The singer-actor, who worked with Kaif in Mere Brother Ki Dulhan, used a video message to call out men who compared her pre- and post-pregnancy pictures online.
Katrina Kaif stepped out with her son Vihaan at Mukesh and Nita Ambani's Ganpati celebration this month. Within hours, her before-and-after pregnancy pictures were doing the rounds online, most of them unkind. Ali Zafar has had enough of it.
The Pakistani actor-singer, who played opposite Kaif in Mere Brother Ki Dulhan, addressed the trolling in a video message that's now circulating widely. He didn't name the people posting the comparisons. He didn't need to.
"We all need to look within ourselves," Zafar said. "Especially as a man, if I am speaking about this, I think it is very important for us to look within ourselves and make the necessary corrections." He went further, pointing at the specific privilege men carry into these conversations. "The way we perceive a woman, her body, the way she thinks and the way she lives, if she does not fit the standards that we have created, we immediately put that woman down."
This isn't a new fight for Zafar. He said he's called out similar trolling before, including comments directed at Pakistani actor Mahira Khan. The pattern, in his telling, is depressingly consistent.
Beauty standards built to fail
Zafar's larger point was about the moving goalposts of physical expectation, for women and men both. He brought up the Renaissance, when ideals around women's bodies looked nothing like they do now, and traced a line to the zero-figure era and then to the six-pack obsession men are held to today. None of it, he argued, is realistic. None of it is healthy.
"Every person is going through their own struggles, and we do not know what someone else might be dealing with," he said. "We should be kind to people, compassionate, understanding, accepting and appreciative."
He closed on a personal note. "I will feel ashamed if I ever criticise someone on the basis of their looks. Every woman has their life, what she has gone through, what her past, present or future, let her live, and you live your life."
This is the second time in as many months that Kaif has faced this exact strain of comment. She was trolled after appearing at filmmaker Kuku Kohli's prayer meet in August too, prompting Shivaleeka Oberoi to push back publicly at the time with a pointed "Kya ho gaya hai matlab?! This is motherhood!"
Kaif welcomed Vihaan with husband Vicky Kaushal last November. She hasn't responded to the latest round of comments herself, and there's no indication she plans to. Zafar's video, meanwhile, is doing the talking for now, and going by the reactions stacking up under it, plenty of people agree with him. Whether that changes what gets posted the next time she steps out is a different question entirely.
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