Daisy Shah on the viral book photo: Reading a dark story doesn’t mean you can’t have a light-hearted conversation!

“There is no shame in apologising,” says actor Daisy Shah in her recent Instagram story. Her thoughts come after an uproar on social media where a picture, which shows her reading Khaled Hosseini’s novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, sees her apparently laughing while reading it. Her smile didn’t go down well with trolls who have questioned how is she so amused reading a “grim” book.

“I admit the book ain’t an easy read. A very disturbing 1, few chapters in and now I understand. The picture was not to hurt any1..(sic),” the actor further adds in her Insta story. Recently, actor and TikTok star Jannat Zubair, too, was trolled for a similar photo of her reading Anne Frank’s The Dairy of A Young Girl, and smiling while visibly reading it.

Ask Shah if it’s too much for one photo to cause a social media stir, and the actor confesses that she didn’t anticipate this coming. “I was just at the beginning... I had hardly read three-four pages. By then, you’re obviously trying to understand the characters. You don’t really get into the story from the first page itself,” says the 36-year-old, questioning, “Show me a rulebook where you can’t have a conversation with anybody else (while reading a book). Even if you are reading a dark story it doesn’t mean you can’t have a light-hearted conversation with someone else at the very same time.”

The actor, who has appeared in films such as Jai Ho (2014) and Race 3 (2018), acknowledges that this episode, and the trolling thereafter has come with its share of learning. “We are in difficult times. There’s already so much trauma in the world... If only people were compassionate towards each other; the amount of emotions you show to non-living things that don’t have emotions. Ya, it connects with you! But, a book doesn’t really have its own emotions. And then you guys are affected by one picture?”

Shah hopes people “uplift each other” instead of “stooping down to this level [of trolling]”. She opines, “Jitna pyaar ek book ko dikha sakte ho, utna pyar ek human ko kyun nahin dikha sakte ho? (The amount of love people are showing a book, why can’t the same be for a human being) Where is your love for others? Today people are so materialistic that you don’t see the love around you; you only see love for things!”

And what compelled her to apologise after this incident? Daily says she decided to do no not for the “haters”. “I didn’t apologise because people felt bad. I apologised because I read the book, and I felt for the book. A loss of death is something I have experienced in my life. I connected with this book,” she concludes.

Author tweets @Nainaarora8

Follow more stories on Facebook and Twitter