Ranbir Kapoor and Rishi Kapoor
Source: Twitter @chintskap

A video that surfaced two days ago has gone viral where Rishi Kapoor is seen pushing a man, Randhir Kapoor is seen asking people to move back, and Ranbir Kapoor is seen getting inside his car, while a reporter holding a boom mic is shown falling on the ground.

The video has not only created angst in the minds of the people, but the Kapoor family has also suffered major backlash on social networking websites.

Being an entertainment journalist for the past five years in Mumbai, I’ve witnessed several cases where reporters have literally shoved the booms in front of celebrities to get bytes. Then there’s the flip side of the coin: There are also incidents like recently when a fan tried coming close to Akshay Kumar – his body guard slapped him. (But when Akshay got to know about to incident, he apologized to the fan and also publicly apologized later.)

Ganpati Visarjan at RK Studios is a big affair and the crowd throngs to see their favourite stars and bid adieu to Bappa. In all of this, Rishi Kapoor accepts that he did push some people, but maintains he didn’t hit anyone and nor did Ranbir.

In this particular incident, Sumit Sharma, a senior reporter from India TV is shown falling on the ground. When I spoke to him, he shared that the video has been cleverly edited. Ranbir never pushed or hit him. He lost balance and fell on his own as there was humongous crowd around.

Sumit Sharma says:

I was going towards Ranbir with my cameraman to take his byte, but he sat in the car and left. The camera wire got stuck in my foot and I fell down on my own. The video has been cleverly edited because Ranbir never pushed or hit me. In fact, no one checked with me before carrying that video. I have no malice against Rishiji, Randhirji or Ranbir. There were a lot of us walk around close to Rishiji and he didn’t ask us to move aside or push us… I was there during the whole Ganpati procession that day… Given all the practical conditions – the heavy rains, the crowd going berserk, the Kapoor family did not target or misbehave with any media persons.

There have been incidents where the media has been mistreated, made to wait for hours and hours at times. Yes, we all work very hard to get stories and cover events, but let’s not forget that we are the platform between the celebrities and fans. Why not act a little responsibly? Why give anyone a chance to disrespect us? The celebrities need the media as much as we need them. And editing a video and making it viral is not only uncalled for, but also shows the entire media fraternity in poor light.

Such incidents only leave us with a foul taste in the mouth. Let’s take onus and do responsible journalism.

Rishi Kapoor speaks:

What has happened has happened, I don’t want to give any clarification. People can believe whatever they want now. Everyone carried it without even checking what exactly happened.