Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan has threatened to unleash his legion of fans on online trolls who wish him death from the coronavirus, after talking about the stigma suffered by patients.
Bachchan and his actor son Abhishek have been in a Mumbai hospital for more than two weeks with Covid-19, while his daughter-in-law Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and granddaughter Aaradhya were released on Monday.
They are the highest-profile family to contract the virus in India, the third most infected nation in the world with almost 1.5 million cases.
The 77-year-old man and his son are in an isolation room, with Bachchan distributing regular messages to his millions of fans on Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr.
The actor’s messages generally focus on thanking fans and hospital medical staff, but in a blog post published overnight Monday through Tuesday, he wrote that some people had sent him hate mails and prayed for his death.
In response, Bachchan promised to “exterminate” those trolls once they left the hospital asking their millions of fans to turn them on.
Describing his admirers as his relatives, he wrote: “That extended family will become an ‘extermination family’ in an instant.”
Bachchan also revealed that he was able to hug his granddaughter before she left the hospital, recounting her emotional reaction to the news that she and her mother could go home.
“Tears flow … the little boy hugs himself and tells me not to cry … ‘you will be home soon,’ he says … I must believe him,” he wrote.
A blog post published Saturday addressed the mental trauma and stigma suffered by Covid-19 patients.
Bachchan, idolized in India and affectionately known as “Big B”, has worked for over half a century in the film industry.
India’s financial and financial capital, Mumbai, represents more than 7% of all cases in the nation of 1.3 billion people.
The country has lifted most of the embargo restrictions to restart the struggling economy. But numerous states have had to reintroduce closures amid local increases in infections.
On Tuesday night, authorities in the eastern state of West Bengal, where some 90 million people live, extended their confinement, imposed only two days a week, until the end of August.
.
