Growing up in Bollywood fandoms: 90s posters, Orkut scraps and the charm of early SRK fan communities

I was 15 and I had a crush on an actor. There was only Orkut at the time and Hi5, so I anxiously searched for him on both the websites hoping to find him, maybe throwing all sensible cautions out of the window. (Don't talk to strangers clearly doesn't apply when it comes to looking for celebrities).

 I couldn’t find him of course, but I ended up following five people with the same name on Orkut, and one even wrote a testimonial for me, which was the digital equivalent of a certificate back in the day). He wrote, and I will always remember, “Hi, hu are u?” He wrote a ‘scrap’ too, asking the same question.

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He had a valid question. But the point is, I hadn’t found the actor of my dreams, though later my crush went on to make such questionable choices in films  and in life, fading out of public consciousness, that I am not even revealing his name out of sheer mortification.

 Nevertheless at that time, my crush was this iridescent star (at least in my head), far, far away, who existed only on screen. If there was a chance that I could claim to be his friend on Orkut and boast to my friends, then I had truly arrived in life.

At the time, we survived on ‘communities’, badly-edited wallpapers. Before Twitter, I think, that I was part of six ‘I lOve SRk’ fan-clubs on Orkut, where the mode of conversation was just posting photos of Shah Rukh Khan, and fans asking for award night photos. We were grateful to the fans who hunted out sites of different wallpapers, doling it out carefully like treasure.

  “This has good SRK pics,” one would earnestly write. And it would invariably become the desktop wallpaper for our computer back home, with my father sighing in exasperation as he settled down for work. “Be careful of viruses, I don’t want any viruses on the computer,” he would warn.

I had followed several actors communities, including Salman Khan, Madhuri Dixit, Kajol and Rani Mukerji, in vain, as if hoping that they would be lurking on the groups. But this was a time without verified accounts, so even if they were somewhere there, we would never know.

 At that time, we didn’t really know what stars thought on a daily basis, or what they did, in their personal lives. If you told 15-year-old me that airport looks, daily photos of zipping in and out of the country, regular tweets and just general photos were going to be blended into our normal daily lives one day, I would’ve squeaked with excitement and gone back to plastering my walls with Bollywood posters.

That’s the most I saw of my favourite stars anyway in the 90s: On the walls, and on the screens.  

 Awards were almost ceremonial: My sister and I would finish dinner quickly and rush to watch and sit through ads. One awards show that we loved was Temptations, which was always hosted by cheeky  SRK and Saif Ali Khan, who would freely jab everyone in the industry playful.

But that’s the only time we ‘saw’ stars.  They were inaccessible and mysterious and good fans like us, would reach for the magazines in book stalls, and devour their interviews. We searched frantically for Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai’s wedding photos, but could only find grainy ones.

 And if it wasn’t magazines, we were always grateful for Simi Garewal’s Rendez Vous, before Koffee with Karan arrived. She had the ability to calmly prod actors into revealing their deepest secrets, unabashed and without any sort of hesitation.

 Twitter didn’t exist, and so we couldn’t share tweets of clips and say ‘Did you see this’?’, we just remembered through muscle memory and discussed it through dinner.

Maybe, it was Saif Ali Khan and Amrita Singh’s interviews, where both detailed how they started dating, or rare friendship duos that we don’t see anymore, like Karan Johar, revealing their fights during the making of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. Kajol ‘flared up’ at him in front of everyone and then later ‘pounced on him’ to apologise.

  And it was all we had, but it was enough.

 Do I miss that time of not knowing stars, after knowing them a little too well now?

Maybe.

Part of the magic was not knowing everything. Stars drifted in and out of our lives, and the gaps in between were filled entirely by imagination. We rarely stopped to question the machinery behind celebrity culture.

There was something innocent about fandom then. We weren’t constantly decoding narratives or wondering what was curated and what wasn’t. We searched for scraps, saved blurry images, joined fan communities, and built entire worlds around people we only ever truly saw on screen. And somehow, that felt enough.

 Maybe life was simpler when I could follow five different Orkut profiles with the same name and wholeheartedly believe one of them belonged to my favourite actor.

 Where is he now, I wonder.