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Incoming Tea: Behind The BollyBlindsNGossip Subreddit
Today, r/BollyBlindsNGossip has over 2.2 million people “prying”— Reddit lingo for “followers”, turning the act of keeping updated into one of voyeurism. Slotted in the top 500 subreddits—top 1 per cent, and the second largest in India after r/India—BBNG is often cited as a source in reputed dailies.
In the devil’s den, gossip is virtue, and Hindi cinema polishes its horns every few hours in the subreddit r/BollyBlindsNGossip (BBNG, hereon), a crowdsourced petri dish of all that is wild, swinging, limp, and limping in the movies—is X actress, divorced and thriving, causing marital distress? Did Y actor’s insecure PR team replace Z’s name with his own in a list of prominent actors over the decades? Is the big star mad at the big fashion designer for forcing him to walk the Met Gala, where his stardom—taken for granted in India—had to be explained?
These are petty provocations posed as sincere questions on the platform. The point is not their truth, but the possibility of their truth.
Once an outpost of all the dirty laundry from the Hindi film industry, BBNG was created in early 2018.
"The goal then was very simple—to have a forum where like-minded people could discuss Bollywood gossip, without the pressure of PR and bullying of fan groups," EccentricBai, the moderator of the subreddit, tells The Hollywood Reporter India. For the first six months, BBNG only had 11 subscribers, growing at a snail’s pace for the first year and a half.
Then, a security manager for VIPs at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport Mumbai did an anonymous Ask Me Anything (AMA). "The gossip revealed was picked up by all Bollywood publications. It raised curiosity about Reddit and new people came looking for us, while also bringing active Redditors from other Indian subreddits,” EccentricBai notes.
While the subreddit was gathering steam, it “blew up” when their posts about the the slander campaign against the late Sushant Singh Rajput, after he died by suicide, was picked up by major Bollywood publications, “We discussed how SSR was being targeted via Blind items, much before his demise,” EccentricBai notes.
Today BBNG has over 2.2 million people “prying”— Reddit lingo for “followers”, turning the act of keeping updated into one of voyeurism. Slotted in the top 500 subreddits—top 1 per cent, and the second largest in India after r/India—BBNG is often cited as a source in reputed dailies.
“They are as much on our radar as traditional newsrooms,” a publicist who chose to remain anonymous tells The Hollywood Reporter India, “It is not uncommon for talent to mention a Reddit thread in meetings or express concern over a theory that has gained too much traction.”
Not just a space to vent possibilities from industry insiders, BBNG has steadily become a diligent archive by the everyday fan—screenshots and videograbs of happenings on various social media platforms are dutifully posted here and discussed, well after they might have been originally deleted.
For example, though Babil Khan’s recent emotional rant on Instagram against “Fake Bollywood” was deleted from his account, someone had screen-recorded it and uploaded it onto BBNG, where it blew up, being picked up by news portals, embedding the subreddit on their pages as a source of information. Khan’s PR even had to issue a clarification on the video. They reached out to BBNG over X (formerly Twitter), who then posted the clarification alongside their posts.
The intimate presence of information alongside gossip, deep curiosity alongside salacious concern, though, turns one into the other—gossip takes up the cool tone of fact, and fact takes up the urgency of gossip. The lines keep blurring. When BBNG had posted the news of Alia Bhatt’s pregnancy two days before her wedding with Ranbir Kapoor, and then removed it, only to realise later that it was true, they had to pick a lane. “Since then, we let OG gossip be posted under the ‘Exaggerated Claims’, ‘Unverified Source’ tag,” EccentricBai notes, though it frustrates them when the media picks up posts from the channel and presents it as news, “Recently, someone posted Govinda’s divorce gossip on BBNG and it was picked by the entire media. They did not even mention that the source is tagged on our channel as ‘Unverified gossip’.”
While theories are floated flagrantly, gossip on BBNG becomes an act of marshalling not just imagination, but evidence, too. In the aftermath of the Deepika Padukone-Ranveer Singh appearance on the talk show Koffee With Karan, members of the subreddit posted a video of Singh speaking of meeting Padukone for the first time, alongside a video fished from an earlier season where he uses the same details to describe his first meeting with then-girlfriend Anushka Sharma. X (formerly Twitter) picked it up, it caught fire, and soon, married actors coming on the talk show joked about how being on the show “ruined marriages”.
There are, however, ground rules on BBNG, with twelve moderators across time zones rapping knuckles when necessary—no spamming; no PR marketing; no politics; no religion; no harassment. “We are a very cynical subreddit. If there are two positive posts about anyone, the entire subreddit thinks it is too much PR by the actor. I don’t think PR is smart enough to understand Reddit,” EccentricBai notes.
Unverified gossip, like Katrina Kaif’s pregnancy—which was false—gets tagged accordingly. The boundary between gossip and harassment is kept clean—to speak of plastic surgeries, but never at the cost of fat-shaming them; to speak of break-ups and hook-ups, but never in the guise of slut-shaming them. Despite getting images of Raha, Bhatt and Kapoor’s daughter, long before it came out in public, they refused to post it. Ditto for mental health medications. Even sexuality—no speculations allowed.
Gossip without spit or sex, with a kernel of moral responsibility, gossip is beginning to sound less like gossip. Often, it garners a bad reputation. But it can also be an instrument of hope, when the coldness and the demanding nature of fact cannot provide reprieve. Months before #MeToo, when Rachel Sandalow-Ash wrote Why Gossip Is a Feminist Imperative, she encouraged women to speak up about supervisors, leaders, colleagues for whom consent is a dated formality. BollyBlindsNGossip, too, routinely posts #MeToo allegations that don’t go anywhere—but at least the record exists.
It is not possible to moderate every post—the traffic can be deafening, and EccentricBai insists no moderator spends more than half-hour a day, “Only ‘Low Karma’ and new accounts’ posts are sent to moderators. We let every piece of gossip posted on BBNG be, and leave it for members to analyse. If we get OG gossip, we ask some questions. For example, if someone said they attended Hrithik Roshan’s USA concert, we ask them to send their ticket’s picture. Recently, someone said Shah Rukh Khan (SRK) is hiding his face due to some plastic surgery for nose correction. Then, SRK fans posted his recent pictures and that gossip was shot down.”
These ground rules, while designed to keep them out of the line of fire, do not always protect them. “Legally, there is an active team that helps Indian subreddits. If Reddit removes a post, we put our case forward and ask them to reinstate the post. If they disagree, we abide by their decision and don’t allow repost of removed content,” EccentricBai notes, “Cricketers always get their posts removed by Reddit. We have seen 2-3 years old posts about cricketers getting removed. Vicky Kaushal PR has gotten 2 posts removed by Reddit.”
Reddit itself has a slippery image. In the late 2010s, it garnered a reputation as a watering hole for men who wanted to let their hair down, with language and images inciting violence against women. In 2017, Reddit had to disband the “incels” subreddit, which had ballooned to over 40,000 members. There is even a “controversial Reddit communities” entry in Wikipedia. However, there is another side to this platform, also a space for hyper-specific communities padding curiosity with knowledge—tailored to the strangest, coziest corners of human desire.
One of those desires is gossip. “Platforms like BollyBlinds have seen a massive rise in engagement. In just the past year, user activity has spiked. These threads are quickly turned into mainstream talking points. It is no longer niche gossip—it can influence the pulse of public conversation,” an anonymous PR manager told The Hollywood Reporter India.
This gossip is increasingly shaping public perception of actors—who are, at the end of the day, no longer artists, but abiding brands. “Discussions on Reddit do linger in the minds of both audiences and brands,” the manager notes. This is to be expected. Gossip fans the flames of fame—it is what keeps them in the news cycle, and to many, that is enough. This flame than fans, though, can also scorch the image. A brand that thrives on attention, also demands complete control of it. Gossip, though, toes no such line.
BBNG is by no means the first gossip aggregator. What used to be “Blind Items”—“invented by actors to attack each other,” EccentricBai notes, “one sided weapons of defamation”—and what used to pad the pages of gossip magazines and crowd the Page 3 for decades, became over time decentralised into Quora, comments on YouTube and X, with neither checks nor responsibilities. Many were wild, expressed in the language of jilted aggression. BBNG is harnessing the decentralised nature of gossip, while attempting to rein in the worst impulses of it, “The actor’s problem isn’t this subreddit’s existence. The main issue is that they are not able to control and manipulate this subreddit.”