Singer and Indian Idol judge Neha Kakkar has lashed out at Kiku Sharda of The Kapil Sharma Show and comedian Gaurav Gera for making fun of her appearance and short height in a spoof video. In a strongly-worded message, Neha first expressed her displeasure at both Kiku and Gaurav mocking her height and looks.
One of Neha’s Insta stories read, “Shame on these people for creating such negative and insulting content! My people know how much I appreciate comedy on me and otherwise but this one is ridiculous! Stop using my name, stop enjoying, dancing and acting to my songs if you hate me so much. Thankless people.”
Her singer brother Tony Kakkar was equally scathing as he posted the controversial spoof video with a hard-hitting message. He wrote, “This is how you respect a small town girl who achieved everything on her own with so much struggle in life. Being a short girl My sister has already suffered a lot. Do you understand what a person goes through when you make fun about her/his body size or shape.
“Will you ever stop making fun of what god has made us ? Not just that you are talking rubbish about her talent too. Aren’t you damaging her career by saying all that wrong things about her talent ? Those who don’t understand music much would believe you easily coz you are a big national tv Channel. Fact is nobody becomes number 1 just by fluke and that too of a country which has a population of 1.3 billion.”
Faced with growing condemnation, Gaurav issued an unconditional apology to Neha. He told Times of India that the decision to mock Neha was part of the script given to him and Kiku by the makers of the video adding that he was only delivering the script as an actor. Times of India quoted him as saying, “I thought they (Channel and Production house) work on so many comedy shows on the small screen they must be aware of the sensibilities. They know what runs and also they had an equation with Neha so they should have known where to stop. But I would like to apologise to her and I love her. She is fantastic… The idea was definitely not to hurt her. She shouldn’t have any haters, we have not done this because we hate her. I am just an actor and that is just a show. We were given a few lines to enact by the writers, the channel, the production house… I am hired to act and mouth the line which are given to me, definitely we tried (Kiku Sharda and I) a lot to tone down a few things. We cut a lot of things because we felt it was not in good taste. We did tried our best. We shot a lot throughout the day.”
In the video, some of the cringe-worthy comments made by Kiku and Gaurav were ‘Tum Neha Shakkar nahi, Neha kankar (pebble) lag rahi ho’ and ‘Neha, when you go to sing in front of a mic with this ugly face, doesn’t mic turn its face away from you?”
The full-blown attack by Neha against Gaurav and Kiku assumes significance given that the controversial video was shot for Sony Max, the sister channel of Sony Entertainment, with whom Neha is currently associated as a judge for its singing reality show Indian Idol.
Neha’s latest Instagram post said that she had moved on from the controversy and urged her fans to also leave the episode behind.
