never going to harm them. Today a new actor’s shelf life is anything between five and seven years, and if you’re an actress, even less. They realise that they need to make the most of their time in the sun and online activity is their best bet. Today’s youth would rather be friends with Priyanka Chopra than Ratan Tata,” says cyber expert and web watcher Vijay Mukhi.

Of course, since most of this activity is online, there’s no guaranteed way of checking how many of the fans or fan clubs are genuine. “I don’t see stars purchasing fans on Twitter or Facebook because there are already enough people who follow them. Yes, there might be about 20-30 per cent fraud FCs, but even those are eventually a tool for promotion,” Mukhi says.

Thanks to fan clubs, we know that SRK is expected to star in a film titled FAN next year. Recently, a clip of a five- year-old girl crying for attention from Salman Khan went viral through a fan club. Everyone from Rajinikanth (whose real-life fan clubs are legendary) to Rishi Kapoor (who has found a controversial lease of life via Twitter) to Nawazuddin Siddiqui (who is now deemed the new-age poor man’s hero because of his online fan following) seems to be making the most of social media.

As the digital world of followers and fan clubs expands, boundaries between superstars and their fans are diminishing faster than ever before. Observes Mahesh Bhatt, a regular user of Twitter, “There was a time when a star would be seen as someone who cannot be touched. Today, stars want to come right to your doorstep through social media. It’s a cultural shift and though there’s no direct impact on the quality of films these actors make, it goes to prove how image is becoming bigger than their work itself.”

@hrithikrules@TeamSalmanKhanDeepika Padukone FCDil To Pagal HaifanInternet Fan ClubsRanbir Kapoor FCSRKUniverse