Not everyone can boast of being an internet sensation but that’s a claim the 18-year-old vegetable seller from Baglung, Gorkha can easily make. After social media made a dreamy blue-eyed Pakistani chai wala shoot to fame overnight across the globe, Kusum Shrestha has become the internet’s new darling.
The Week asked the public about their opinion on the overwhelming attention and media circus surrounding them.
Abha Shrestha
Finding a presence on YouTube
I was well aware about the phenomenon taking place in other countries. You have tumblr, random blogs and such every now and then but I never thought the trend would catch up in Nepal as well. The scale of the post’s popularity was pretty impressive. Then there was coverage of it in a couple of international publications and I found it all to be very amusing. Though I haven’t exactly checked her background or followed her interviews, it’s entertaining to say the least. I imagine the media houses have trouble coming up with sensational news everyday so they naturally jumped on this opportunity.
I’m happy for the person who gained all this publicity. I hope it will help them in their lives. I’m particularly glad that they didn’t get all that many hate comments. If we think about it, it could have gone either way. But the public’s response wasn’t negative. Now if she plays her cards right, who knows there might even be a chance that she can make something substantial for her future from this time in the limelight.
Rahul Thapa
This is a great showcase of Facebook’s power. All one needs is one post and before you know it, it spreads like wildfire. With the right luck, it isn’t that hard for issues and as we can see, people to become sensations these days. Nobody can explain why and how she was chosen for such publicity.
Personally, I didn’t see anything exceptional about the vegetable seller. I guess somebody just wanted to capitalize on the popularity of the Pakistani chaiwala. The timing of it all is certainly suspicious. I think that helped to a great extent. But at the end of the day, all this is for entertainment and we can’t deny that it did manage to hold the nation’s interest, at least for a while. Everybody in my circle has heard of it, though I don’t think people are deeply invested in her story. In many ways, it’s quickly starting to be yesterday’s news. Perhaps the trend will catch on and social media will give us another guy or a girl sometime pretty soon.
Barsha Rimal Ghimire
I think that she is just a lucky girl who happened to catch the eyes of some people and she went viral. There is no doubt that she is beautiful; however things have been taken a little too far with this. Her beauty was in her simplicity, making her wear tight reveling clothes and doing a photo shoot are not helping her in any way. There are so many people who are beautiful and who are in the same situation as her, it doesn’t make sense for the government to give her grants just because she went viral.
Dipak Karki
The fame of the vegetable seller is like the flow of current which is but fleeting. It showcases social networking as a tool that creates buzz out of simple course of living. She is presented as a public figure and it’s not because of her potential or intellect. She has been given different offers to act in films, do modeling while people work hard to attain such offers. Her public image portrays a naïve person whose sense of decision-making is not yet developed. So, the different offers that she has been presented gives me a perception of victimization of innocent people rather than it being an opportunity.
Dr Umesh Nepal
I don’t like the fact that her photo was taken without her consent and went viral on social media. Even if she did go viral on all the social media sites, she would have been better off without all these interviews and the photo shoots that have happened to her since she was “discovered”. She was only a “tarkariwali” as they have been calling her but she was probably happy with her life, selling vegetables and going to her school or college and was content doing what she did. In the long run, I think all this hype might have a negative impact on her life and leave her feeling dissatisfied with where life takes her. This moment of fame might fizzle down as the media loses interest but her life will have been altered forever.
